[Mono-list] Two questions about .net/mono internals

[L.G. Meredith]

Hello All,

i'm in the process of writing a gateway application. It speaks SOAP out of
one side of it's mouth and a proprietary network application protocol out
the other.

My application would be much more beautiful and easy to maintain if i had
the following two bits of interface to .net/mono capability.

1. i want to trampoline incoming webmethods to invocations to send an
appropriately formatted message to a tcp stream connected to my app. That
is, i would like to get the current (web) method and it's arguments. i would
prefer not to copy the incoming arguments to an invocation but to
generically call an api that will return a data structure providing all the
information associated with the method invocation, including method name and
actuals (a.k.a. arguments). i can then pass this data structure to my stream
formatter to format appropriately for the network stream.

2. i would like to have the format of the .net/mono binary formatter. It
does the work i need to do except that it puts some extra stuff into the
stream. Currently, i have a hack in which i drop markers into the stream and
pull out the bytes between the markers to get the appropriately formatted
bytes for the packet i need to send. Obviously, this is a brittle solution.
If i had the format the binary serializer uses, then i could extract them in
a better way. Even better, if i had an API that allowed me to extract
naturally distinct pieces, e.g. just member data, excluding class name or
member name data or even size information, then i could have a very robust
and generic application.

In fact, i would argue that with the two pieces of API you have a generic
framework for writing such gateway applications and considering the number
of proprietary protocols there are in the world, this probably has wide
applicability.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Best wishes,

--greg

-- 
L.G. Meredith
Partner
Biosimilarity LLC
505 N 72nd St
Seattle, WA 98103

+1 206.650.3740
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