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Advanced .NET Remoting
My Overview and Summary Advanced .NET Remoting breaks out into a two-part book. The first four chapters are at the introductory level, while later chapters are considerably more advanced. The book begins with an informative conceptual discussion on what .NET remoting technology is, but then quickly moves on to more specifics, entirely focused on generous code examples (which actually work, barring one or two stray lines here and there, which I found easy to correct).
I picked up this title needing to get a solid introduction to .NET remoting, and the first part of this book does not disappoint. If you stop reading after the first four chapters (after spending time working on each and every code example). you will feel like you have a solid grasp of the basics of .NET remoting. However, you need to delve into the second part of the book to realize that .NET remoting is a deep and complex topic that is going to require considerable effort on your part to understand.
The second part of the book is not for the faint-hearted. The complexity level ratchets up several notches, and holds nothing back. It delves into advanced topics such as .NET remoting internals, including message sinks, channel sinks, formatters, and transport protocols, and shows you how to customize each part. Ingo's goal is for you to really understand how the .NET Framework implements remoting. The discussion here often borders on the theoretical, but it always stays grounded in relevant code examples.
Intermediate to advanced developers will greatly appreciate this book if they are looking for an in-depth, no holds barred discussion of .NET remoting.
What's in the Book Chapters 1-4 are an introduction to .NET remoting and configuration. Ingo starts with a conceptual discussion to help you understand how .NET remoting fits into the larger picture. He then presents a remoting example that provides an excellent introduction to the core aspects of remoting, including different types of remoting objects; marshalling objects by reference; serializing objects; and using interfaces to share type information. Chapter 4, on configuration, shows you how to use configuration files to simplify your remoting code, and to make it easier to port across different deployment environments.Chapter 5 is about securing .NET remoting. This chapter was disappointingly short and did not provide enough depth. Also, some security implementation features have changed in v1.1 of the framework, so this section is not the most relevant one in the book. To his credit, Ingo has published a 1.1 update on his website that specifically addresses relevant changes to security implementation in the .NET framework.
Chapter 6 is where things start to get advanced. This chapter discusses object lifetime issues, and shows you how to control the lifetime of remotable objects, through "leasing" and "sponsorship." It also shows you how to implement asynchronous remoting calls using delegates and events. Chapter 6 is a must-read.
Chapter 7-10 is where things get really advanced. These chapters shows you how the .NET framework implements remoting, and it studies the 5 elements of remoting in great depth (Proxies, Messages, Message Sinks, Formatters and Transport Channels). This chapter is packed, and is a must-read for understanding advanced .NET remoting issues, especially when you need to heavily customize the implementation. Intermediate developers will have a harder time with these chapters, and may not find all of the material relevant to a basic .NET remoting implementation.
Chapter 11 closes out the book with an interesting look at how to implement .NET remoting techniques in a client application in order to manage the objects more effectively. Again, intermediate developers will have difficulty with this chapter, which is the most theoretical in the book. Advanced developers will appreciate it however, especially with Ingo's lead-in warning that 100% of the material in the chapter is undocumented by Microsoft!
Table of Contents
- Introduction to Remoting
- .NET Remoting Basics
- Remoting in Action
- Configuration and Deployment
- Securing .NET Remoting
- In-Depth .NET Remoting
- Inside the Framework
- Creation of Sinks
- Extending .NET Remoting
- Developing a Transport Channel
- Context Matters
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Broadly speaking, it's the ability to call methods on remote objects (e.g. a separate machine over the network). Think of it as something like Java RMI. The framework takes care of things like serializing the parameters and return values.
I think it's a decent technology for the right kind of applications, e.g. a cluster of servers that need to share data. However, if you want to expose services to other systems in a more general way, web services are probably a much better way to go.
.NET Remoting is one of Microsoft's solutions for the problem of inter-process (or application) communication. The writer of this review paid cursory attention to this fact when he made analogy to the promotion of XML Web Services (a technology that solves the same problem.) Think of .NET remoting as MS's RMI. The book that is reviewed here actually comes in two flavors, a VB.NET flavor and a C# flavor. Although the underlying framework (the .NET class library) supports both languages, the structure of the resulting code is different enough to call for such as thing. As for Ingo's book, this was the seminal tome for those looking into implementing programs that leveraged the Remoting technology. Ingo spent a good deal of his own time research the book, even digging to the level of examining the MSIL for the Remoting namespace. Support efforts such as this. This book is not a retelling of the MSDN documentation ... it's a product of a great undertaking.
-A.M.
Pimpin' all the Karma Hoes!
Please people, don't get too excited. This technology has been around for many years in different forms. RPC, DCOM, etc. It's nothing new really, just the same ideas dressed slightly differently.
In a nutshull;
.NET equivalent of a Java's RMI.
.NET this interaction between the two objects can either use a binary protocol or SOAP.
.NET Remoting vs Web Services can be found at http://www.developer.com/net/net/article.php/22017 01
Remoting is the
This means you work on an object in your local address space but the object you are working with is in fact sending off your method calls to the real object elsewhere (another machine, another address space, whatever) that performs the necessary operations.
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