Anonymous pipes help provide safe and secure interprocess communication between child and parent processes. The System.IO.Pipes.AnonymousPipeClientStream class enables a child process to connect to and exchange information with a parent process.

Anonymous pipes are unnamed, one-way pipes that typically transfer data between parent and child processes. Anonymous pipes are always local; they cannot be used over a network. A System.IO.Pipes.PipeDirection value of PipeDirection.InOut is not supported because anonymous pipes are defined to be one-way.

Anonymous pipes do not support PipeTransmissionMode.Message read modes.

The client side of an anonymous pipe must be created from a pipe handle provided by the server side by calling the AnonymousPipeServerStream.GetClientHandleAsString method. The string is then passed as a parameter when creating the client process. From the client process, it is passed to the System.IO.Pipes.AnonymousPipeClientStream constructor as the pipeHandleAsString parameter.