Peter Drayton, Simon Fell and I are proud to announce a set of open source .NET Remoting projects. We have planned this for some time now and after Simon created the CVS repository last week, I finally got the time to create a web site about them.

http://www.dotnetremoting.cc/projects

We have currently implemented a JabberChannel which allows .NET Remoting messages to be transferred via the Jabber protocol and an SMTP/POP3-channel which uses standard internet email to transport the requests and responses. Both channels come with full source code, sample clients and servers and are covered by a very liberal open source license.

One of the reason for kicking this off right now is that we want to provide a collaborative environment for remoting-related developments. At the current time we are about to implement the following (parts of them will be available in the CVS in a week or two)

* An XML-RPC Formatter for .NET Remoting
* A bidirectional TCPChannel which avoids the problems with callbacks, events and sponsors which are used from clients behind NATs or firewalls.
* A caching channelsink (based on this idea)
* A framework for the development of feature complete custom channels
* An MSN Messenger channel

Further ideas which we think about are
* A document/literal encoding SOAP formatter
* A DIME/TCPChannel
* and finally, an implementation of the GXA-specs (WS-Routing, WS-Security)

This post is also a call for action!

If you already implemented channels or sinks or have some great ideas about doing so, please don't hesitate to contact me privately or - even better - post them to the project discussion forum. Also please check the licensing information before submitting any source code to this project as we definitely don't want to infringe of any existing copyrights.

Thanks for your support. I'd really like to hear your opinions on this. Please blog, email or post at them the forum!

Happy coding!