WebReference.com - Part 1 of Chapter 6: Professional C# Web Services, from Wrox Press Ltd (1/8)

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Professional C# Web Services

What is .NET Remoting?

.NET Remoting is the replacement for DCOM. As we have seen in the last chapters, ASP.NET web services are an easy-to use-technology to call services across a network. ASP.NET web services can be used as a communication link with different technologies, for example to have a COM or a Java client talk to web services developed with ASP.NET. As good as this technology is, however, it is not fast and flexible enough for some business requirements in intranet solutions, and ASP.NET web services requires the ASP.NET runtime. With .NET Remoting we get Web Services Anywhere that can run in every application type.

Web Services Anywhere

The term "Web Services Anywhere" means that web services can not only be used in any application, but any application can offer web services. ASP.NET web services require the IIS to run; web services that make use of .NET Remoting can run in any application type: console applications, Windows Forms applications, Windows services, and so on. These web services can use any transport with any payload encoding.

In the next chapter we will talk about when and how to use .NET Remoting with different transports (TCP and HTTP) and about different payload encoding mechanisms (SOAP and binary).

CLR Object Remoting

The next part of .NET Remoting that we need to be aware of is CLR Object Remoting. With CLR Object Remoting we can call objects across the network, as if they were being called locally.

With CLR Object Remoting we have:

• Distributed Identities – Remote objects can have a distributed identity. If we pass a reference to a remote object, we will always access the same object using this reference.

• Activation – Remote objects can be activated using the new operator. Of course, there are other ways to activate remote objects, as we will see later.

• Lease-Based Lifetime – How long should the object be activated on the server? At what time can we assume that the client no longer needs the remote object? DCOM uses a ping mechanism that is not scalable to internet solutions. .NET Remoting takes a different approach with a lease-based lifetime that is scalable.

• Call Context – With the SOAP header, additional information can be passed with every method call that is not passed as an argument.

We will cover all of these CLR Object Remoting features in detail later on in this chapter.

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Created: February 13, 2002
Revised: February 13, 2002

URL: http://webreference.com/programming/csharp/webservices/chap6/1/