The Visual Studio.NET application development platform does not support Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) directly. There also appear to be no plans to incorporate DDE support into the .NET languages.
Using the NDde library
The best solution that we have found so far is an open source class library called NDde. The NDde class library is an extremely well designed Dynamic Data Exchange class library complete with sample code that shows how to use it as well as complete and well written user documentation.
NDde is a free third-party library. The original NDde site is no longer available, but a maintained copy that works with current versions of .NET can be downloaded from GitHub:
https://github.com/specshell/specshell.software.ndde
The NDde library comes with sample VB.NET and C# source code that demonstrates how to use it to create both DDE Clients and DDE Servers.
For connecting to WinWedge or TCP-Wedge, you would normally only use a DDE Client connection. DDE Client connections support both receiving data from WinWedge (or TCP-Wedge) as well as sending DDE Commands to WinWedge.
The following link can be used to download a ZIP file containing a VB.NET (framework 2.0) sample executable program (with source code) that shows how to communicate with WinWedge (or any other DDE Server) using the NDde class library. The sample program shows how to both retrieve data from WinWedge using DDE and also send DDE Commands to WinWedge:
Visual Basic .NET Sample Application Last modified on November 3, 2026
