| Platform SDK: Interprocess Communications |
As computer users become more sophisticated, they demand more power from the applications they use. To meet this demand, developers add more features to the applications, and the applications become larger. Large applications eventually become unmanageable, both from a development standpoint and from a user-interface standpoint.
One method you can use to manage larger applications is to produce a specialized application that provides a limited number of features, then enable it to communicate and share data with other specialized applications using some form of IPC. It is not necessary for a single application meet all its users' expectations; applications can communicate and cooperate.
The following IPC mechanisms are supported by the Win32 API: