Here are my notes on hosting remote objects in .NET:
- MSDN has a Remoting Example for hosting in IIS. The nice thing about the sample is that it shows how to use the BinaryFormatter for optimized communication over the HTTP channel.
- When using the HttpChannel and BinaryFormatter combination, HTTP errors still come back as text. This leads to SerializationException errors on the client. Richard Blewett wrote a custom channel sink to fix the HttpChannel/BinaryFormatter/ASP.NET host bug.
- The connectionStrings element in the web.config file is only valid when running ASP.NET 2.0. You can change your virtual directory to use ASP.NET 2.0 by running Internet Information Services, right-clicking on your virtual directory and selecting Properties. Then, go to the ASP.NET tab and select the 2.0 ASP.NET version in the combo box. You can also modify the web.config file here by pressing the Edit Configuration button.
- Put the web.config file in the root of the virtual directory, and the assemblies in the bin subdirectory.
- If you want to test the remote object, you can't just surf to the URI of the object (e.g. http://localhost/tipnet/MyAppServer.rem). If you do, you'll get a "Requested Service Not Found" error. You need to go to http://localhost/tipnet/MyAppServer.rem?wsdl instead. Be sure you explicitly specified the SdlChannelSink if you use other channel sinks.
- Lastly, be careful when defining channel tags in web.config. Don't close XML elements out prematurely. It's easy to do, and hard to spot once you've done it.
