Two way communication between MATLAB and C#

Question

I have a third party MATLAB toolbox, which performs some calculation over set of data. I am designing a Windows Form based application in C# to integrate it with MATLAB Toolbox. Following are the primary requirements-

1. The Windows Form i.e C# application can be invoked from MATLAB
2. If uses performs any operation in the Windows Form, the Form should be able to call the method and pass the parameters to MATLAB Toolbox. The Form should be able to get the data returned by the MATLAB as well.
3. Also If user modify the data/parameters in MATLAB then it should be reflected in Windows Form.

From Google Search, I got plenty of results to call C# application from MATLAB by using COM approach. I am looking for two way communication between MATLAB and C#. Please note that the communication should be fastest as possible.

Answer 1

I've tried to do something related to this, and you can see the solution I arrived at in this question. Ultimately, you're gonna have to use COM if you plan to have any meaningful interaction between the two programs. I've looked into UIAutomation but unfortunately Matlab exposes nothing you can use.

To address your questions individually:

1. Should be pretty simple using the shell escape to call your C# app. Your app should support command line arguments, or use some kind of interop to pass anything to a running instance of your app (see 3).
2. This is also doable. See the linked question for how to interop with a running instance of Matlab from C#.
3. This is going to be the hard part. Your going to have to write your own COM server in your app and create a COM client in Matlab to interop with your app. This won't be automatic though since your user will have to type some kind of command to initiate the interop from Matlab. The only way I can think of making this automatic would be to have your app poll Matlab's workspace using COM in fixed time intervals, and figure out if anything has changed (neither simple nor efficient).

The conclusion? This is generally way too much work to be bothered with and you're much better off just writing a Matlab GUI. If you need any functionality from the .NET framework you can simply use Matlab's .NET interface.