Welcome to the first issue of the Distributed .NET Newsletter!

Transferring Custom Exceptions over Remoting Boundaries

Even though Remoting supports "High Type Fidelity", transferring custom Exceptions over Remoting boundaries comes with its very own challenge: using [Serializable] is not enough because the base class (System.Exception or System.ApplicationException) already implements ISerializable. If you want to pass your custom Exceptions over Remoting boundaries, you therefore have to override GetObjectData() and provide a custom constructor for deserialization. And don't forget to call base.GetObjectData()! [Read more]

Favorite Tools

For anyone dealing with runtime issues in distributed applications, I highly recommend taking a look at Ethereal. It is an open source graphical network sniffer (for Windows and Linux) which decodes everything from HTTP to DCOM and from ARP to X11. It might take a bit to get used to its verbose output, but Ethereal is one of the tools I couldn't live without. The only drawback is that it doesn't work on the loopback interface (localhost or 127.0.0.1) but instead only on data which is transferred over a real network. [Download here]

Architecture Must Reads

First and foremost, if you never looked at the "Patterns & Practices" section at msdn (http://msdn.microsoft.com/practices) you're really missing some great information.

One of my favorite documents in this section is "Application Architecture for .NET: Designing Applications and Services". This isn't your usual web page - instead it's a 166 pages PDF document! (Oh, and the fact that I collaborated with Microsoft during its creation only adds a little bit to my enthusiasm about this document ;-)). This document is a no-bull approach to application architecture which doesn't focus too much on just web services but instead walks you right through the various architectural choices in .NET for web services and conventional applications. This is a must read!

MSDN Development Samples

TaskVision Solution Overview: This one rocks! It's a complete Windows Forms Client/Server Application which isn't only a demo style project but instead shows possible solutions to a number of real world issues: Online/Offline mode, a fancy UI (GDI+ in action), XP Themes, printing, localization, concurrency conflict resolution, web services security. Be sure to check it out!

Next Issue

In the next issue of this newsletter, I'll talk a little bit about the breaking changes for Remoting based applications when moving to .NET Framework version 1.1. Yes, there are some - and it's quite likely that your application will be effected by them. Fortunately, it's not too hard to avoid them ...

Feedback

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Regards from Austria, Europe