Today's enterprise is equipped with array of business applications running across LAN, WAN and public internet. Applications domains cannot remain dispersed for business that demands ad hoc needs. It is now crucial for enterprises to lay these applications out of black box and allow them to communicate seamlessly with each other under distributed environment. There exist several technologies and platforms, which permit interprocess communication across network, and one amongst them is "The .NET Remoting".

.NET Remoting provides generic framework and set of APIs for developing distributed application that allows different applications to communicate with one another. These applications can be located on the same machine, different machines on the same network or even machines across separate networks.

Numerous technologies permit interprocess communication. DCOM (Distributed COM), Web Services, .NET Remoting all fall under umbrella of Microsoft distributed computing. Both DCOM and Web Services have specific shortcomings that make "The .NET Remoting" a center of interest.

DCOM is restricted to computers of similar type on the same network as it relies on binary protocol. When internet connected world is to be approached, DCOM cannot bring in to play, as every object model does not support binary protocol. One more shortcoming of DCOM is that it works on range of ports that are generally blocked on firewall. Although you can configure firewall and open tons of port for DCOM to work well but in that, it decreases effectiveness of firewall and lot of security issues come up.

Web service a buzzing word, fall under .NET Remoting. Web service is the simplified programming model that allows application to exchange messages in a way that is platform independent, object model independent and programming language independent. Web service is restricted to HTTP protocol only where as .NET Remoting can work on range of protocols. Yet another shortcoming of Web service that put .NET Remoting ahead of it is that it is stateless, each request results in creation of new object, while .NET Remoting allows correlating multiple calls and maintaining state.

It is very difficult to provide ideal Remoting Framework that assures to meet need of most of the business applications. Microsoft has taken a key step in the right direction to improve .NET Remoting with framework 2.0.

One of the big new addition in ".NET Remoting" with Framework 2.0 is a new communication channel called IPC Channel, based on named pipe for cross process communications within the same machine. Previously developers had to depend on network stack, even though they need to communicate with processes on the same machine. In addition, security and restrictions have been applied to IPC Channel with an ACL to limit number of users accessing channel.

Another step up in ".NET Remoting" with framework 2.0 is the improved TCP channel. Security interface SSPI (Security Service Provider Interface) has added to TCP channel that requires window identity for authorization and thereby making it a secure remoting solution.

Strict nature of formatter has been a major problem starting from framework 1.0. It restricts only exact matches of types to be de-serialized on the receiving end. It enable type developers to modify and evolve their types over a time without failing to serialize between versions. This improvement is called "Version-tolerant serialization"

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