Chapter 7
Channels and Channel Sinks
In this chapter, we ll continue showing you the various customizable features of .NET Remoting. To get a more detailed understanding of the channel architecture, we ll examine HttpChannel in depth. The next step will be to create a custom channel by using our own transport mechanism. Finally, we ll build a custom channel sink.
The .NET Framework has two types of channels: HttpChannel and TcpChannel. Although the overall structure of these two channels is very similar, they differ in the transport they use to transmit messages. Although HTTP and TCP will fulfill most transport needs, occasional problems that require a different transport will occur.
For example, you might need to access remote objects from a wireless device that supports the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP). To solve this problem, you d create a custom channel that accepts incoming messages via WAP. When we look at the structure of channels later in the chapter, you ll see that once a message is reconstituted into the proper format, the channel framework is oblivious to the manner in which the message was received.