Engineering Enterprise Level Applications using Microsoft .NET Framework

If you have been into engineering medium sized business applications using Microsoft .NET Framework (or even any other framework/language), you must be familiar with ‘n-tier application’ and ‘service oriented architecture’ but the terms ‘dynamic clustering’, ‘horizontal scaling’, ‘fail over clusters’ and ‘interoperability’ might sound a bit fishy. These are the technologies and techniques involved in the engineering of fairly sophisticated, enterprise level, high performance, fault tolerant and horizontally scalable applications.

Tech geeks at Microsoft .NET Framework Developer Center have come up with a great end-to-end sample application in the name of ‘.NET StockTrader’ in order to demonstrate how to engineer enterprise level applications using Microsoft .NET Framework. Some of the distinguishing features of this sample application include

• Load Balancing and Failover clustering
  
• Centralized configuration management of clustered service nodes 
  
• Horizontally scalable via dynamic clustering 
  
• Interoperability with Java and PHP services 
  
• Service host failure detection and automatic restarts 
  
• Full interoperability with J2EE and IBM WebSphere's Trade 6.1 
  

The ‘.NET StockTrader’ sample application has two parts; the core ‘.NET StockTrader’ application and the ‘Configuration Service’ implemented by the ‘.NET StockTrader’ components (web app; business services, and order processing service). The ‘Configuration Service’ is engineered to provide dynamic clustering of service nodes, fail over and load balancing, replication of updates in configuration to allow adding new service nodes on the fly as well as providing the centralized management of configuration data through a single web based interface for the core ‘.NET Stock Trader’ application.

You can download the complete sample application with source code and technical documentation from the official website of ‘.NET Stock Trader’ Sample Application. Although it’s a fairly complex application and does need quite some time to completely absorb and understand it but it’s a great learning experience. I would highly recommend you to start experimenting with it and read and learn more and more about it in order to broaden your tech vision and have insight into engineering sophisticated applications using .NET Framework.

Web service VS Remoting

A Web service is equivalent to a static function library. If a client creates an instance of Web service and a member variable of the object with one method call, then attempts to read the value from another method call, the value will be the default value for the variable, not the new value. That's because a Web service doesn't maintain session state without considerable hacking outside the "SOAP" standard.

Remoting feature of .Net however, works with remote objects. If you need the ability to use the remote objects rather than just remote methods, Remoting is the way to go!

Can you identify a pro for Web service when measured against .Net remoting?