Re: Best way to auto-start Remoting host that is a Windows Forms app?

I have not encountered any clean solution to that and I too prefer the COM autolaunching of out-of-proc servers.

You could have a client-side dll that does the launching of the host process etc. The requirement now is that the client "touches" the dll before going anywhere near to the exe (or to be precise, the dll hosted by the exe).

In fact, I have thin proxy objects in my client side dll that simply forward the calls to the corresponding remoted object and hence the client apps don't even know/reference the remoted dll - they do everything through the local dll and the out-of-proc business is transparent. There are other benefits to that like translating chatty calls to chunky, validating arguments in-proc etc.

Cheers
Daniel
--
http://www.danielmoth.com/Blog/


"None" <none@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:%23W599fAZFHA.2884@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I have a Windows Forms app. that acts as a Remoting host for my client apps.
I don't really want to turn the host app into a Windows Service if I don't
have to. What are my options for auto-launching the host app when a client
needs it? (the host app already acts as a Singleton so only one instance
will ever run)

I see a couple of options, none very nice:

1) Have the client start the host application. The problem I see with
this is that I have to build in logic in the client to detect that the host
is started and ready.

2)  The host application also acts as an OPC server.  The clients could
create an OPC connection to the server and Windows will launch the host.
The problem with this is some of my client apps don't really need the OPC
functionality so this is kind of a hack.

3) Create a Windows Service that is nothing but a listener for Remoting
activation requests from the clients. The service will then launch the host
app. Yuck.

Please suggest other options!  One nice thing about COM was that Windows
will launch out-of-process servers for you.  I wish Microsoft had done the
same thing for Remoting.



.

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