Jason,

It might be that the .NET Framework BCL misses the implementation of the
Stream class for named pipes. I think there should be a number of such
implementations on the Web - I once even have had to implement working with
named pipes from .NET myself.

This is from the Stream help...  Where is the IPC Pipe?  I cannot find
anything on this.  Using sockets is TERRIBLE for this sort of thing.  We
have an app that keeps running out of socket handles because they are in the
TIME_WAIT.  Why doesn't the framework recycle those?  FreeBSD and other
Unix's will force recycle TIME_WAIT's when the system gets under load and
runs out.  This seems like a really easy way for someone to DOS attack a
windows box.
FROM THE HELP:
Stream is the abstract base class of all streams. A stream is an abstraction
of a sequence of bytes, such as a file, an input/output device, an
inter-process communication pipe, or a TCP/IP socket. The Stream class and
its derived classes provide a generic view of these different types of input
and output, isolating the programmer from the specific details of the
operating system and the underlying devices.