.NET Remoting

Question

Is it possible to submit an HTML tag to a .NET Remote object? Therefore I would like to submit a text area on a html page to my .net remote object (http://localhost:1234/endpoint) where I can then process the encoded stream using something like HTTPRequest. IIS is not an option... I know a solution could be writting a very light-wieght HTTP Server (listening on a random pre-defined port) which could process POST requests (using tcp sockets and encoded streams). I was hoping that a .NET Remoting solution would be quicker easier and cleaner.

spgilmore · Answer

Not natively that I know of. It's possible that you could fake a NET remoting client and send this data from a client that sends the right XML-serialized object from that data but the problem remains that you must send that data to an HTTP server. That is what the browser is going to do. If you must use a web browser you must use a web server. There are lots of other free http servers out there that may meet your needs. Cassini (though not touted as a production server) may work Apache Sambar AnalogX Jetty etc. Some of them are lighter than others. If this is all you're using it for and you just want to forward the request to the .Remoting server your http server may be simple enough to write your own. It only has to read a single line from the browser stream (if you use GET) and send a canned http 200 response then forward that line of text to the Remoting server. But at this point it doesn't make much sense to even HAVE a remoting server because you've already got a piece of code running with the information you need and it can do what you want with it.

p.jones · Answer

You have to look in the .NET remoting literature in Visual Studio. By default .NET remoting uses serialisation of objects over HTTP using WSDL-SOAP or a binary formater. What you want is POST or GET on top of HTTP and I think there are .NET remoting classes for input via these but not the base class MarshalByRefObject. There is a diagram somewhere showing them.