Choosing Windows Inter-Process Communication ── A Decision Table for Named Pipes / TCP / gRPC / Shared Memory / COM (archived 2026-07-27)

How do you choose the right way for Windows applications to talk to each other? This article organizes named pipes, local TCP, gRPC, shared memory, file-based integration, and COM by their strengths and pitfalls in a decision table, and covers practical topics like UI/service separation, 32-bit/64-bit bridging, permission boundaries, and a working named-pipe implementation example. Archived version of https://comcomponent.com/en/blog/windows-ipc-decision-table/, as published on 2026-07-27. The live article is maintained and may change after this date. First published 2026-07-02.