I had the great opportunity to present at the local .net user group (TVUG) last night and really had a blast. Thanks to everyone that came out took part in the meeting. A couple of people asked me about getting a copy of the presentation; Communicating Between Tiers with .Net Remoting and/or a copy of the code demo. I’ll be in touch with Dave about getting this up on the TVUG site as soon as possible. In the meantime, feel free to shoot me off an email and I will be happy to send these to you directly.
I have previously noticed how awkward the dead black hole of time can be that occurs when a presentation falls short of its scheduled time allotment. Last night I learned how awkward the flip side of this problem can be; when you look at the clock and see a ½ hour remaining, and know that you still have about an hour of presentation left! So, my apologizes to the gang for the last ½ hour speed race sprint to the end, and for the 10 or so minutes of overtime. For those of you keeping score and interested in the final code demo, which we couldn’t finish successfully, it was really something quite stupid. We had a couple of libraries that we wanted to host in a separate process. Because of the ticking clock problem, I choose to host these libraries in an existing IIS Virtual directory, as opposed to creating a new host from scratch. This seemed like a good approach; it would demonstrate that there is really nothing special about the host, and hopefully help drive home the point of just how flexible remoting; especially remoting with the use of configuration files can be. Unfortunately, the host that I dropped these assemblies in had some problems of its own to begin with. It was basically a sandbox of a host that I used when putting the demo together, and it had therefore seen it’s share of code dropped in, pulled out, overwritten, dropped back in, etc. As such, the web.config in this host was referencing and loading some assemblies that no longer existed. The serialization exception wasn’t even really our exception, but just a general one that was occurring whenever that host was called. What a shame; if we weren’t running short on time, I would have never used the existing host, but would have taken the extra minute to create one solely for the purpose of hosting these remoted assemblies.
Overall, I think the presentation went over pretty good, and the rest of the live, on the fly, demo seemed to work well too. However, I do need to be a little more cognitive of the time. Somehow, I let an hour disappear between looking at the clock at 7:30 and asking if anybody needed a break, and then not looking at the clock again until about 8:30. Oh, well, time flies when your having fun, and I really had a blast! Thanks again to everyone that came out, the great feedback and interaction during the night, and for putting up with 10-15 minutes overtime.