.NET Remoting

.NET Remoting is a Microsoft application programming interface (API) for interprocess communication released in 2002 with the 1.0 version of .NET Framework. It is one in a series of Microsoft technologies that began in 1990 with the first version of Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) for 16-bit Windows. Intermediate steps in the development of these technologies were Component Object Model (COM) released in 1993 and updated in 1995 as COM-95, Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM), released in 1997 (and renamed Active X), and COM+ with its Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS), released in 2000. It is now superseded by Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), which is part of the .NET Framework 3.0.

Like its family members and similar technologies such as Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) and Java's remote method invocation (RMI), .NET Remoting is complex, yet its essence is straightforward. With the assistance of operating system and network agents, a client process sends a message to a server process and receives a reply.

.NET Remoting allows an application to make an object (termed remotable object) available across remoting boundaries, which includes different appdomains, processes or even different computers connected by a network. The .NET Remoting runtime hosts the listener for requests to the object in the appdomain of the server application. On the client end, any requests to the remotable object are proxied by the .NET Remoting runtime over Channel objects, that encapsulate the actual transport mode, including streams, HTTP streams and named pipes. As a result, by instantiating proper Channel objects, a .NET Remoting application can be made to support different communication protocols without recompiling the application. The runtime itself manages the act of serialization and marshalling of objects across the client and server appdomains.

...
Wikipedia