Please help!! How to design this?

[Diego F.]

Hello. I hope you can help me with this. I have to write an application in
C# that is more or less this:

1.- I have different clients that receive data from a central server.
2.- The server sends the initial data to the clients and keeps waiting for
responses.
3.- The clients generate new data and send it back to the server to complete
some operations.
4.- When the server finishes the operations requested, it sends back again
the data to the clients.
5.- Finally, the clients end the operations and send the final data to the
server.
6.- The server stores the completed data in a data base.

Important issues:
* When the server works with the data sent by the clients in step 3, it
opens an entry in a table with information of the process, so it can
complete the information in step 6 and store the data in the data base.

Firstly I decided using web services and send the information (objects) via
web methods, but there was two problems: the proxy generates its own
objects, incompatible with the original objects and the second, each time a
web method is called, a new object is created, so I can't store temporary
information in the table.

I asked for help and people talk me about two solutions:
- Serializing the table in each call: I think it's not very efficient (isn't
it slow?)
- Using remoting: I should learn first about remoting :-\

What do you think?

Regards,

Diego F.

 

[Vladimir Scherbina]

Diego, you can create your own protocol for clients and server to
communicate between each other.
suppose, you have a class A that contains three variables of types int,
string, float...
There is no need to serizlize it into xml, you can create packet where you
will
write the type of data, it's length, and the packet's intent (so-called
packet code)
clients, or server will get that packet anilize it, and have a possibility
to constrcut object, or save data into db...