Upgrading Distributed Applications

Chapter 21

Upgrading Distributed Applications

Until now we haven t really talked about upgrading large-scale distributed applications. But building these types of applications is, after all, the cornerstone of the entire Microsoft .NET initiative. The .NET Framework is designed from the ground up to support new first-class distributed technologies. Knowing how these technologies are implemented is critical in assessing how to upgrade a given application. Unfortunately, so many possibilities and variations exist that it is impossible to address all or even a significant portion of them in a meaningful way.

This chapter gives an overview of the core concepts behind large-scale distributed applications. It then discusses how these concepts are implemented in Visual Basic .NET. We highlight the use of these technologies and describe how to implement them in your applications. Although this chapter covers some interoperability issues (such as how to build wrappers and marshal objects such as ADO Recordsets from the server to the client), there are others you may face if you get creative with your application. Consult Chapter 13 for more information regarding COM interoperability.

	Some of the examples in this chapter use the Northwind database Northwind.mdb (included on the companion CD) as a basis for demonstrating various forms of data access.