Passing message over network

Question

Hi,

I'm currently trying to develop a message-oriented networking framework and I'm a bit stuck on the internal mechanism.

Here are the problematic interfaces :

public interface IMessage
{
}


public class Connection
{
    public void Subscribe<TMessage>(Action<TMessage> messageCallback);
    public void Send<TMessage>(TMessage message);   
}

The Send method does not seem complicated, though the mechanism behind Subscribe seems a bit more painful. Obviously when receiving a message on one end of the connection, I'll have to invoke the appropriate delegate. Do you have any advice on how to read messages and easily detect their types ?

By the way, I'd like to avoid to use MSMQ.

Answer 1

Sounds like a problem Windows Communication Foundation was created to solve: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa663324.aspx but you've tagged the question .NET 2.0 so that may not be an option for you.

Instead, if you're in control of both the client and server sides, take a look at .NET Remoting: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/kwdt6w2k(VS.71).aspx.