I think I have finally settled into what I want to use for the transport for the remote RPC stuff. One of my main issues was not having a big external dependency for this piece. .NET Remoting and Web Services require IIS in order to do the easy-to-setup coding. I always thought that this was overkill for what I wanted to do, and I felt queasy about having to install virtual directories and all that jazz. I just don't want my users to have to deal with that.

My rule of thumb is "Don't make users jump through the hoops that I wouldn't jump myself." With that in mind, I checked out a couple of frameworks out there. The first one I looked at was RemObjects. I love how they do their developing, but I just can't afford the price of the kit. It is way above my budget. The second thing I checked out was GenuineChannels. They do a good job of removing a lot of difficulty found in using .NET remoting. They are cheaper than RemObjects, but I still felt that they were still overkill for what I wanted to do.

So today, I settled on just using a HTTPListener-based server to connect the MMC console to the server I'm going to be writting. I am deciding on what to use for passing across the wire, basically the message format. I'm investigating sending either XML-RPC or SOAP packets. I'm leaning towards using XML-RPC since the envelope is a lot simpler than SOAP. The only downside is that I would have to write a lot of conversion myself, converting objects to/from XML-RPC documents. I don't think I will have a lot of work to do, since I won't need a lot of differerent types of "envelopes."  I would have rather bought this, but I just can't justify a $500 purchase for a product that might now sell for no more then $79.

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