Interprocess Communications

Windows CE includes a variety of services that let you develop distributed applications that can communicate with other processes and applications on the same device, on another mobile device, or on a desktop machine anywhere in the world. The topics in this section describe these services, and how to implement their interfaces and functions to create a distributed application.

Support for COM (the component object model) programming was added to Windows CE, effective with version 2.1x. With a small footprint and a minimal number of interfaces, this COM runtime is the ideal choice for applications that use an in-process, free-threading model. Effective with version 3.0, Windows CE also supports a more full-featured implementation of COM that includes support for remote servers(DCOM), and an out-of-process, multi-threading model. Except for certain security features which are OS-dependent, this richer implementation is fully compatible with Windows NT, version 4,SP5.

Microsoft Message Queuing Service (MSMQ) lets applications communicate with each other by means of messages, even if the applications are running at different times, or are not continuously linked together. This functionality was first implemented in version 2.12, and expanded in version 3.0.