Remoting is a means by which one operating system process, or program, can communicate with another process. The two processes can exist on the same computer or on two computers connected by a LAN or the Internet. Communicating between two programs may seem like a big “so what,” but it’s a rather involved process. Here’s why.
In any operating system, two paramount goals are security and stability. One way to achieve these goals is to load each executing program into its own process. By design, processes are isolated from each other?the code in one process cannot access the code or data of another process. That design enhances security by preventing one program from snooping around where it does not have access rights, and it enhances stability by ensuring that problems in one program cannot inadvertently corrupt the memory space of another program or of the operating system itself. The .NET Framework provides an additional level of isolation with application domains, which permit two or more programs to run within the same process, maintaining the same level of isolation as if they were in separate processes while minimizing the overhead of multiple processes.
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While the need for isolation between processes is clear, the fact remains that separate programs sometimes do need to communicate. The emphasis on distributed computing and scalability makes this need even more prevalent today. The .NET Framework provides several method for cross-process communication, collectively called remoting. Web services are probably the best known type of remoting, but they are not your only option. In this article you’ll see an overview of .NET remoting technologies that may help you choose between the various remoting options..
Remoting makes an object in one process (the server) available to code in another process (the client). This is called marshalling, and there are two fundamentally different ways to marshal an object:
- Marshal by value: the server creates a copy of the object passes the copy to the client.
- Marshal by reference: the client creates a proxy for the object and then uses the proxy to access the object.
When a client makes a call to an object marshaled by value (MBV), the server creates an exact copy and sends that copy to the client. The client can then use the object’s data and executable functionality directly within its own process or application domain without making additional calls to the server. To implement MBV you must either implement the ISerializable interface in your classes, or mark them with the
In contrast, when a client makes a call to an object marshaled by reference (MBR), the .NET framework creates a proxy in the client’s application domain and the client uses that proxy to access the original object on the server. To implement MBR a class must, at minimum, extend the System.MarshalByRefObject class. Figure 1 illustrates the differences between MBV and MBR.
A channel is an object that implements communication between a client and a remote object, across app domain boundaries. The .NET Framework implements two default channel classes, as follows:
Both of these classes are dual-purpose in that they implement both a client channel, used on the client side to communicate with remote objects, and a server channel, used on the server side to communicate with clients. The HttpChannel class formats messages using the SOAP protocol, which encodes communications as XML. In contrast the TcpChannel class uses a binary format for messages. While binary formatting is more efficient (formatted messages are smaller), the plain text format of SOAP is much less likely to have problems with firewalls and other network security measures. When you create a server?that is, a remotable class?you also define and register one or more channels for the class and associate each channel with a specific port. By registering a channel/port combination you tell the .NET infrastructure to listen on that port for messages intended for that channel. When a message arrives, the framework routes it to the correct server object. Figure 2 illustrates how the client and server communicate. Note that when you’re using remoting on a single system, the port numbers used by the client and server cannot be the same, because you can use a given port only once.
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