To start, I downloaded and installed the latest binaries of stunnel. Before starting, I modified the conf file to add the following entry:

[dor]
accept=localhost:8080
connect=www.MySuperSecureSite.com:443

Then, I installed tcpTrace and set things up to Listen on port 8079 and forward to localhost:8080. Lastly, in my application, I connected to http://localhost:8079/MyPath. This would eventually forward all of the traffic to the real destination, but I was able to spy on the details in tcpTrace since that was just HTTP traffic.

After doing this, I could see where things were malformed and clean my code up to submit things in the desired format.

The first thing to note is the syntax of the XML mapping file. You can take a look at LINQ Preview\Docs\DLINQ Mapping Schema.xsd for more information on the mapping format, but here is a shortened extract from LINQ Preview\Data\samplemapping.xml to give you a look at a concrete implementation:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="Windows-1252"?>
<Database Name="Northwind">
  <Table Name="Categories">
    <Type Name="Mapping.Category">
      <Column Name="CategoryID" Member="CategoryID" Storage="_CategoryID" DbType="Int NOT NULL IDENTITY" IsIdentity="True" IsAutoGen="True" />
      <Column Name="CategoryName" Member="CategoryName" Storage="_CategoryName" DbType="NVarChar(15) NOT NULL" />
      <Column Name="Description" Member="Description" Storage="_Description" DbType="NText" UpdateCheck="Never" />
      <Column Name="Picture" Member="Picture" Storage="_Picture" DbType="Image" UpdateCheck="Never" />
      <Association Name="FK_Products_Categories" Member="Products" Storage="_Products" ThisKey="CategoryID" OtherTable="Products" OtherKey="CategoryID" />
    </Type>
  </Table>
</Database>

The above code shows how the Categories table in the Northwind database could be mapped in an XML file. One thing of special note here is the Association element which will allow data hierarchies to be established, much like you can do in the DLINQ designer. You can generate this file by hand if you want, or you can use the new version of LINQ Preview\bin\sqlMetal.exe to generate the starting point for you. sqlMetal has a lot of options for you to look at, including a bunch to take save snapshots of database schema information to an xml file, and generate classes and XML mapping files from that saved XML file. A sample command would look like this:

sqlmetal /server:(local) /database:Northwind /map:nwindmapping.xml /namespace:Mapping /code:nwind.cs

The resulting nwind.cs file does not contain any attributes, as they are all stored in the xml file. To use this file, use code like this:

    XmlMappingSource mappingSource = XmlMappingSource.FromXml(File.ReadAllText("nwindmapping.xml"));
    Mapping.Northwind db = new Mapping.Northwind("Integrated Security=SSPI;database=northwind;server=(local)", mappingSource);
    var q = from c in db.Categories 
            select c.CategoryName;
    foreach (string s in q)
        listBox1.Items.Add(s);

Fast forward to today. My goal is relatively simple. I have a .NET application built with WinForms. I'd like the same type of ease of use in deploying this WinForm application to my users. I've done quite a bit of research on the best way to achieve this, but I haven't come up with the perfect solution yet. I'm close, but it's not buttoned up all of the way yet. For starters, I would highly recommend the following articles:

• Using Windows Forms Controls in Internet Explorer has a good overview of how to get a UserControl hosted in .NET
• Code Access Security and Distribution Features in .NET Enhance Client-Side Apps is a very complete article about hosting in IE. It talks about how to host an EXE, and gives some troubleshooting advice, including the fact that trying to host a WinForm (as opposed to a Control) will not work. :-(
• Deploy WinForms on the Web is a brief overview with some overlap, but has some good information.
• Security and Versioning Models in the Windows Forms Engine Help You Create and Deploy Smart Clients talks about how to deal with versioning, security, permissions, etc.

I wasn't able to find this nugget anywhere, though. If you want to call methods from your HTML page via (e.g.) JScript, you need to make your EXE assembly COM visible. The easiest way to do this is to select Properties for the EXE in the Project Manager, and press Assembly Information. There, you'll find a checkbox to make this assembly COM visible.

So far, I've been able to get a WinForm EXE hosted in IE, strong-name it and communicate from the web page to the control. I still have several items left to tackle, like wrapping everything up in a CAB file for easier deployment, and getting calls to other assemblies working. I'll comment on those as I get to them, but if you have any pointers on better ways to do any of this, I'm all ears!

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Put the web.config file in the root of the virtual directory, and the assemblies in the bin subdirectory.
5. 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.
6. 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.

I couldn't find anything to easily deploy my project with remote objects and a web.config to an ASP.NET virtual directory. I did see some documentation about Visual WebDeveloper, but I don't have that installed here. Perhaps I didn't install it when I installed VS.NET. Regardless, I really don't want to go back to install this since I'm not creating aspx pages and the like, but I do want to host my remoting objects in IIS (more details on this in a later post).

What I ended up doing was using the post-build Build Event to create events to copy the files over to the IIS directory, e.g.:

copy $(TargetDir)\*.* \inetpub\wwwroot\tipnet\bin
copy $(ProjectDir)\web.config \inetpub\wwwroot\tipnet

At least this way, my IIS files stay in sync with what I just compiled. It might not be the most beautiful thing ever, but it works.

<serverProviders>
   <formatter ref="binary" />
   <provider ref="wsdl" />
   <provider type="LoggingSink.ServerSinkLoggerProvider, LoggingSink" />
</serverProviders>

The ref syntax is a shorthand way of referencing the SdlChannelSink class. You could use the full type name by specifying the strong name of the SdlChannelSink class if you wish, but this is much easier.