How to share objects across processes in .Net?

Question

I'm trying to "share" .net objects across separate processes. I have one type of process that's a web service that manipulates a set of domain entities. Another type of process is a window service that's doing some automatic batch processing on the same set of objects.

Beyond the typical solution of having the DB as the shared space where both types of processes read/write the objects, what might be a better, more distributed architecture for having these different processes see and work on the same objects?

I've considered using a distributed cache as a shared store for objects, but that doesn't fully support objects and their relationships. Object graphs inserted into a distributed cache are flattened and objects end up stored in multiple disconnected copies.

Is a "messaging bus" the right way to go about, letting the processes send each other updated copies of the objects?

Or are there other solutions altogether to consider?

Answer 1

I would suggest using WCF-services. For local using (calling from Windows Service) you can netNamedPipeBinding. That allow you to separate this two processes physacally in the future.