[xmlblaster-devel] C# Clients

[Tim Heilig <blaster at heilig.com>]

As I C# programmer who has used xmlBlaster for some time, I have a 
couple questions, plus a few thoughts about the current state of C# clients.

Right now it looks like there are 3 options, activex bridge, xmlrpc, and 
using dhtml with a hook in a webbrowser control.

Rather than reply to the various threads of each method, I wanted to 
compress the information into one thread.

general question:
Are there xsd's for the UpdateQos and UpdateKey?  This would enable the 
microsoft tools to deserialize into objects.  I'd prefer to deserialize 
into C# rather than hold onto com objects that have to be marshalled to 
the activex thread to make interface calls.

xmlrpc:
I'm assuming that this requires server initiated connections.  If this 
is the case, xmlrpc can't be used for C# clients that reside behind nat 
networks, correct?  If there is an xmlrpc C# client that doesn't require 
the client to be running its own xmlrpc server, I'd love to hear about it.

dhtml:
This should be an easy thing to implement, but dhtml has a few inherent 
problems.  There are a few traffic choke points because browsers deal 
with message overloading very poorly.  This results in poor performance 
(relative to the other clients) in high traffic situations.  Also if you 
are not able to load every pending message in the http transfer window, 
the client goes into a loop where it times out, reconnects, tries to 
load everything, times out, reconnects, etc.

activex:
As far as I can tell, the HelloWorld3.cs demo doesn't currently work.  I 
made some changes to get it to work.  Ideally I'd like serialized xml 
getting passed to the C# client, but when I tried to create an event 
that passed (string, byte[], string) or (string, string, string) with 
the content base64 encoded, I failed miserably.  If someone who knows 
the activex bridge better would be willing to help in this endeavor I'd 
appreciate it.  As it is now I have to do an InvokeMethod on the 
EventObject that gets passed to me to get serialized strings.  Also, I 
added getKeyStr and getQosStr to the XmlScriptAccess interface.  
Obviously its possible to get the xml by invoking getKey() (or getQos()) 
followed by toXml() but I'd prefer to only marshal once rather than twice.


Please correct any mistakes I made, or respond if you have any questions.
Tim