I'm sorry if this is the wrong place for this...

One of the biggest issues I have had in making the switch to managed code code is finding equivalents to various functions. I have found this... But I would really like it to go a level or two deeper.

For instance, what is the managed equivalent (and compatible version) of BroadcastSystemMessage

Shoot, while I'm at it, what about something that shows equivalents to the other 10,000 unmanaged functions I have used in the past

I guess this explains why .net makes doing some "everyday" things such a pain (or impossible). In this case I simply want another instance of the same program to "talk" with the first instance - and pass a small amount of info. DDE, Mutex, BroadcastSystemMessage, whatever... .net makes doing many things so easy that I guess I was hoping there was an easy .net way to do everything. I feel like MS is pushing us to program with managed .net and at the same time tying our hands with limited functionality. It is a pain to Pinvoke everything... and to do so I figure I'm doing something wrong or "unsafe".

I guess my biggest issue is that I'm not sure where the edge of the .net cliff is. What has been wrapped in a .net class, and what hasn't. Really, I have spent the last couple of months trying to get my mind around .net, clr, managed code, etc. I feel like I have landed on Mars and in all, it makes me want to crawl back to my "old school" C with its fopen(), fprinf(), and BroadcastSystemMessage()... It may have been buggy, but at least I knew I could do everything if I found the right sample code and functions...

If you're looking for inter-process communiations, there's much better ways of doing it. If your communications includes large amounts of data (more than 32 bits at a time), in .NET the recommended approach is to use .NET Remoting. While .NET Remoting uses the TCP stack for it's communications medium, it can be used to communicate between two processes on the same computer in addition to separate computers.

It may sound like a heavy-weight solution; but using .NET Removing will give you these benefits over using BroadcastSystemMessage:

• Well documented framework
• All managed code
• Well-used API with many examples and samples
• Safe serialization of data is performed automatically
• Built-in security and robustness
• Suppported
• Built on standard communications framework that accounts for timeouts, retries, etc.
• Scalable to 2-tier client/server

And avoids such things as:

• Poorly written client doesn't repsond to message properly compromising/hanging your application
• incorrect usage of BroadcastSystemMessage compromises entire system
• Avoids "pinging" all running applications to find your client/server