Microsoft® .NET Development for Microsoft Office

Chapter 9. Web Services and Remoting

The Microsoft Office applications were originally designed to be client-side UI-intensive end-user applications, and they fulfill this role extremely well. They also expose extensive programmability features, and many solutions based around Office are also client-side UI-intensive. On the other hand, it is increasingly common to build Office-based solutions that are distributed and that leverage existing systems that might even reside on non-Windows platforms.

The .NET Framework offers two broad technologies for building enterprise-strength distributed systems: ASP.NET Web services and .NET Remoting. To be sure, you can build solutions using older interprocess communication protocols such as named pipes, sockets, ...