Named pipe

Win32 SDK functions CreateFile, ReadFile, WriteFile and CloseHandle open, read from, write to, and close a pipe, respectively.

Also unlike their Unix counterparts, named pipes are volatile (removed after the last reference to them is closed).

The VMware Workstation PC hardware virtualization tool, for instance, can expose emulated serial ports to the host system as named pipes, and the WinDbg kernel mode debugger from Microsoft supports named pipes as a transport for debugging sessions (in fact, VMware and WinDbg can be coupled together – as WinDbg normally requires a serial connection to the target computer – letting driver developers do their development and testing on a single computer).

[6] Named pipes are also a networking protocol in the Server Message Block (SMB) suite, based on the use of a special inter-process communication (IPC) share.

SMB's IPC can seamlessly and transparently pass the authentication context of the user across to Named Pipes.