Share dataset between two ASP.NET applications

Question

I have application A and application B running on the same web server. I want to share number of dataset between these two application. Is there any way to share without using database or xml files. There will be several dataset for each user. Thanks Jijo.

spgilmore · Answer

In other environments I would recommend sockets. There are some great socket libraries out there that make it really easy and sockets are about as fast as a network gets. In .NET you also have some great socket classes (tcplistener). If the transmission is relatively simple this can still be best because it doesn't require an HTTP server like web services. Otherwise .NET really makes webservices easy to use and hard to resist. It's much easier and much faster than other implementations of SOAP and XML-RPC. It also provides .NET Remoting which is a very cool rip-off of CORBA with advanced features. It is very fast but not as easy as web services. If it's not a big deal to have a web server involved or if the transactions are complicated web services are the way to go. Memory-mapped files mailslots named and anonymous pipes aren't really supported in .NET (yet).

dantin · Answer

I have a similar problem (I posted also in ADO section without viewing this thread sorry for cross-posting) I have to share a dataset between two applications at runtime I should care about speed in particular and disk space too. Wich is the best solution socket named pipes or web services? In general how can I share data (ex. variables) between two application without using a tcp listener with sockets?

spgilmore · Answer

You want to share datasets without using a database? Datasets were designed to use data without a database but they were designed to use XML instead. You could do this some other way say an in-memory ISAM table or a multi-dimensional arrayor something but these things wouldn't necessarily work any better than XML. XML can be used without saving it to a file too. You can send XML datasets across sockets SOAP named pipes mailslots RPC etc. Any of these would work (I'm not sure yet how to do some of these in .NET without Interop). What is your concern? Latency? Disk space? Parsing difficulty? Code simplicity? Speed?