"Best" way to communicate between .NET 1.1 and .NET 3.5

Question

By best I mean:

• Cheapest development cost (1.1 project is unlikely to live > 6 months)
• Easiest migration to WCF or similar

By communicate between I mean:

• Remote communication between computers
• Most likely no firewall restrictions

With .Net 1.1 the options appear to be: sockets, remoting, and various flavours of web service.

The option of using binary serialized DataTables over sockets has been proposed as a solution but I am wary of this.

UPDATE: The "Server" in this case is Windows Embedded Standard with .Net 1.1. At this stage we are unable to add any new components to the image such as IIS, ASP, or MSMQ etc. Take that into consideration

Answer 1

Since eventually you will be migrating to WCF, you may want to consider building a WCF service immediately, using the BasicHttpBinding, which supports the old ASMX style web-services, i.e. WS-BasicProfile 1.1. You would be able to easily consume this service from your .NET 1.1 application.

You can also consider using the MsmqIntegrationBinding in WCF, where your .NET 1.1 application would post/receive messages from the MSMQ.

You may want to check out the following related articles:

• ASMX Client with a WCF Service
• Consume WCF BasicHttpBinding Services from ASMX Clients
• Difference between BasicHttpBinding and WsHttpBinding
• Calling WCF services from .NET 1.1
• MSMQ: Net vs Integration

Answer 2

WebServices (asmx based) should work between the two without a problem.

Answer 3

Sockets should be fairly trivial. What sort of data do you need to send? If it's just simple strings/other primitive types, you can just come up with a basic xml layout, and send that.

Answer 4

We use both remoting and web services in our code for communicating 1.1 <--> 3.5. We have found that web services are the easiest to port from 1.1 to 3.5.