Chapter 4: Building a Simple Messenger

Overview

The last chapter conducted a whirlwind tour of Remoting, .NET's object-based model for communication between applications and across a network. Remoting is a surprisingly flexible technology. By default, it's tailored for traditional enterprise computing, in which all the work is performed by a central group of powerful server computers. But with a little more effort, you can use Remoting as the basis for a peer-to-peer system that uses brokered communication. In this chapter, we'll explore one such example with an instant-messaging application that relies on a central coordinator. Along the way, you'll learn the advantages and drawbacks involved with using Remoting in a peer-to-peer project.

Though Remoting is fairly easy to use, there can be a fair bit of subtlety involved in using it correctly. In the example presented in this chapter, it's easy to ignore threading and concurrency problems, scalability considerations, and security. These details are explored in more detail in the next chapter. In this chapter, however, we'll concentrate on creating a basic, reliable framework for a messaging application based on Remoting.

Because the code is quite lengthy, it won't be presented in this chapter all at once. Instead, it's broken down and dissected in detail throughout the chapter. But before we consider a single line of code, we need to plan the overall architecture of the system, which we'll call Talk .NET.