Connecting a Smartphone 2003 Application to a Remoting Infrastructure

n its current release, the .NET Compact Framework does not encourage the development of applications with a distributed object model because it doesn't support .NET remoting. That leaves only a single interoperability option: Web services. I'm not by any means attempting to establish a case in favor of or against the use of Web services; however, Web services may not be appropriate for some types of mobile applications. Fortunately, you can create your own remoting solution. The example chat application in this article will show you how to do that.

You will need two third-party products to compile and test the example application: MiddSol's MinCor.NET (an object request broker for the Compact Framework written in C#) and MiddCor (the counterpart that runs in a standard .NET environment). If you want to follow along, I recommend that you first download and install the sample Visual Studio solution code, and download the MiddCor and MinCor libraries from the Middsol Web site as well. When you load the solution into Visual Studio for the first time, you will need to fix the references to the MinCor and MiddCor libraries. To do that, right-click on any broken entries in the References sections of the Solution Explorer and select 'Remove'. Then right-click on 'References' and select 'Add Reference'. Make sure that there is a reference to MinCorSmartPhone.dll in the client project (usually in C:\Program Files\Middsol\MinCor\bin) and one to MiddCor.dll in the server project (usually found in C:\Program Files\Middsol\MiddCor\bin).