Using the SharedMemory Channel with Windows Vista and above

By Henning Krause

If you are using the shared memory remoting channel from GenuineChannels under Vista, you can quickly become a victim of a new security feature of Windows Vista: Global objects (a Mutex in the global namespace, for example) can only be created in session 0 - and with Vista, only services run in session 0.

The GenuineChannels SharedMemoryChannel creates a global mutex by default, and will fail with with this error message:

Can not create or open a memory file mapping.
Error code: 2. Use the Visual C++ Error Lookup utility to see the text of the error message.

Consider the following code for the initialization of the remoting infrastructure:

public void InitializeRemoting(string name, string address)
{
    var properties = new Hashtable();
    properties["listen"] = address;
    properties["name"] = name;
    properties["priority"] = 100;

    var channel = new GenuineSharedMemoryChannel(properties, null, null)
    ChannelServices.RegisterChannel(channel);
}

To force the channel to create session-local objects only, add the following property:

    properties["smsessionlocal"] = true;