midget1500

hi folks

something that is totally new to me. I have at the moment a standalone windows application of which there may be several instances running on several machines. now, each copy needs to access a 3rd party application on the server. the problem is that the 3rd party application only permits 8 connections and I want my app to use 1 connection therefore i think i can put a small server application on the same server as the 3rd party app and have it manage my connections. i can see the theory but not sure how to go about implementing a solution.

ideally i would like it to return objects and datatables just like the client apps do at the minute.

can anyone point me in the right direction?

cheers
steven

OllyK

Yes you can do it, and indeed I have. The downside is that it is likely to bottle neck as you will be taking in X connections at your server app and trying to force all the traffic through a single pipe to the final destination.

What is worth looking at is logon, logoff times. I have communicated with some apps that have lightening fast logon / logoff, so you just logon get the data and logoff again making way for something else to connect.

If you do decide to go the route you describe, you ideally want to communicate with the destination app via high speed API's rather than Web Services or such like if at all possible. What you do in your server app is up to you, if you are given datasets, you can convert those to your own business objects if you wish before passing them on.

Not sure if that has helped? If you have any specific questions, let me know and I'll see if I can help

midget1500

cheers olly

the problem i is i can't see how the mechanics of it work, i.e. instead of having a function in another class to call i now will have this function residing in another EXE, so how do i interact with it? how do i find a running instance of this app and send/receive data as i normally would with another function?

cheers
steven

midget1500

had a look about, seems there is something called .net remoting. i guess if i have a DLL it can just open and close connections for each call and that way i don't need an instance of an app running on the server?

still searching...