Summary:
Since the introduction of DCOM support in Visual Basic 4.0, I've been on a continual quest to find the best ways to design and build distributed applications using Visual Basic. With Visual Basic .NET, my quest has moved to a whole new level. Gone are the days of struggling with DCOM and firewall security administrators who, for their own nefarious purposes, refuse to open hundreds of ports to the world at large. The .NET Framework provides us with two solutions that can be used to provide DCOM-like functionality without all those headaches. Both Web services and Remoting are large topics by themselves. In this column, we'll take a high level look at how to use both technologies from Visual Basic .NET to return an object's data. |
