Communication between programs?

Im want to do some simple communication between two programs, but i dont know how to do it. I searched for "communication between programs" but this doesnt help. It doesnt have to be very efficient, since only very little data is exchanged. I thought about using invisible controls, but this seems more like a hack to me. I looked a little at dde but this looks like overkill. Anybody got an idea..... i only need some keywords i can look for. The communication is only between programs on the same computer.

Communicating between two programs or between two instances of one program is called Interprocess Communications or IPC. Probably the easiest IPC method to use is the WM_COPYDATA message. This involves a window message that one program can send to the window in the other program. You would find the target window with the FindWindow function and the class name of the window. Other IPC methods you could use are pipes, mailslots and mapped files. Out of the list of IPC methods, I would avoid using the clipboard (anti-social as it deletes whatever the user had in the clipboard), COM (too complex), RPC (too complex), DDE (too complex) and sockets (some firewalls may not let you bind to a port).

Thak you anonytmouse, im always amazed by the amount of your knowlege :p.

There is also the HWND_BROADCAST type msgs.