Named Pipes between C# and Python

There's a lot of over-complicated information on the internet for communicating between a C# process and a Python process using named pipes on Windows. I'll start with the code:

In this example, I implement a very simple protocol, where every "message" is a 4-byte integer (UInt32 in C#, I (un)pack format in Python), which indicates the length of the string that follows. The string is ASCII. Important things to note here:

• Python
  • The third parameter to open() means "unbuffered". Otherwise, it will default to line-buffered, which means it will wait for a newline character before actually sending it through the pipe.
  • I'm not sure why, but omitting the seek(0) will cause an IOError #0. I was clued to this by a StackOverflow question.

References

• .NET NamedPipeServerStream class on MSDN
• Python open() method on Python.org