🚀 go-pugleaf

> Is there a "trick" to make it faster OR better way to send/receive
messages
> among multiple applications?

Directly from the MSDN documentation.

"The SendMessage function sends the specified message to a window or
windows. It calls the window procedure for the specified window and does not
return until the window procedure has processed the message.

To send a message and return immediately, use the SendMessageCallback or
SendNotifyMessage function. To post a message to a thread's message queue
and return immediately, use the PostMessage or PostThreadMessage function."

Options.
1 - do not not wait for a response.
2 - do not send the message to applications that have no interest (which is
likely to be most of the running applications since they know nothing about
your custom message).
3 - use a different IPC mechanism.

Without specifics about what you are trying to accomplish, I can't really
offer alternatives.  Broadcasting a message to every application and waiting
for a response is probably the slowest form of IPC (but very easy and very
powerful).  Perhaps the following link will be useful.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/ipc/base/interprocess_communications.asp?frame=true