Pushing the output of two programs as input to another program?

Hello, I'm willing to use either C or C++ to solve this problem (Which ever is better to use) and I'm doing this on a Windows XP platform. I plan on having two independent programs push their data into another program, a "master program", and that program is going to read that data and take the appropriate actions. The question is, how do you actually redirect the output of two programs into another program and read it inside that program?

I have a general understanding of "piping" in Unix, but I've never done something like this on Windows. If there's a special name for this in Windows, I could research the subject more if I knew what it was called. Any help would be appreciated! :)

why not to use files?