Hidden in the October CTP for Orcas, developers will find a new addition to the .NET Framework. The IPC mechanism called pipes has been introduced to managed code. The next version of the framework will support both anonymous pipes and named pipes. Anonymous pipes are most useful for communication between threads in a process and between parent child processes. Named pipes are for use in client-server communication when building multi-threaded servers.
Justin Van Patten published a few sample code snippets.
With the advent of multi-core processors and the gradual architectural move away from single-threaded multi-process servers, it is opportune for managed code developers to gain access to high performance mechanisms in the Windows Operating Systems like IPC pipes.