[AccessD] Talking between Applications.

Ya learn something new every day, don't ya?  I've been re-writing an
application I built 7 years ago.  The new version is already in
production, but I'll be adding new features probably for years to come.
It's a help desk application, and one issue I'm working on is that there
are several things that are 'monitored' events.  Some events are
lightning fast, some are a bit slower.  The slower ones slow down the
interface a bit, because it's all running in the same .exe.  To fix this
I thought about multithreading, but decided on just creating another
application to do the monitoring.  So how do you have one application
talk to another?

 

Before, I have used winsocks to do this. But it involves making socket
connections, etc.  This time, I dug into Window Messaging.  I've done a
lot of things with windows (in Windows) before, but I had to share this
little tidbit with the List.

 

To bring everyone up to snuff, every window on your machine has an hWnd
value.  That's the ID of each window.  Windows sends all sorts of
messages to each window, for every single thing that you do.  When you
move the mouse over a window, windows is firing window messages to that
window with the mouse position.  Clicking, typing, resizing, redrawing
and more are all sent to the windows through window messages.  When you
close an application, that too is a window message.

 

The fun part is, we can use that same process for our own purposes.
There's a simple API call, called SendMessage, that requires the hWnd of
the window you want to send a message too, the message ID (every process
has a static ID, but you can use RegisterWindowMessage to create your
own messageid (Unique to that particular machine)) and then two
parameters (both long integers).  Hey, but wait, if all I can send
between two applications is two integers, what's the point?  Well, you
can also create a window on the fly, with a single API, you can then set
it's window text to anything you want, and your recipient applications
can read that window text and destroy the window.

 

I have this process in place (the communication part, now I'm on to
actually doing something with the comms), and it works great.  Virtually
no overhead in the communication process, runs as smoothly as moving a
window across your screen.

 

If there's interest in something like this, I'll post some code for it. 

 

Drew

 


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