Microsoft RPC & idl

This shit is crazy. Can anyone recommend a book or some articles to figure out how the fuck to use it properly?

Your MSDN library CD covers it all. If not refer to your platform SDK documentation. If microsoft documentation is too cryptic for you (which it is 9/10 times) well then.... I doubt any of their books would help you either, and hardly anyone wanna piss them off releasing an unofficial documentation >_>

Don't do stuff for Microsoft platforms

Read SICP

Lol, middleware. No, I'm afraid it's all just abstract bullshit and ENTERPRISE QUALITY.

>>5
abstract bullshite and ENTERPRISE QUALITY are polar opposites. Your post makes no sense.

>>6
Microsoft IDL manages to be ENTERPRISE QUALITY while being vague and supposedly all-powerful at the same time. Perhaps there should be an expression that properly embodies the latter, to be used instead of "abstract bullshit".

>>1
SICP

Learning the complications of the built in RPC is better than rolling your own on-the-wire protocol with all the authentication, encryption and code generation bullshit that you'd have to figure out yourself.

Oh yes, that is obviously true. However designing an application from the ground up with IDL first, or (worse) rolling IDL into every class in your application is a very, very labour-intensive way to lose horribly down the road. Yet that's what many books on DCOM and CORBA suggest!

Also, generic middleware RPC solutions tend to either have simplistic or horribly baroque security layers. Take CORBA security for instance -- most ORBs I've seen just reimplement tcp-wrappers in the object adapter and configure that from a file, or command-line parameters. ... of course SSL isn't that simple either.

>>7
_{^{Microsoft IDL manages to be ENTERPRISE QUALITY while being vague and supposedly all-powerful at the same time}
ENTERPRISE QUALITY while being vague and supposedly all-powerful}
being vague and supposedly all-
supposedly

That's the difference between ENTERPRISE GRADE and ABSTRACT BULLSHITE. The former only tries to be general and vague, but turns out an utter failure, the later naturally is.

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