What is the major use of MarshalByRefObject?

Question

What's the purpose for MarshalByRefObject?

Answer 1

Remoting; it means that between AppDomains or machines, rather than serialize and transfer the object, the object stays at one end and a proxy is created at the other. All method calls to the proxy are intercepted and the call is transmitted as RPC ^{wiki, msdn}, causing the method to execute on the other machine (typically serialising the arguments and return value).

Note: this can lead to unexpectedly "chatty" interfaces. The object/proxy/RPC approach is now less preferable to approaches with an explicit service boundary; Microsoft now recommends WCF ^{wiki, msdn} instead of remoting.

Answer 2

Another important use of MarshalByRefObject is for implementing AOP via remoting sink-chains.

If you have an object that derives from ContextBoundObject (which itself derives from MarshalByRefObject) you can instantiate it in a separate Context within the same AppDomain and have communications between objects automatically go through the Remoting proxy system - allowing you to plug custom sinks into the Remoting sink-chain.

This ultimately allows you to 'decorate' method calls to your objects and implement cross-cutting services, such as logging and security etc.

Answer 3

it basic use is for support access of objects between two appdomains and these appdomains can be on the same computer or in the different computers via remoting.

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Answer 4

Any object outside the application domain of the caller application should be considered as Remote Object. A Remote Object that should be derived from MarshalByRefObject Class. Any object can be changed into a Remote Object by deriving it from MarshalByRefObject. Objects without inheriting from MarshalByRefObject are called Non-remotable Objects.