Summary

In this chapter, you’ve seen that .NET Remoting facilitates the task of invoking methods across the network. A remote object has to inherit form MarshalByRefObject. In the server application, only a single method is needed to load the configuration file so that the channels and remote objects are both set up and running. Within the client, you load the configuration file and can use the new operator to instantiate the remote object.

You also used .NET Remoting without the help of configuration files. On the server, you simply created a channel and registered a remote object. On the client, you created a channel and used the remote object.

Furthermore, you learned that the .NET Remoting architecture is flexible and can be extended. All parts of this technology such as channels, proxies, formatters, message sinks, and so on are pluggable and can be replaced with custom implementations.

You used HTTP, TCP, and IPC channels for the communication across the network, and SOAP and binary formatters to format the parameters before sending them.

You learned about the stateless and stateful object types that are used by well-known and client-activated objects. With client-activated objects you have seen how the leasing mechanism is used to specify the lifetime of remote objects.

You have also seen that .NET Remoting is very well integrated in other parts of the .NET Framework, such as calling asynchronous methods, performing callbacks using the delegate and event keywords, and so on.