Another Request for Serialization and Remoting in CF

[JAT]

Serialization and remoting support in embedded real-time
Windows CE apps is critical for us to be able to use .NET.
We feel that web services wouldn't be adequate for the
rich remote GUI's and event-handling support we'd like to
implement.

Our choices currently seem to be to use Windows XP with
real-time extensions (expensive and complex) or Java
(which we're using currently for managed threads, and
supports remote method invocation and serialization in
RTOS's including CE and VxWorks, but lacks some of the
great features of .NET). We'd be willing to pay a premium
for a less-compact Compact framework on Windows CE.

Is there any reason for us to hold out hope that
serialization and remoting might be implemented in some
extended form of the Compact Framework in the not-too-
distant future?

 

[Carl Rosenberger]

Serialization and remoting support in embedded real-time
Windows CE apps is critical for us to be able to use .NET.

Hi JAT,

the basis to implement serialization and remoting is
principally supplied in CF:


(1) CF supports reflection to analyse classes. It's
not too much work to implement your own serialization
framework, that uses reflection information to store
object data in your own format.

If you like to spare yourself the work, you may want to
take a look at our object database engine:
http://www.db4o.com


(2) CF supports TCP socket connections. You can use
these connections to execute code on other machines.

We have implemented our Client/Server functionality
on top of CF sockets, so you could run a db4o client
on a handheld that connects with a db4o server on
a PC to store objects there and even trigger code
execution (our messaging functionality).


In my opinion the CF team needs to be careful, not
to bloat the system. Otherwise it will get too big
and too slow.


My personal favourite feature request for CF:
Full synchronized/wait/notify support for threads.
( Monitor.Wait(), Monitor.Pulse() )


Kind regards,
Carl

 

[Martin]

Serialization and remoting support in embedded real-time
Windows CE apps is critical for us to be able to use .NET.
We feel that web services wouldn't be adequate for the
rich remote GUI's and event-handling support we'd like to
implement.

Our choices currently seem to be to use Windows XP with
real-time extensions (expensive and complex) or Java
(which we're using currently for managed threads, and
supports remote method invocation and serialization in
RTOS's including CE and VxWorks, but lacks some of the
great features of .NET). We'd be willing to pay a premium
for a less-compact Compact framework on Windows CE.

Is there any reason for us to hold out hope that
serialization and remoting might be implemented in some
extended form of the Compact Framework in the not-too-
distant future?

Why not write your own?
At least you'd get what you want, not what someone else decides to give.

 

[JAT]

-----Original Message-----


Why not write your own?
At least you'd get what you want, not what someone else decides to give.


.
I thought that the point of using a framework is to take

advantage of its features. .NET already supports remoting
and serialization, so I was hoping to use those features
rather than spending my time inventing what would
presumably be inferior hacks. If I wanted to write my own
libraries, I probably wouldn't have bothered with Java
or .NET in the first place.

 

[Alex Yakhnin [MVP]]

Take a look here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?
url=/library/en-us/dncscol/html/csharp09182003.asp

-Alex