.NET Remoting

Microsoft application programming interface NET Remoting is a Microsoft application programming interface (API) for interprocess communication released in 2002 with the 1.0 version of NET Framework. It is one in a series of Microsoft technologies that began in 1990 with the first version of Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) for 16 bit Windows. Intermediate steps in the development of these technologies were Component Object Model (COM) released in 1993 and updated in 1995 as COM 95, Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM), released in 1997 (and renamed ActiveX), and COM+ with its Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS), released in 2000. It is now superseded by Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), which is part of the NET Framework 3.0. Like its family members and similar technologies such as Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) and Java's remote method invocation (RMI), NET Remoting is complex, yet its essence is straightforward. With the assistance of operating system and network agents, a client process sends a message to a server process and receives a reply.

. NET Remoting allows an application to make an object (termed remotable object) available across remoting boundaries, which includes different appdomains, processes or even different computers connected by a network. NET Remoting makes a reference of a remotable object available to a client application, which then instantiates and uses a remotable object as if it were a local object. Type safety is enforced by the CTS and the NET Remoting runtime. Remote method calls are inherently synchronous; asynchronous calls can be implemented using threading libraries. Authentication and access control can be implemented for clients by either using custom Channels or by hosting the remotable objects in IIS and then using the IIS authentication system.