Summary

Messaging is an essential part of an enterprise framework and complements other technologies described within this book. Although messaging does not solve all problems related to distributed computing, it offers many advantages including the ability to decouple application components . Unfortunately, there is a cost attached to this flexibility. Messages are greater in size than their body and can contain overhead needed to support the messaging framework. Also, because messages are often routed by servers, they can be slower than direct connections. However, in the end, the benefits outweigh the costs to achieve reliable messaging.

In the next chapter, you will learn about e-mail services within the .NET Framework. You will learn how they work, how enterprises applications use them, and how they can facilitate online collaboration between the users and the application. You will also interact with the Collaboration Data Objects, Microsoft's solution for building e-mail-based services. You will put these elements together to implement a messaging service that fits cleanly into the application framework and interacts with application business objects.