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Remote method invocation has always been an issue in software development, especially when writing distributed enterprise level applications.

The Microsoft .NET runtime supports remoting, webservices has been used for years, and with the advent of version 3.0 of the framework Microsoft introduced Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). WCF greatly simplifies writing distributed software by encapsulating the transport mechanisms used – be it TCP, MSMQ, WS-* or some else – as well as security.

Unfortunately WCF does not run on the Mono.NET runtime, and System.Runtime.Remoting is a bit esoteric. So I have written a small framework which uses messages across a TCP channel to invoke methods remotely. The framework enables programmers to easily write distributed service oriented applications with a minimum of boiler plate code. Clients are produced by using Reflection.Emit to dynamically generate IL-code that delegates method calls to a host.

Read more and get the source and binary here.

How do we write secure, robust, scalable, mutilthreaded software? There are several aproaches, and no definitive answer to this question. But the recent advent of multicore processors have put a new emphasis on how we as programmers write software that can utilize this new hardware architecture so that the processors are not idle and we get maximum performance.

Traditionally we write sequential programs. That is what programmers are taught, and it is easy to understand the flow in the software. Programmers are also taught that we should avoid multithreading whenever possible, because chances are that bugs will be present – indeed one gets the feeling that bugs are inherent in multithreaded software. And the fact is that getting multithreading right in imperative languages like C++, Java or C# is extremely hard; the primitives provided in these languages for handling threads and their communication are not adequate. It might look simple on paper, but multithreaded software is rarely as simple as the textbook examples. (more…)