pipelines ... program1.exe | program2.exe SOLVED

[BramVandenbon]

- INTRODUCTION -
I'm working on a GoBot project.

Go is a worldfamous (asian) boardgame.
A lot of computerprograms are written for letting people play with GoBots.

And there are also a lot of Go Servers where people can play eachother.

Letting bots play on these servers has been impossible for a long time. But recently there is a new protocol "GTP".

each goserver makes his own bridge between the bot and its server.

- WHAT I DID -
I need 2 programs to communicate using standard input and standard output.

MS-DOS and linux users will propably know how this is done:

if you launche program1 like this ...
program1.exe | program2.exe

Then program 1 sends its output to the input of program2 and the other way round.

Program 1 is written in Java by the owners of the server. My program is written in C#but that doesn't really matter.

in my program I use Console.WriteLine() to send my commands. And indeed the other program receives all my commands.

- THE PROBLEM -

If I want to receive Input from the other program ...

I can't make a Console.readline() loop cause i never know in advance when the other program is going to send something. Using readline would make my program hang till i receive something and then make it hang again.

And even when i put my loop right behind my Writeline I don't receive the input because mostly my Readline is too late.

So I need some kind of event that gets triggered when i receive input. But the Console class doesn't contain this kind of thing.

I tried the In property of the Console class to put the input into a StreamReader object. But the same problem occures. When I'm using sr.Readline() the whole program hangs. and still the timing is impossible

- ... -
Does anybody have any experience with this kind of problems ?
I went through MSDN and didn't find any kind of information about it.

Thank you in advance