Introduction

The Eneter Messaging Framework is a lightweight framework intended for communication between processes. The second version of the framework supports all features and API from the previous version, and in addition, it comes with new features:

Reliability:

• Monitoring of the connection
• Buffering of sent messages in case of a disconnection and automatic reconnect
• Acknowledged communication

Security:

• SSL supported for TCP communication
• Fast symmetric encoding of messages with AES and Rijndael

General:

• HTTP policy server for the HTTP communication between Silverlight and the standalone .NET application

The following picture summarizes possibilities of the framework:

In summary, the framework covers the following main use-cases:

Interprocess Communication

The framework enables you to implement communication between your applications using messages.

You can use string messages or strongly typed messages. The communication can be one-way or request-response. You can also implement Publish-Subscribe scenarios where applications can be subscribed to receive desired notification messages from other applications.

The reason why you could consider communication via messages is, the communicating applications are loosely coupled. It means, they do not have many assumptions about each other. They just need to know the message format and the address (channel) where to send / receive the message. This reduces maintenance effort and increases flexibility. E.g., in case of messaging communication, if you add a new message to the service, the existing client applications are not affected. In case of Remote Procedure Call (RPC), if you add a new method to the service interface, you probably need to update clients using this interface.

Across Platform Communication

The framework is implemented for the following platforms: .NET, Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, and Mono. Therefore, when using the framework, you can use the same approach to connect applications running on different platforms:

• Silverlight application and .NET application
• Silverlight application and Mono application
• Windows Phone 7 application and .NET application
• Windows Phone 7 application and Mono application
• .NET application and Mono application

Reliable Communication

The communication across the network is much less reliable as the communication on a machine. It is quite common that a network connection is interrupted or the application is not available. To support these scenarios, the framework provides:

• Buffered messaging with automatic reconnect - in case of disconnection, the sent messages are stored in a buffer and the framework tries to reconnect. If reconnected, the messages stored in the buffer are sent to the receiver.
• Acknowledged messages - the delivery of sent messages is confirmed.

Secured Communication

To secure the communication, the framework allows to use HTTPS or SSL, or you can just encrypt messages with a fast symmetric encryption like AES or Rijndael.

If you are interested in more technical details, you can visit: http://www.eneter.net/OnlineHelp/EneterMessagingFramework/Index.html.

Release notes are available here: http://www.eneter.net/ReleaseNotes.htm.

The full version of the framework is free for non-commercial usage, and can be downloaded from: http://www.eneter.net.

I hope you will enjoy the second version.