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.NET Tiered Architecture

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by terry.bobo 1 view

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How do you utilize a tiered architecture with .NET components, UI, and webservice on different servers. Basically, how do you add a reference to a .dll on a different server than the web UI referencing the .dll?

7 replies

by tony hopkinson

If you are going service based you expose entry points onto the dll as operations in the web service. All it is basically is an abstraction of an RPC call.
If you want to to access a dll with a .net component, you are entering unmanaged execution and a lot of difficulties.

Look up .NET interoperability, safehandle and intptr.

by terry.bobo

I'm wanting to access a .NET dll that is on the Application Server from the Web Server. Hope that better explains it. Sorry for the confusion and thanks for the replies.

by tony hopkinson

You need some process to host the dll on the application server.

If you were to use ASP.NET and make it aware of the location of the dll you could access it through there but then the application dll would be loaded into the web server. One suspects that isn't what you wish to achieve.

On that basis you need an application to sit on the application server that loads the dll and provides an interface to it.

by dkehring

There are a number of ways to accomplish this and it partly depends on the transport mechanism you wish to use. For example, you could use .NET remoting, TCP/IP or SOAP. You would need to develop your dlls to properly expose methods and properties and it should be a rather coarse interface with only a limited number of public properties and methods. My suggestion is that you take a look at Rockford Lhotka's books on Business Objects (Apress). They're excellent and I have been using his architectural designs for years quite successfully. His frameworks directly address your need to build a tiered architecture. In fact, his architecture abstracts the transport mechanism and allows you to design your libraries is a consistent way and then determine the transport through a configuration file. Very nice.

by tony hopkinson

That's exactly what MS have done with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).

Well it's not strange really, an obvious way to go.

by onbliss

... I had found his Business Objects book on VB6 immensely useful.

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