Chapter 10. Remoting

Modern applications are no longer isolated, standalone entities limited to a single process or machine. Distributed applications allow you to put components in close proximity to the resources they use, let multiple users access the application, improve scalability and throughput, and increase overall availability and fault isolation. It's difficult to imagine a modern distributed application without components. Component-oriented programming is especially geared toward distribution, because it's all about breaking the application into a set of interacting components that you can then distribute to different locations.

This chapter shows how to access remote .NET components using a technology called .NET remoting. Remoting is related to .NET as DCOM is to COM in its ability to connect to components on remote machines, and like DCOM, .NET remoting can also access components in other processes (similar to COM's local servers). .NET remoting is a vast topic. Although each facet of remoting is simple enough, there are a multitude of terms and details to master before you can build even a simple distributed application. Nevertheless, this richness offers a highly flexible programming model.

This chapter begins by explaining the fundamental concepts of remoting and the key elements of the .NET remoting architecture. You will then see how to apply .NET remoting, in a set of comprehensive code samples. Like most things in .NET, there are many ways to achieve the same result. The emphasis in this chapter is on understanding the basic concepts, the trade-offs you face in using them, and the practical aspects of using remoting. Without going into every nook and cranny, but armed with an understanding of the basics of remoting you can go after the more esoteric features if the need ever arises.

The main advantage of remoting is that it is an extensible open architecture, as opposed to technologies like DCOM. You will see some very useful examples of this extensibility in the next chapter. If you do not need the extensibility, you should consider using Enterprise Services for intranet connectivity or web services for opening your application as a service to the Internet, instead of remoting.