Gandalf's .NET Blog

Allo Guvna! From England!

Gandalf — Mon, 04 May 2009 10:21:05 +0000

Just finishing up another trip to Manchester this week. My buddy Vu and I went up to Edinburgh, Scotland and checked out the town. The following weekend I drove down to London. Next trip I’ll have to bite the bullet and shell out the bucks for the ferry ride to Ireland (Hopefully I can bring the better half out one day, as a solo trip to Ireland with her not going is going to incur some bad wife faction).

Just like to take this opportunity to apologize to all of the folks on the roads out here in the UK, hopefully I haven’t given to many of you a heart attack by driving on the wrong side of the road.

Some pictures from the trip here

Stryder’s Learning Center beta released

Gandalf — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 23:45:20 +0000

I’ve been working on some software to teach my son Stryder things like letters and numbers and math and etc. You can read all about it at my new website www.MyKidsBrain.com

Simple Singleton .NET Remoting with Serialization

Gandalf — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 04:35:27 +0000

.NET Remoting has two important concepts to master, the first is the MarshalByRefObject which is introduced in Simple Singleton .NET Remoting. The second is Serialization. MarshalByRefObject is a class that you derive from if you want a given class to stay put (in other words, the object will not move from where it is instantiated). Serialization is the exact opposite, you mark an object with the [Serializable] attribute when you want it to be able to move from client to server and vice versa.

In the attached sample there are three projects.

SimpleRemotingSerializationClient

SimpleRemotingSerializationObject

.
SimpleRemotingSerializationServer - This is a winforms application that has a few lines of code in it to host the SimpleObject as a Singleton.

When the sample project runs the following happens.

SimpleRemotingSerializationServer hosts the SimpleObject as a Singleton. SimpleRemotingSerializationClient instantiates SimpleObject and grabs a copy of the People property (of type List) and binds that list to a Grid. You can then click the Add and Remove button to Add a random person to the list or Remove selected people from the grid. Each time you add or remove, the actual add and remove is done in the SimpleRemotingSerializationServer process space via the SimpleObject.Add and SimpleObject.Remove functions and then the SimpleRemotingSerializationClient grabs a new copy of the updated list via the SimpleObject.People property and rebinds it to the grid.

Download: Simple Remoting Serialization Sample

Simple Singleton .NET Remoting

Gandalf — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 06:23:20 +0000

In .NET remoting you have the option to host objects as either a Singleton or Single Call object. The Singleton hosting option guarantees that one and only one instance of your object will be hosted. Single Call means that each client will get a fresh copy of the object. You can think of Singleton objects as being useful for things like a cached list of people that you don’t want to pull from the database over and over, and Single Call is useful for doing transaction processing (such as a credit card transaction).

In the attached sample there are three projects tied together by a single Visual Studio 2005 solution file.

SimpleRemotingClient - This is a winforms application that has a few lines of code in it to access the SimpleObject that is hosted in the SimpleRemotingServer
SimpleRemotingServer - This is a winforms application that has a few lines of code in it to host the SimpleObject as a Singleton.
SimpleRemotingObject - This is a simple library that contains an object (SimpleObject) that inherits from MarshalByRefObject and exposes a simple interface to keep track of a number of people.

Download: Simple Remoting Sample