Cook Computing

I've mentioned the lack of inbuilt security functionality in .NET Remoting and, although it looks this might be remedied in a future release (see my entry on this), Microsoft are currently suggesting you use something based on these MSDN samples:

Microsoft.Samples.Security.SSPI

Microsoft.Samples.Runtime.Remoting.Security

However we've found this blows up regularly when put it under load, throwing this exception on the client side:

Unhandled Exception: System.Net.Sockets.SocketException: Only one usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port) is normally permitted

You have been warned. I've not bothered investigating any further because we're now using a named pipe channel which gives *much* better performance and security.

Scoble mentions the Windows Smart Client version of Outlook in this post. This will be a very cool demo of the power of downloadable clients as long as it runs as a pure smart client, i.e. only running code from the download cache and only using isolated storage (and any other features of smart clients I can't think of this early in the morning).

Robert's post ends with a cryptic comment:

So, take that further. In 2005, what will Mozilla look like? And what will Outlook look like? What will your apps look like? That's why you'll want to be at the PDC this year.

Why Mozilla, are Microsoft doing something with Mozilla? A plug-in for WinForms smart clients, or more?

Avaya have just published a status report (PDF) on Unified Messenger, the product I work on, and its installation at Microsoft. It gives an idea of what is involved in a large-scale unified messaging implementation.

I've been responsible for the application server framework of the product for several years now. Major projects have been designing and implementing support for COM service objects (making extensive use of the Universal Delegator for pre and post-processing COM calls) and now .NET objects. The various components in the system communicate using three remoting technologies: a now deprecated proprietary remoting infrastructure which uses named pipes, DCOM, and most recently, .NET Remoting. Interestingly for the latter we have returned to Named Pipes, using a Named Pipe custom remoting channel to achieve adequate performance and built-in security.

I've been back at work for a couple of weeks after a vacation in the far North-West of Scotland, too busy at work to feel like posting anything here until today. We stayed in a small cottage overlooking the Summer Isles and had some great weather (it can be very wet in this area). I had recently read Charles Sprawson's excellent Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero and fired up with enthusiasm I went swimming every day in either the sea, from the rocks below the cottage or from the most beautiful Achnahaird beach, pictured above, or inland from a beach on the freshwater Loch Lurgainn.