Best IPC for VB6 and .net application

Question

In our application (a document management system) we are supposed to be notified of screen changes (or notify the other program of screen changes) in order to keep the two a

Answer 1

If you want to be able to run on Vista or Windows 7, the best form of IPC is going to be TCP (which is done very easily from VB6 with the Winsock control).

The advantage of this is that two apps can communicate even if they aren't running as the same user, they can communicate (you can't do that with SendMessage or Named Pipes under Vista+). The only thing you have to remember to do, is set a rule in the firewall so it doesn't get blocked. This can be done in your installer with:

netsh.exe firewall set allowedprogram "{PROGRAM PATH}" "{PROGRAM NAME}" enable