Choosing an IPC Mechanism

After you decide that your application would benefit from IPC, you must decide which of the available IPC methods to use. It is likely that an application will use several IPC mechanisms. For example, all Win32-based applications should provide at least minimal support for the clipboard. In addition, COM and DDE offer the application an opportunity to communicate with applications that support these protocols. By supporting the protocols for the clipboard, COM, and DDE, you enable your application to share data with other applications, without knowing anything about the applications themselves.

The answers to these questions determine whether an application can benefit by using one or more of the IPC mechanisms available in the Win32 API.