[2005] .Net Remoting Design Help

[Strider]

Im developing a system where scheduled applications will send notifications to our server application. If these notifications are received on the server it means the client app is running fine.

all the client apps will incorporate a library to make a remoting call to the remoting server.

there will be another client app [Manager] to connect to the remoting server where it will return the details on wether the other client applications have made communication with the server.

My design question is to do with the server:
-what is the best way to store this data. should i use a static object in memory(some form of collection object) or maybe use an xml file?
-since several clients will be calling the remote server to update the data store
will there be locking issues?

[dolot]

My thought would be to use an xml file or some sort of disk storage so that in case the server goes down you don't loose information.

Locking issues would probably be transatory. I would put the code that opens the xml file in a procedure and have a loop in that procedure that checks to see if the file can be opened. If so, then open it. If not, then wait a few milliseconds and try again. Something along those lines.

[Strider]

hey mate cheers for your reply..

wudnt i need to implement some sort of multi threading for that.
for example after a client connects it will go ahead and create a thread which will open the xml file and write the details to it.
then for other clients it would need to wiat until this thread is finished.
then also the Manager application would also use this thread to access this file.


does this like a sound approach.

also i havent done too much with XML before is it difficult to update specific nodes and attributes on XML files.
is it best to read the XML into a dataset, manipulate it and then write it out again. or is their specific methods for updating
elements & nodes