The Art of the Inside Job - Addendum

Okay, so we've got memory that we can share across processes. Now, what can we put in it? Well, as a general rule, you can put in it whatever you can put in it - that is, whatever is contained completely in the shared memory. Let me clarify.

Any basic value data types can be put in shared memory. ints, floats, arrays, etc. structs can be placed in shared memory so long as all the members of the struct fulfill the same guidelines as anything else in a shared memory area. While you probably could get it to work if you're very careful, I wouldn't recommend putting classes or anything else that has associated functions in a shared memory region.

Pointers may never be put in shared memory. Remember that each process has a separate address space, so a pointer to something in one process will almost certainly not point to the same thing in another process. As well, it is not safe to put pointers that point to data in that shared memory in a shared memory region, for the same reason: with the exception of Windows 9x (as noted earlier), there is no guarantee that a shared memory region will be mapped at the same address in multiple processes. Offsets to data in the shared memory, relative to the base address of the shared memory, are safe to share between processes, as the offset won't change, regardless of where the shared memory gets mapped.

HANDLEs are not safe to put in shared memory sections - at least not directly. A HANDLE (at least, a real HANDLE - some 'HANDLE's are really user-mode pointers cast to the HANDLE type) is a reference to a kernel-mode object. Specifically, they are indices into the process' handle table, in which each entry maps to a kernel-mode pointer to the object. As all kernel memory is shared among all processes, the objects themselves are accessible from any process, but the HANDLEs remain process specific. It is possible, however, to create a new HANDLE in a foreign process which points to the same object that a HANDLE in your process points to. This is what the DuplicateHandle function is for. In this way it is possible to share HANDLEs between processes; but remember that you now have two separate HANDLEs - one in each process - and the object they point to won't be freed until both HANDLEs are closed.

Lastly, HWNDs (handle to a window) and HHOOKs (handle to a window hook - we'll get to what these are in a post or two) are process-independent, and safe to share across processes.

There are probably a few other things that are safe to share between processes, but I believe I've covered almost all of the sharable types. When in doubt you should assume that something is not safe to share between processes.