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.NET Remoting and Windows Communications Foundation

.NET Remoting

Remotable .NET components allow you to access MATLAB® functionality remotely as part of a distributed system consisting of multiple applications, domains, browsers, or machines.

Before you enable .NET remoting for your deployable component, be aware that you cannot enable both .NET remoting and Windows® Communication Foundation.

Benefits of .NET Remoting

There are many reasons to create remotable components:

  • Cost savings — Changes to business logic do not require you to roll out new software to every client. Instead, you can confine new updates to a small set of business servers.

  • Increased security for web applications — .NET Remoting allows your database, for example, to reside behind one or more firewalls.

  • Software Compatibility — Remotable components employ standard formatting protocols like SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), which can significantly enhance the compatibility of the component with libraries and applications.

  • Ability to run applications as Windows services — To run as a Windows service, you must have access to a remotable component hosted by the service. Applications implemented as a Windows service provide many benefits to application developers who require an automated server running as a background process independent of a particular user account.

  • Flexibility to isolate native code binaries that were previously incompatible — Mix native and managed code without restrictions.

Windows Communications Foundation

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is an application programming interface in the .NET Framework for building service-oriented applications. Servers implement multiple services that can be consumed by multiple clients. Services are loosely coupled to each other.

Services typically have a WSDL interface (Web Services Description Language), which any WCF client can use to consume the service. A WCF client connects to a service via an endpoint. Each service exposes itself via one or more endpoints. An endpoint has an address, which is a URL specifying where the endpoint can be accessed, and binding properties that specify how the data will be transferred.

For More information About WCF

For up-to-date information regarding WCF, see What Is Windows Communication Foundation in the Microsoft® documentation.

What’s the Difference Between WCF and .NET Remoting?

WCF is an end-to-end web service. Many of the advantages afforded by .NET Remoting—a wide selection of protocol interoperability, for instance—can be achieved with a WCF interface, in addition to having access to a richer, more flexible set of native data types. .NET Remoting can only support native objects.

WCF offers more robust choices in most every aspect of web-based development, even implementation of a Java® client, for example.