Communications between different .NET Applications

  • Thread starter Thread starter Simon Tammaru
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Simon Tammaru

Hello,

I am moving into territory that is unknown to me so I thought I
would request sage council from those who knew about such topics.

My desire is to have client versions of my application running on a couple
of computers on my LAN and then a server application that helps those client
instances process the database efficiently.
For example if one user sends a message to the other the following should
occur:

a) The Database is written to by the client application (this is already
done)
b) The client program sends a message to the server instance of the software
explaining that a message has been sent from user A to user B (for example)
c) The server program looks for instance of the application running on the
LAN and sees if any are logged in as user B.
d) If the user is found then that client instance of the software is told to
re-select it's message data from the database.

I realise I could just use a timer to re-select the data every x seconds but
I don't see this as efficient.
I figure I could also do all of this via web services.

As i'm moving into larger application structure these days I was wondering
if anyone could point out the best of these solutions or any ideas that I
have not considered and point towards the relevant .NET objects I should be
using to accomplish this.

I hope you can help and if you do, many thanks.

Kind Regards

Jax
 
Either through web services or if you are going to be transporting a
large chunk of data around use .net remoting. .net remoting is a wee
bit harder to setup and get running than web services but it better
suited for larger data chunks that need to be transported. Also,
remoting supports utilization of transport plugins so you can use either
ip/port based communications or you can use http/ web based.

Web services you will essentially have the clients talking to the server
but they cannot recieve init calls from the web server itself. With
remoting the clients can not only talk to the server but to each other
and the server could send init data to the clients without the client
making the first call.
 
there's a very good book that can help you with this:
Advanced .Net remoting by Ingo Rammer

--
--- Nick Malik [Microsoft]
MCSD, CFPS, Certified Scrummaster
http://blogs.msdn.com/nickmalik

Disclaimer: Opinions expressed in this forum are my own, and not
representative of my employer.
I do not answer questions on behalf of my employer. I'm just a
programmer helping programmers.
 
Thanks for the responses Greg and Nick.

Sounds like remoting is the way forward.
Does anyone know of any decent on-line articles I can check out on the
subject?
Has Jon Skeet written any? That'd be dope as his articles are very easy to
understand and are generally good fun.
 
Uchiha Jax said:
Thanks for the responses Greg and Nick.

Sounds like remoting is the way forward.
Does anyone know of any decent on-line articles I can check out on the
subject?
Has Jon Skeet written any? That'd be dope as his articles are very easy to
understand and are generally good fun.
Click to expand...

Thanks for saying so :)

I haven't written any articles on remoting or web services - indeed, I
haven't done much remoting yet myself. However, my new job relies
heavily on remoting, so I'm sure I'll be getting a lot of practice with
it. When I know what I'm talking about, I'll see about writing an
article - just don't expect it in the very near future!
 
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