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Is there any way to realize communication between a Windows Universal App and a standard Desktop application running at the same computer? I read that UAs don't support IPC. Instead they use those so called background agents. But is it possible to use those background agents not to communicate with a UA but rather a desktop application or is this completely suppressed?

The reason is, that I already have a desktop application and I would like to add Cortana support to it, without too much effort. So I would like to avoid converting the desktop app to a universal app. Cortana is only available in Universal Apps at the moment.

Peter
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    The answer is NO, possible duplicate of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12341707/communication-between-windows-store-app-and-native-desktop-application – Mehrzad Chehraz Oct 14 '15 at 16:57
  • OK, thank you very much. Too bad - that's not really sophisticated design, IMHO. – Peter Oct 15 '15 at 07:00
  • I agree with you, it's too bad, but they may provide a way to do that in future since there is already an app-to-app communication mechanism (as I just remembered!). I mean, when an app can communicate another app, a desktop app should be able to do that too! see https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/windows/apps/xaml/windows.applicationmodel.appservice.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396 – Mehrzad Chehraz Oct 15 '15 at 07:45
  • You may be able to call WinRT api in a desktop app too, see http://www.hanselman.com/blog/HowToCallWinRTAPIsInWindows8FromCDesktopApplicationsWinRTDiagram.aspx – Mehrzad Chehraz Oct 15 '15 at 09:11
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    While calling WinRT APIs from desktop apps is possible, it's only available for a subset of WinRT APIs. Cortana's APIs aren't included in that set, yet, they're not tagged with the appropriate flags that indicate they're safe to use (and they'll fail because you're not running in the context of a package). We're aware of the desire to use the APIs from a desktop app however, and we're considering options there. – Andrew Pilley Oct 15 '15 at 17:36

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