Request for basic networking advice

[CyberDuke]

Hi, I am newish to Network programming in .NET

 

I have currently been developing applications where the client interacts directly with the database (which has been working fine in small scale environments)

 

But I wanted to play about with 3-tier ideas to gain performance and scalability

 

So far I have been looking at serializing a data object and using sockets to send the xml string across the network. But I have been told that�s a dumb idea because it would be re-inventing the wheel and I should be using remoteing.

 

Well I have been looking into this and played about with a few examples.

All the examples I have found build parts of the data access layer into the remote object. Which they then reference in the client�

Now I am probably being thick but doesn�t that then mean if you want to change your data access layer you have to at least re-distribute the remote object dll to all the clients.

 

What am I missing here? How can I use remoteing and keep my data access layer separate to the client so I could use completely difrent databases and the client would't care.

 

Or should I be using sockets?

Can someone point me in the right direction please?

 

Thanks

[PlausiblyDamp]

You may want to also investigate web services as an alternate to remoting as this removes the client side requirements and doesn't impose some of the strange restrictions that remoting does.

[CyberDuke]

Thanks for your help�

 

Looks like web services use IIS (ok ok that should have been obvious, as I said I am thick)

 

Had to think long and hard on this as web services do look tempting.

I didn�t want to use IIS though, it�s only going to run over a LAN and if I can get enough speed out of it I want to make some parts update in near real-time

 

After much deliberation I have decided that doing it via sockets will be more fun anyway. (Right here we go� my wheel will be� hmm octagonal!)

 

 

Thanks,

CyberDuke