marchalling struct on window.

[Mansour Al Akeel]

Hello all,

I an new to dbus but I have done some reading on the subject, and I need
an advice. Here's what I want to do.


I need to read data from hardware dvices, and send it through the bus to
component(s) interested in these data. I understand signals are the way to
go, but I want to put these data in struc and validate it before sending
it. Thus, I have to marchall the structs, and unmarchall it again.
Processes that are going to recieve the event, are going to be in
different languages (C#, python, java). So I have to unmarchall it for
these languages.

In other words I want something similar to publish/subsribe pattern for
IPC. Performance is a concern to me, as this should be deployed on low
resource hardware. The daemon should be always running, and the services
producing events is always running.

My questions, 
1- Is dbus right for this ? 

2- If yes, where can I find basic example about marchalling c struct's
    and unmarchalling them to C# ?

3- What to use for this type of communication , methods calls or
    signals ?  My understanding is, signal are good for broad cast, but
    we can send only array of strings, while method calls are good for
    passing complex argument, but I have to wait for it to return, which
    is not the case. I am looking for fire-and-forget !

4- I am working on windows XP with dbus 1.2.4.1, did anyone experience
    problems with this ? 

Thank you.