Remoting.Net vs Web Services

Both .Net Web services and .Net Remoting are Microsoft solutions for distributed application. Before choosing one of them for application development, let’s identify the differences between these technologies.
Protocol
.Net web services can be accessed only over HTTP whereas .Net remoting can be accessed over any protocol including TCP, HTTP, or SMTP.
Performance
In terms of performance, .Net remoting is faster than its counterpart web service when it uses TCP channel with binary formatter. But if you use soap formatter in .net remoting, web services with soap formatter either with TCP or HTTP channel provides faster solution.
Security
.NET Remoting can be hosted either in IIS or in other container. If hosted in IIS, .NET Remoting can benefit all security advantages of IIS. But when hosted other than IIS, the application has to take care security aspect itself.
On the other hand, .Net web services are hosted in IIS, by default. So, it leverages all features of security provided by IIS.
State Management
Web services are a stateless in nature like web application. You need to use state mechanism to retain state. You can use session or application object to maintain state. In .Net Remoting, Singleton objects can share state whereas if you don’t need to maintain state, you can use Singlecall objects.
Interoperability
Web services support heterogeneous environments which means client and remote object can be built in any platform.
.NET remoting requires the client be built using .NET, enforcing homogenous environment.
Reliability
Since .Net web services are hosted using IIS, they are reliable whereas .Net remoting application needs to maintain security on its own if not hosted using IIS. When hosted in IIS, .Net remoting is also as reliable as web services.
Ease of development
Create and consuming .Net web services are easier process. To create remoting object, you need create remote object, hosting application to host remoting object and configuration file to specify type of channel and formatter to be used by remoting object.

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