One of the important features of vvvv50 is that it splits up the GUI (HDE) and the runtime in two separate programms. The runtime acts like a server where the HDE can connect over network and modify the executing program. The communication is done via .NET remoting (or TCP sockets).

Internally vvvv50 uses a normal command pattern to execute modifications from the user on the data graph. When a command is dispatched from the GUI, it gets inserted into the HDE history, but it also gets serialized and sent as a XML string to the runtime, where it gets deserialized, inserted and executed at the runtime history.

This enables also other programs to send commands to the runtime as an XML string.