Mono: A Developer's Notebook

Chapter 7. Networking, Remoting, and Web Services

Computing in the 21st century is all about networking. While a disconnected computer can still be useful for word processing, spreadsheets, and single-player games, a connected computer opens up the world of email, the World Wide Web, and multiplayer games.

Mono gives you access to all the common networking technologies from the hackneyed TCP/IP sockets to higher-level protocols such as HTTP and SOAP, and de facto standards like XML-RPC, as well as database access.

In this chapter, you’ll see how Mono lets you use networking technologies to connect to remote computers, call remote procedures, and access databases.

Set Up ASP.NET

It used to be that running ASP.NET required a large investment in software. The Microsoft web application framework requires the Internet Information Services (IIS) that comes with Windows. The Windows End User License Agreement limits how many users may be served from a Windows workstation install, so that means you might need to install Microsoft Windows Server.

Along with the software license cost, there is the cost of administering IIS and Windows Server. If you’ve got a shop full of experienced Linux administrators, it may be difficult to add Windows administration to their repertoire.

Now you can run ASP.NET on Linux and on other Unix versions, and on Mac OS X. Thanks to Mono’s mod_mono, your familiar Apache web servers will dish up all the ASP.NET you care to eat.

Note

Mono brings the popular ASP.NET ...