Rich Turner's “On the Road to Indigo” blog has an interesting article: When to use ASMX, ES or Remoting. With all of the buzz around SOAs, it only seems logical to have the debate about these technologies. Ever since I read Ingo Rammer's book, “Advanced Remoting” I was under the impression that .NET remoting was the fastest and best way to implement IPC. However, I could never stand using Soadsuds, and using binary over TCP leaves you with a security issue (unless you implement IPSec or build your own security sink - scary thought). Which then leaves us with using IIS to secury SOAP over HTTP for remoting. So I started looking into using COM+ again (Enterprise Services - ES) which I thought would be slow because of interoping. That was a big misconception on my part according to Rich's blog post. Here's a few of his key points:
- .NET Remoting is NOT the fastest way to call a remote object! .NET Enterprise Services is!
- .NET Remoting is recommended in only two scenarios - handling custom message formats and communicating between two different AppDomains within the same process.
- ASMX & WSE are your best bet for building interoperable services today.
