In this chapter, we've looked briefly at all the key .NET technologies that we'll be using to create our n- tier framework. Obviously, we'll also be using Windows Forms, Web Forms, and various other technologies, but they're generally more mainstream and better understood .
Remoting enables efficient client-server or server-server communication. Serialization allows us to convert an object graph into a byte stream, and then to deserialize that byte stream back into a clone of the original graph of objects. We can do this on a single machine, or we can use this technology along with remoting to move objects from machine to machine on a network.
Enterprise Services provide access to COM+ features from within .NET. This is a large and complex technology that has a lot of implications for our architecture, code, and deployment. We'll be using Enterprise Services transactional support as we create our data-access code.
Reflection allows our code to examine classes, methods , and other code structures. We can use reflection to discover information about these structures, but more importantly, we can use reflection to manipulate the variables of an object and to call its methods ”even ones that aren't public . When building a framework, we'll find that there are times when we want to interact with parts of an object that aren't publicly exposed, so we'll be using this technique in our framework.
.NET supports the concept of attributes that can be applied to assemblies, classes, methods, and variables. We'll be using custom attributes in our framework, and we've covered the basics of their creation and use in this chapter.
We also discussed .NET's own role-based security, and how the latter interacts with Windows or allows us to build custom security. Finally, we discussed ADO.NET, which we'll be using to read and write data from SQL Server.
At this point, we've covered the theory of distributed architecture and distributed objects as well as the technologies we'll use to put it all together. Over the next two chapters, we'll construct a distributed-object framework based on these technologies as well as the theory from Chapter 1 and the design from Chapter 2.
