Remote Happiness

For a long time I've been really really scared of those old guys talking about COM. Fortunately, a while ago, I realized that I probably never had to learn this stuff because I am a pure .NET developer, and I could just simply learn .NET Remoting (an excuse good enough for me). Not that I actually knew how it worked.

After a couple of sessions listening to Clemens Vasters talking Enterprise Services I managed to get afraid of .Net Remoting aswell (that guy simply knows too much).

Knowing the painful process of setting up EJB's on the Java platform I've postponed digging into .NET remoting for a long while until...

..yesterday: I was trying to make Webservices do more than it's intended to when I realized that I had to remote something. Today, after 6 hours work I'm happy to announce that I've made my first Enterprise Component, deployed it on IIS and consumed the whole thing from another ASP.NET application. Oh Joy!

Once again the simplicity of the framework amazes me. This stuff is really not that hard. What was really confusing though was that the books I've got here are written by real COM-jockeys, and they do make it seem harder than it is.

Thanks to Ingo Rammer for his excellent RemotingHelper class that simplyfies the use of interfaces on the client and server. A whole new world just opened:)

Other articles and howtos that helped me:
.NET Remoting Basics
MSDN: Hosting remote objects in IIS
Deepak Sharmas blogentry with some links

2 Comments

  • Very inspirational, Mads. I have a set of enterprise apps that I have lazily used webservices to implement when I know remoting is really the better solution since I have a controlled end user base on windows forms apps. I am going to have to soon take the leap. But it does work pretty well the way it is. Oh, those deeper waters!





    julie

  • I will try to make a short tutorial/summary of how I did it and publish it somewhere shortly (probably tomorrow). I'll link it up from this post.

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