What issues should I expect when porting an application from Genuine Channels to WCF

Question

Genuine Channels is a set of 3rd party chancels for .Net Remoting.

I have been given the tasks of replace the usages of .Net Remoting in a rick client and server with WCF. I am familiar with standard .net remoting but not Genuine Channels.

So what problems should I expect and any pointers to the solutions?

Answer 1

Sending event to client is not a natural behavior of WCF. You should use a duplex contract there is some knowledge here: Sending events from WCF server

Other then that WCF is pretty cool: you define the data contract, and the operation contract using attributes, and you have a service running. Some more care should be taken when trying to serialize circular objects (but it is solved) and the rest - you will have to find while you're porting / learning WCF.

There is an easy way - to use a shared dll, and the hard way (but the more "soa" friendly) - to generate a server proxy to the client.

Juval Lowy - This is a good book to start, and the rest is googlable....

Answer 2

There are a few features of GenuineChannels that were the reasons we originally used it over standard .Net remoting:

1. it works through authenticating proxies, whereas .Net remoting would not
2. it can broadcast events on the server and have the clients receive them
3. it has built-in functionality to deal with disconnections (reporting them to the application via events) and auto-reconnections
4. it integrates closely with SSPI authentication, but also has the ability to switch this for an alternative mechanism (it is referred to by GC as ZPA)
5. it can gzip compress the traffic between the server and clients
6. it can encrypt the traffic between the server and clients (using underlying Win32 calls)
7. it has integrity checking, which prevents modification by an intermediate host

It also has lots of other security-related features which your application may be using.

I haven't used WCF so I don't know whether these are supported, but it should give you a starting list of things to check.