ways to send messages to a service? - c++

Question

i had a client server program and i wanted to change the server to a service. so i took some code from here Svp.cpp. it works fine but i created the client server using UDP so i was wondering is there another way to send messages to a service? The client sends messages to the server(service) and the server just echoes them back. is it necessary to have a UDP or TCP connection to send and receive messages?
here is the part of the program that receives the messages from the client (the rest of the code is taken from Svp.cpp)
SOCKET socketS;
InitWinsock();
struct sockaddr_in local;
struct sockaddr_in from;
int fromlen = sizeof(from);
local.sin_family = AF_INET;
local.sin_port = htons(1234);
local.sin_addr.s_addr = INADDR_ANY;
socketS = socket(AF_INET,SOCK_DGRAM,0);
bind(socketS,(sockaddr*)&local,sizeof(local));
while (1)
{
char buffer[1024];
ZeroMemory(buffer, sizeof(buffer));
if (recvfrom(socketS,buffer,sizeof(buffer),0,(sockaddr*)&from,&fromlen)!=SOCKET_ERROR)
{
sendto(socketS, buffer, sizeof(buffer), 0, (sockaddr*)&from, fromlen);
}
}
closesocket(socketS);

Answer 1

If the client and server applications are on the same machine, you could use Named Pipes instead.
Named Pipes
I had a system service that I had to remove the UI, and instead of creating a socket to communicate between the UI and the service, we used Named Pipes. This was nice, because some of our clients were worried about security with an open listening TCP socket on the machine.
If you go this route, you have to set up some sort of signaling between the two applications, because the pipes do not notify you of reads/writes like sockets do. But it is a very workable solution.