Microsoft® .NET Distributed Applications: Integrating XML Web Services and .NET Remoting

Bidirectional Communication

The simple .NET Remoting examples developed so far support only one-way communication. That means the client can call methods, retrieve results, and use properties but can’t respond to events or callbacks. In short, the server has no way of interacting with the client application except in response to the client.

In many enterprise applications, this simplified approach is ideal. In other cases, however, the server might need some mechanism to notify the client (for example, to signal that a time-consuming asynchronous task is complete or to send a message from another user in a chat application). In this case, a few changes are required.

First, you need to move from the client-server channels used so far to the bidirectional ...