Introduction

It's been roughly seven years since distributed application architecture first gained recognition in the business world. Back then, exciting new technologies such as COM/DCOM and CORBA/IIOP promised to revolutionize the way that large-scale, resource-intensive applications were built. Instead of trying to host a single monolithic application on a single computer, distributed architecture allowed software to be modeled as a group of objects communicating across different machines. Best of all, these machines no longer needed to be proprietary mainframes instead, developers could use inexpensive servers running the Microsoft Windows operating system. Increasing the overall throughput of the system was often as easy as just adding an extra computer to the mix.

All this has made distributed programming one of the most exciting and hotly pursued areas of software programming, but it hasn't made up for some critical stumbling blocks. Quite simply, distributed applications are complicated. Programming a distributed application on the Windows platform requires a solid understanding of Microsoft's COM standard, its enterprise software and component services (such as SQL Server and COM+), and a healthy dose of painfully won experience. And no matter how skilled the programmer, a distributed programming project can quickly mushroom into a collection of versioning nightmares, interoperability headaches, and unexpected performance bottlenecks.

These problems are the key factors behind the creation of Microsoft's .NET platform. Microsoft .NET provides an entirely new model for creating components, communicating across computers, and accessing data one that is optimized for distributed applications on every level. This framework still requires a healthy investment of developer time and a fairly steep learning curve for novice programmers. After the basics are mastered, however, .NET makes it dramatically easier to create truly scalable software systems.

This book explores distributed programming with .NET. It details the key .NET technologies you need to master and explains the best practices for distributed application architecture with .NET. Best of all, it shows you how the separate .NET technologies can all fit together.