And... Breathe...

So I've been a bit busy over the past couple of weeks.

What have I been up to?

1. Spent 2 weeks in Egypt
2. Spent a week at work
3. Went book shopping

Actually, that doesn't sound too busy at all. How come I feel like I haven't had 2 seeconds to sit and do anything? Oh well.

Doing some interesting stuff at the moment with System.EnterpriseServices and .NET remoting in C# 2.0. It's big fun, and if it all works, should make my life at work a bit easier. Nothing huge, but I'm currently replacing a web service with a remotable serviced component. The web service works fine, but because of the job it does, it needs to be as quick as possible. WebServices are great for a whole host of reasons, but for out purposes it could be better. It's a logging component for our intranet, which can be called across sites, but always to and from applications we've written.

There's no need for it to be interoparable over multiple environments (one of the biggest advantages of WebServices). As a result, one of the first advantages remoting has over WebServices is being able to send messages over TCP, and serialized using .NET's BinaryFormatter. This makes the messages going backwards and forwards much smaller. I haven't get any data on actual message size, but it took approximately 8 times as long to pull a dataset out through the webservice than it did to pull the same data out as business objects through a remoted component.

Add to that the nice things that COM+ brings to the table like JIT Activation, transaction management and object pooling and it should be a nice replacement.

And I get to play with C# and VS 2005.

What more could a boy want?

I'm sure I'll be writing more about my adventures in C# 2.0 shortly, but for now, I've got a couple of new books to read (this, this and this).

Just wanted to share.