Passing custom complex objects between server and client in C#

I have a desktop C# app that I want to split into two parts - server part and client part. My app is already split into two very independent parts that communicate by exchanging some (complex!) objects.

If I want to put one part of my app on some web server, what kind of technology should I use for passing those custom complex objects between the server part and client part? I was thinking about WCF, but...I'm not sure that WCF can easily handle (send/receive) custom objects (composed by many other custom objects). I don't need WCF because I'm not planning to offer my service to any third-party, I'm not planning to port my client app to other OS...

That's why I'm confused and need 开发者_Python百科your help: what kind of remoting technology should I use in my case?

WCF stands for Windows Communication Foundation. In other words its about general cross process/machine communication and not limited to hetrogenous systems

One thing to remember about WCF is, despite appearances, you are not actually passing objects at all - the objects are used by a serializer to generate messages.At the other end it will deserialize into an independent copy. You don't, unlike COM, get a reference back to an object on the sender.

The reason this is important is because if the complex objects have non-serializable state such as a socket connection then this won't make it to the receiver side

Also, with the DataContractSerializer (which is the default) unless your objects are annotated with the [Serializable] attribute or you annotate the classes with [DataContract] and [DataMember] you will only be sending state that is exposed publicly (via a public field or a property).

This isn't purely a problem for WCF; Remoting requires objects derive from MarshalByRefObject or are annotated with the [Serializable] attribute. Building distributed systems is quite different from building systems that all share the same memory address space. You have to think carefully how you define that boundary between the distributed pieces because, for example, lots of small calls will kill your performance rather than few data rich calls (although from your description this might not be an issue that affects you)

So WCF can handle arbitrarily complex object graphs but just remember the above points about serialization

Well, DataContracts in WCF support complex objects, so I don't see a problem with that (how complex are your objects); however you should probably use the technology that is sufficient in your case. You can use Remoting, hell, even Sockets; but it is in almost all cases overkill and going too low in .NET stack for nothing; you will just be wasting your time in implementation.

If you have no reason against WCF, I would go that way, because it is very simple and powerful. There are also standard ASP.NET ASMX web services if you'd like.

One thing to note, whichever the technology, you should have your code structured in a distribution layer, exposing coarse-grained methods.