Rocky finished up talking about remoting with a discussion of Enterprise Services.
The loudest message was unquestionably this:
You really only need Enterprise Services if you need any one of these:
Two-phase transactions (e.g. updating two databases, NOT updating two tables in one
database)
Queued components
Object pooiling (don't really need this unless you are using a database that doesn't
have connection pooling)
Synchronization (who cares)
Loosely coupled events (delegates give you enough most of the time)
Most of the time (according to Rocky) you don't need these, so don't worry about ES.
Stay with Remoting or Web Services. I haven't needed ES yet myself, so this resonates
with me.
Then Chris came back up and gave us an intro to no-touch deployment. This is the classic
"Smart Client" stuff that Chris has been telling us about for a while now. He started
with a discussion of hosting WinForms controls in IE5.01+. If you don't know
already, it looks like this:
He showed how to hook up events, call methods, and set properties on hosted controls.
On the side Chris mentioned an interesting point. While discussing how security
impacts zero-deployment scenarios he asked, "How does IE know if it is Local Intanet
or not?" I thought it would use the subnet masks for all of my connected networks,
but it doesn't. It turns out that it looks for a period in the address. Yep, believe
it or not that's how it decides. I tested it by adding an entry to google's IP address
to my hosts file. Crazy.
Back to the session, Chris talked about the steps required to give trust to a .NET
assembly (in order to make events work). In his made up scenario, his grandma needed
to give full control to an assembly he was hosting in a web page, because it exposed
an event to the browser's client script. As you know if you've ever done this, it
is NOT something a grandma could do. Not to mention you're average corporate sysadmin.
Then Chris had Rocky create a Windows Forms app in C# (this was funny for many reasons
if you've been following along). Everyone actually applauded when he got it to compile
and run. :)
As expected, if you've read Chris' articles, he turned on web sharing for the Debug
folder, and hit it with a URL. Then came the big question, "What happens when you
change the application behind the URL?" Rocky did it. It works. Pretty cool.
Then the next question, "What about security?" Rocky added a line to delete Chris'
boot.ini file. It failed. Again cool. (And expected. Nothing really new here.)
After that there was some Q&A. The most important one that I hadn't quite thought
about is that no-touch requires an internet connection to work. If you want to work
online/offline you should use something like th app updater block and right a regular
winforms app.
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