Similarly to my way to CountdownEvent class, I found MemoryMappedFiles namespace, which is new in .NET 4. It’s in System.IO.

If you’ve done some work in stone ages in C/C++ or maybe ObjectPascal (Delphi) you may remember using these files. I used these for exchanging data between two applications, but the usage is pretty much endless. And now you can benefit from it in .NET directly, without using P/Invoke.

To see what’s inside, I wrote two simple applications that are reading and writing some data (no synchronization ).

The first one is doing writing and reading:

using (MemoryMappedFile mmf = MemoryMappedFile.CreateOrOpen("TestMemoryMappedFile", 1024 * 1024))
{
	using (MemoryMappedViewAccessor accessor = mmf.CreateViewAccessor())
	{
		HelperStuff.WriteData(accessor, 0);

		Console.ReadLine();

		HelperStuff.ReadData(accessor, 0);
	}
}

and the second one is just reading:

using (MemoryMappedFile mmf = MemoryMappedFile.CreateOrOpen("TestMemoryMappedFile", 1024 * 1024))
{
	using (MemoryMappedViewAccessor accessor = mmf.CreateViewAccessor())
	{
		HelperStuff.WriteData(accessor, 0);

		Console.ReadLine();

		HelperStuff.ReadData(accessor, 0);
	}
}

Nothing magical. The reading and writing methods (placed in shared library) are simply creating some dummy data. In my case struct and string, saved as array of bytes.

public static void ReadData(MemoryMappedViewAccessor accessor, int position)
{
	SomeData data1;

	accessor.Read<SomeData>(position, out data1);
	position += Marshal.SizeOf(typeof(SomeData));

	int length = accessor.ReadInt32(position);
	position += Marshal.SizeOf(typeof(int));

	byte[] data2 = new byte[length];

	accessor.ReadArray<byte>(position, data2, 0, data2.Length);

	Console.WriteLine(data1.CurrentDate);
	Console.WriteLine(Encoding.Unicode.GetString(data2));
}

public static void WriteData(MemoryMappedViewAccessor accessor, int position)
{
	SomeData data1 = new SomeData() { CurrentDate = DateTime.Today.Ticks };
	byte[] data2 = Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes(DateTime.Today.ToLongDateString());

	accessor.Write<SomeData>(position, ref data1);
	position += Marshal.SizeOf(typeof(SomeData));

	accessor.Write(position, data2.Length);
	position += Marshal.SizeOf(typeof(int));

	accessor.WriteArray<byte>(position, data2, 0, data2.Length);
}

The struct is really dummy:

public struct SomeData
{
	public long CurrentDate { get; set; }
}

The reading and writing is little bit limited, as you’re in fact dealing with just a bunch of memory, not some structured storage. But if you like working with it directly as stream (or you have some smart wrappers around streams), you can also use method CreateViewStream instead of CreateViewAccessor used in my example. These method have some overloads with option to specify also the access rights using MemoryMappedFileAccess, so you can i.e. use CopyOnWrite and any write operations will not be seen by other processes.

Tags: .NET, C/C++, Delphi, Memory