Genuine Channels - Worth Buying?

[Uchiha Jax]

Hello all,

Given my general greenness when it comes to remoting and my
desire to having something relatively stable up and running in the short
term I have been considering the purchase of Genuine Channels.

Would I be making a smart purchase here? What things should I be considering
before purchasing this product and what is the short of buying it, does
anyone know exactly how much easier it will make the process or will it
impede my actual learning of remoting by depending on a different product
rather than doing the DIY?

Kind Regards

Jax

 

[clu]

As a way of learning the .NET Remoting technology I think nothing is
better than writing your own code.
But this is not alwasy easy, expecially when you wish to write custom
channels.
First, because it is quite an advanced customization feature which
requires a very good knowledge of the Remoting internals.
Second, because you should also have a deep knowledge of the
communication layer you want to use: for example, if you decide to
write a custom transport channel based on, say, UDP, you better know
UDP very well to make it work in a production environment.
So, in a word: Genuine Channels, as to my experience, are a very good
product which is worth buying, if you need it.
Buying it does not prevent you from learning the internals of the
Remoting framework, although you will probably know it better writing a
custom channel from scratch.

As usual, it's a matter of time.
My suggestion? Buy GC if you need it and if you can afford it, but keep
studying the .NET Remoting framework nonetheless

HTH
Regards

Claudio Brotto

 

[Uchiha Jax]

Thanks for the reply Claudio,

I'm looking at it as an introduction to .NET remoting to cover all the stuff
I haven't run into yet until I properly understand it.

I'm currently spending a lot of time on figuring out how to setup .NET
Remoting for my purposes and now i'm getting to the stage where everything
is working, but the code seems to have problems in reality, in a perfect
test environment it works fine but as soon as I start signing up quite a few
clients to the server and have a multitude of disconnections and
re-connections I'm getting bugs that I have absolutely no idea about and
debugging a distributed application isn't as easy as a standard app
(especially if you've never done it before ).

I'm hoping that GC can give me some stability and be put in place while my
brain catches up with what i'm trying to do.
Additionally ther only really useful tutorials that sound interesting and
talk about the kind of things i'm looking to do are either by Dmitry Belikov
(the author of GC) or are stuff about Genuine Channels (which of course
requires Genuine Channels to be of any use)....

I dunno, am I being a wuss by just buying a product rather than working this
all out myself or is it really a good option to consider?

 

[Claudio Brotto]

IMHO, if you notice scalability problems, this is probably due to some
mistake in your architecture/implementation rathter than to a problem
inside the standard Remoting framework/channels.
If that's the case, GC won't help you that much :-(

Remoting is a very powerful technology.
It's not hard to begin using it, but it's much harder to use it at its
best, 'cause it's much harder to fully understand it.

If I can suggest you a great reading, please take a look at Ingo
Rammer's Advanced .NET Remoting book (APress publishing).
Maybe you can find there some answer to your problems.

Doing it yourself is a great thing, but it's worth considering only
when you have great sources to give you, at least, a starting point for
your learning and your researches.

Best Regards and ... Good Luck for your Remoting trip !

Claudio

 

[Uchiha Jax]

I've got that book on order actually.
Should get it sometime this week, hopefully that can give me some clearer
guidance.

 

[Sahil Malik]

As per this blog entry by Rocky Lhotka -
http://www.lhotka.net/WeBlog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=6a336ce6-2c07-4283-b208-e2cee1c250f9

Quote "
From .NET Remoting to Indigo the changes are comparable to the asmx
migration. Only a couple lines of code need to change and away you go. This
does assume you listened to advice from people like Ingo Rammer, Richard
Turner and myself and avoided creating custom sinks, custom formatters or
custom channels. If you ignored all this good advice then you'll get what
you deserve I guess.
"
Maybe the answer is no?

- Sahil Malik
http://codebetter.com/blogs/sahil.malik/