Terrible problem with remoting

xal posted on Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Ok, it's not the end of the world, but it really is terrible when you test this...
I use ActiveObjects on an every day basis, but it wasn't until recently that I started using remoting.
Active Objects implements an observer which works very well, but I'm having a problem when it is combined with remoting. I'm not sure the problem is in AO (in fact I'm pretty sure it's not), because of a simple fact: It doesn't throw an exception, or fail or anything.

Here's the steps to reproduce:

• Set up an ActiveReadOnlyList (it doesn't need to load anything from the db, you can create dummy objects child objects).
• Load it with remoting, and make sure that Notify("IsDirty", True) is called. You can either do this by hand or by not setting RaiseListChangedEvents to false when loading the list.
• Wait for the object to return.
• Ignore the previous step, it never happens.

It's strange because I see that the objects are being serialized, so the list is loaded, I even see that it gets to return the object, but it never actually get's back to the client, and no, it doesn't throw an exception.

The worst part of all this story is that that line of code (notify...) doesn't actually do anything, because at that point no object is registered to the list.

I'm wondering if this could be one of those edge cases where you need to specify an attribute somewhere, like when someone found the inlining problem in PropertyHasChanged...

Seriously, this is the biggest wtf i've found so far in .net.

Andrés

eslater replied on Friday, May 02, 2008

xal,

I am running into this issue now and am wondering if you solved the problem.  Any suggestions would be great.

Thanks,
Elliot

xal replied on Saturday, May 03, 2008

Hi Elliot,
Yes, I did fix this and a few other perf issues (this changes things dramatically performace wise, but the code you write would be the same). It's been about two years since I heard anything from Petar. I don't know what happened. I hope he's ok.
Anyway, I published the latest AO (meaning, Petar's + a few changes I made) in CslaGenerator's forum, under the files section. You can get the binaries or the source here:
http://groups.google.com/group/CslaGenerator/files

Good luck!

Andrés

eslater replied on Monday, May 05, 2008

xal,

Thanks for the link but when I attempt to use CSLA 3.5 I get 35 errors in the project.  Is there something I am doing wrong or does it run against CSLA 2.x only?

Thanks,
Elliot

eslater replied on Monday, May 05, 2008

Cancel that last msg.  I hadnt changed the target framework.