I have a project that must be compiled and run in 64 bit mode. Unfortunately, I am required to call upon a DLL that is only available in 32 bit mode, so there's no way I can house everything in a 1 Visual Studio project. I am working to find the best way to wrap the 32 bit DLL in its own exe/service and issue remote (although on the same machine) calls to that exe/service from my 64 bit app. My OS is Win7 Pro 64 bit.

The required calls to this 32 bit process are several dozen per second, but low data volume. This is a realtime image analysis application so response time is critical despite low volume. Lots of sending/receiving single primitives.

Ideally, I would host a WCF service to house this DLL, but in a 64 bit OS one cannot force the service to run as x86! Source. That is really unfortunate since I timed function calls to the WCF service to be only 4ms on my machine.

I have experimented with named pipes is .net. I found them to be 40-50 times slower than WCF (unusable for me).

Any other options or suggestions for the best way to approach my puzzle?