The “is Remoting dead?” question keeps popping up in forums and mailing lists inside and outside of Microsoft. Earlier this week the discussion came up again somewhere, so for the benefit of everyone, here’s what I wrote in the reply email to that “Is Remoting dead?” question – slightly edited for privacy protection:
Peter,
Nothing is “dead” until it doesn’t ship anymore and then subsequently becomes unsupported. The long-proclaimed-dead COM is very much alive and kicking and there’s even work being done underneath on MS RPC. Remoting is the technology used to communicate across AppDomains within the same process that’s baked into the .NET Framework. As such, it’s very much alive.
Does it have any great & bright future in terms of being a distributed systems technology for communicating across the network and will see any significant investments? No. Our strategic technology for building distributed systems is the Windows Communication Foundation.
Our guidance has been – for the last few years – that you use Web Services (ASM/WSE) by default for whenever you cross a network boundary and if you happen to need features from Enterprise Services or cannot use IIS as your application host, you use ES instead. If you need reliable, durable communication you use MSMQ. Remoting you’d typically only use in cases where you need a more or less convenient way get CLR typed data across a TCP socket – tightly-coupled, non-interoperable, limited security needs, limited scale.
If you choose Remoting, you should avoid client-activated objects, marshal-by-ref, delegates, events and direct access to fields and/or properties. All that will not only make a later migration easier, but is also a good recipe to avoid the most common distributed object system disaster scenarios.
Lastly, this is not so much a matter of opinion as one of reading and understanding what we’ve been saying for quite a while.
Clemens
What this says is that Remoting isn’t dead. It’s there, it’s part of the .NET Framework and I don’t see anybody pulling it out. At the same time, I also don’t see scores of people spending a lot of time putting more stuff into it. It is what it is. And as I wrote in that email, this is not a matter of personal opinion or taste or a wild guess – that is simply the definitive story.
Every second person who knows that I’ll
soon be moving to the Puget Sound area around Seattle soon can’t help to
point out how much the weather allegedly sucks. Here’s a screen clip that
I made last week but didn’t get around to blog yet. This goes to show
(and the comparison holds pretty much throughout the year) that the Seattle
weather is just like the weather at home – we’ll be fine 
When I started blogging about 5 years ago ( I can’t remember exactly, but 2002 seems right) I would never have thought that my blog would end up on the MSDN Web Services home page. Now it did. Matt Powell, who’s been the blogger featured on the front page of the “MSDN Web Services and Distributed Technologies Developer Center” at http://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices has asked me to whether I’d be interested in taking that spot from him and you can guess that it didn’t take me very long to say “Absolutely! Yes!”.
So for the benefit of anyone who just found my blog through MSDN and hasn’t attended any of my talks at some conference or hasn’t previously read my original blog I should probably introduce myself:
My name is Clemens Vasters and I am one of two Community Program Managers on the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) team. My team mate Shy Cohen is responsible for our managed partners, our early adopter programs, and direct customer engagements and I am more or less responsible for keeping in touch with everyone else. That includes folks like the Microsoft MVPs, the Microsoft Regional Directors, frequent conference speakers, and book authors, but also – and most importantly – You, You, You, and You. I should also point out that Shy and myself are both members of the product team who builds WCF and neither in marketing, evangelism or even sales. We care first and foremost about the technology, we know how it all was built and why, and about You being able to build great apps with it. And we care very much about you telling us what you like and don’t like so that we can make things even better for you in the next releases.
Thank you for all the great work, Matt. I’ll try to use this spot wisely.
(via http://windowscommunication.net)
The WCF Documentation Team has started to release biweekly (!) documentation updates. The updates are made available as a set of .CHM files.
Mind that these files do not integrate directly into Visual Studio as the WinFX Windows SDK files do. Since VS integration requires quite a bit of setup work, the VS integrated help files can only ship with the regular WinFX Windows SDK CTPs. Nevertheless, the feedback from all customers we asked told us loud and clear that we should ship the documentation in this form irrespective of this minor usability inconvenience and therefore we do.
If you have feedback on the documentation, please use the "Send comments about this topic to Microsoft" email links below each documentation entry to provide feedback. Due to the volume that our team receives, you might not always get an answer, but your input is most definitely read and considered.
You can download the first (April 15) Documentation CTP directly using this link (20MB).
Matias Woloski writes about ClickOnce and WCF and provides a complete solution path for setting it up and also talks about our "Full Trust" constraint that I explained a few weeks ago.
My grand boss ... if someone had told me this a year back ... but it turns out that it is a great blessing ... anyways .... My grand boss, the magnificient Doug Purdy points to our best kept secret: You can actually do Remoting-style distributed objects with WCF as Sowmy and Michael explain.
Update: Tomas Restrepo asks why that is good. Let me clarify: I think the transparent, distributed objects way of doing things is very problematic, but there are some scenarios where they are a feasible solution and there are migration scenarios where you don't have much of a choice. As a platform provider, we have a mainstream path (SO) that we prefer and that's represented in our turnkey scenarios, but we cannot and will not be as dogmatic as to shut the door on different architecture styles. We don't do that on REST/POX on one side and we don't do that on distributed objects on the other side of the spectrum.
The WinFX Tour is coming to Europe!
Mark it in your calendar and, if you can, sign up! Locations: Rotterdam (20 Apr), Nice (25 Apr), Zurich (2 May), Copenhagen (4 May), London (9 May), Eilat/IL (9 May), Reading/UK (10 May), Cairo (15 May), Moscow (19 May)
I'll be speaking at the Zurich, Copenhagen, and Eilat (TechEd Israel) events.
[If the event near you does not have a sign-up page linked, watch your local MSDN portal or MSDN newsletters for updates]
- You wrote an example for WCF that you want others to see?
- You wrote a WCF article on your blog or for a magazine? (online or offline, any programming and written language)
- You have a tool that complements or uses WCF? (any license, commercial and non-commercial)?
- You offer WCF training or speak at a conference?
I have the power to hyperlink. I want to know.
I am sure that some want to fly under our radar, but I am also sure that a lot of people are very interested to have a bit fat green spot showing up on our radar screen when it comes to their blogs posts. Well, if you look here ... everyone who left a comment on that post is on my blogroll in RSS Bandit and I am making every interesting and original post/thought/article visible internally to make sure that your wishes/concerns/praise are heard and your contributions to the community are acknowledged.
PS: Did I mention that I am involved in the MVP approval process? 
PS: Identity (InfoCard, Active Directory, MIIS), Workflow and BizTalk gurus are welcome too. I will get your feed addresses to the right folks.
Today's news from Apple is significant. Sun already runs Windows and now Apple runs Windows. Cool.
Blogland is big. I am currently trying to get a bit of an overview what people out in blogland are doing with WCF. And while I've been doing that in addition to a bunch of very long and (due to the time difference between Redmond and Germany) very late evening meetings, Sabine has caught the Sudoku virus and keeps filling those grids ...
It turns out, there is convergence between WCF and Sudoku.
I have seen a few people pointing it out already, but in case you haven't seen Kumar Gaurav Khanna's WS-Sudoku (blog post) game, you might want to take a look. It's ClickOnce installable (given you have the WinFX Feb CTP) and lets a group of people solve a puzzle together. Very nice demo.
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