I sat down with this book, read the first half and selected later chapters in about two hours, and all the issues that had cropped up in my first attempt to use remoting were resolved.

A later remoting problem triggered by installation of .NET framework version 1.1 was resolved by information on the author's website.

However, this book excellently describes the concept of .NET remoting and it's easy to follow. Although some examples and pictures are occasionally mistaken, but if you get the idea of the topic, you can easily fix it. (But It could be better if there was no mistake at all, anyway).

I suggest it's best to read when you know what're going to do with it.

It's a strange hybrid book. The beginning chapters are rudimentary, even sketchy, and the second half is overly detailed in a way that I found hard to learn from. There should be more real world examples. There are some things I've learned and some of the advanced examples are useful but it's not a book I'd heartily recommend. Finally, for me, this books organization distracts from it's use as a .net remoting reference.

This is a very good tutorial on the remoting subject and a must have. The advanced tag seems a bit misleading, the first six chapters are tutorials on the topic, nothing advanced. Anyone with a knowledge of .NET/C# could read and work with it.

Paul.

Along with great explanations of how .NET remoting works in general, the author provides invaluable boilerplate code for writing custom sinks (described as "white space" by another reviewer). These sinks allow the developer to intercept remoting messages at various stages of serialization so you can encrypt the message or add your own custom properties. These properties can be reconstituted with the message on the server side. Ingo gives an example of sending the client thread's priority to the server, and having the server thread run under the same priority.

Here's why:

1. Riddled with mistakes. Lots of the code does not work, and lots of the XML contains blatant syntactical errors. That certainly lowers my trust of a book, making me question the accuracy of the content.

2. No decent examples. Although it's nice to get the "internals" of how .NET works, I'd preferred that the author spent more time on developing reasonable examples.

3. Hard to follow. There's far too much jumping from one topic to another (and back to the fact that there are few examples). Many topics have only marginal coverage, like using Windows Services with .NET Remoting.

Overall, a disappointment. I have found the .NET documentation and online resources to be better than this book. I'd recommend you stay away from this book. I'm confused by the other reviews for this book, as the readers must be interested in something that I am not.

The book on the other hand offers in-depth information regarding the "behind the scenes" work of .NET remoting.

Final verdict: Good value for money, but do not expect any code to work.

The best book on .NET Remoting by far!

Thanks Ingo.

Around 400 pages with absolutely 0% beginner material and no useless content is what i expect when i buy an 'advanced' book. And its exactly what what this one is.

Good job Mr.Rammer. Will be checking out all your publications in the future.

Update:
I've been writing a rather contrived remoting based application and the chapters 7, 8 and 9 have been really worth it for me. However, these chapters give a little too brief coverage of MessageSinks and underlying plumbing. I do appreciate the strong focus on details, but so many things are left unexplained that it becomes really frustrating if you are trying to really understand what's going on.
One particular problem in my application was to forward the threads CurrentPrincipal to the thread on the remoting server via MessageSinks. I still am not sure exactly why I am using ClientChannelSink vs just doing it with IMessageSink... previous chapters lead you to believe that IMessageSink is designed for something like this. This is just one example and there are other instances where a similar thing might throw you off a bit. Nevertheless, if you are looking at a guide to just using Remoting (not playing around with its plumbing) you wont go wrong with this book.

There is much useful information throughout the book. I really appreciated the line by line (or should I say node by node) explanation in the Configuration chapter. There is so much good info that I still haven't assimilated everything in this book.

I also found Ingo responsive when I contacted him by e-mail; however, this book is bound to get so popular I wonder if that will continue to be the case.

This is a quality explanation of .Net remoting. It does not just present simple examples, but it illustrates concepts with robustness of architecture in mind.

Everything on Remoting is covered in the first part of the book (server/client activated objects, lifetime management issues, SoapSuds, config files, hosting in IIS and security, versioning, asynchronous calls etc) which is basically the first 6 chapters. The remainder 5 chapters go deeper than what most of us will venture (extending a chosen layer, custom sink and remoting proxy creation, developing your own transport channel etc).

If we want to knit-pick we could complain about the focus being entirely on distributed apps instead of describing good practices for inter-process communication on the same PC only. This was easily achieved with ActiveX Exes (out-of-proc servers) in COM and now with .NET requires Remoting.

Finally, the code used in the numerous examples can be downloaded from the book's website in both VB.NET & C#. If you are still looking for answers to particular Remoting probs after reading the book, you will find Ingo at the remoting newsgroup 'killing' all queries submitted.

This book isn't titled Advanced for nothing, it shouldn't be your first step into .Net but a must-to-take step if you want to become a strong .Net developer and enthusiast. Actually this is the first book I read that hasn't any kind of introduction to .Net framework, it's pure .Net Remoting from the first to the last page.

Solid understanding of the .Net framework will help you to get amazing results and extreme flexibility on your n-tier .Net applications.

Contains great tracts of whitespace, and long spaced-out source code listings with little value or content.

The first half of the book covers everything you need to know for developing distributed applications with the .NET Framework. The second part gives you a thorough technical insight that will allow you to really understand what's happening behind the scenes and how you can tap into customizing the framework to suit your exact needs. I found this to be very effective.

One of the things that really stands out are the numerous examples that he has following every section throughout the book. He has obviously spent a great deal of time on these examples and, unlike a lot of other books out there, has made sure that they compile and execute as expected.

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