I have found new real estate at
http://blogs.aspadvice.com/dgottlieb for my blog. All future posts will appear there.
I'm all excited now because I am headed to Orlando, FL for the .NET Connections conference in April. I am going to be co-running the DevAdvice.com booth with Steve Smith. I am hoping to learn a lot while I'm down there and meet a lot of the people I have dealt with via lists, blogs, forums etc. If you happen to have the privilege of going, please make it a point to stop by the DevAdvice.com booth. I would love to meet you and talk .NET for a bit and exchange ideas.
See ya' there!
I was recently tasked with writing a chat client to service customers via the web site with technical support and customer questions. The first thing that came to my mind was, “Woo Hoo! I get to play with .NET Remoting!” As I began doing my research, I figured that this could be done in one of two ways - .NET Web Services or .NET Remoting.
Obviously, in a chat application you will want each client running the application to interact with the other right? Well, this requires an object that contains state. Web services are stateless, therefore they would not work for this application.
When the client attempts to communicate with the proxy, which is responsible with communicating with the server and whose responsibility is to invoke objects and methods on the server, there are two types of server activated objects, Single Call and Singleton.
The single call object includes the client making a call to the proxy which invokes the object on the server, once created and it has done what it needs to do, it is marked for the garbage collection to pick it up next time around. Thus, the Single Call object is stateless and this is not what we are looking for.
The Singleton object is a stateful object in that the object will maintain its state in between calls from the client and allows other clients that are communicating through the proxy to interact with each other.
Just wanted to give a little background in remoting and why this solution fit my needs better than web services. I will come back with updates as I progress in this application. There is a lot to be learned in .NET remoting! I definitely recommend reading up on it.
I know it's been a while since I last blogged an entry, but things have been busy and the time to write small articles has been very slim. However, I have been reading a book called Code Complete by Steve McConnell. This is an excellent book for all developers to read. I goes over good design patterns and good practices of software engineering. I would definitely recommend going to your local book store or to amazon and ordering this book. For those of you that have read it, I would love to hear any comments or criticisms on it.
Now that I have a little bit more time on my hands, I am hoping to add more blog entries more often so keep coming back!