Protocol Independence

As discussed in Chapter 11, a specific protocol such as HTTP is not the optimal tool for every situation faced by todays distributed applications. Maintaining protocol independence while still achieving interoperability is an increasingly important and achievable aspect to distributed application development. Each protocol in use on the network today comes with its own set of strengths and weaknesses. Applications with the agility to switch from one transport to another will be in demand as user needs evolve . To take advantage of this trend, the core functionality of your applications should be independent of the underlying transport protocol. The .NET Framework helps developers design applications with greater protocol independence by providing common I/O models, such as the System.IO.Stream type. Going forward, you can expect to see further enhancements in the System.Net namespace and in other areas of the .NET Framework, such as Web services, that support this trend.