SoapSuds and Remoting - Issues using CAO under .NET Framework 1.1

Gaurav Khanna — Sat, 15 May 2004 00:26:00 GMT

Over the past weekend, I was working on implementing a Remoting Server that would serve CAO (Client Activated Object) to my Remoting client.

Went ahead, implemented the Remotable class and did a RegisterActivatedServiceType. Then, for the Remoting client to have the metadata, I used the SoapSuds extract the metadata and provide reference to the client. So far so good.

But then I executed my client, I got a deserialization error. Here's the Microsoft KB article that discusses this error:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;823445

Ofcourse, you will need to get the service pack to get around this problem. But what do you do if that's not available? So, here's a workaround to this issue is this:

1) Write your Remotable class which is MarshalByRefObject

class MyRemotableClass : MarshalByRefObject, IRemotableClass
{
   // implementation comes here
}

IRemotableClass is the interface that your class implements and will be shared with the client to provide it with metadata.

2) Write a factory class that will be create a new instance of your Remotable class:

class MyRemotableClassFactory : MarshalByRefObject, IRemotableClassFactory
{
     // This is the factory method that will return a new instance of the RemotableClass;
    // Thus, we have a CAO behaviour.
   public IRemotableClass GetNewInstanceOfRemotableClass()
   [
      return new MyRemotableClass();
   }
}

IRemotableClassFactory interface serves the same purpose as IRemotableClass interface above.

3) Now, write your Remoting client that connects to the server (which got activated using RegisterWellKnownServiceType) using RegisterWellKnownClientType.

And you have a CAO implementation for yourself :) BTW, this issue is observed when the Remoting Server is running on .NET Framework 1.1 and not 1.0!