.NET remoting via COM and Python

I bumped into a problem when trying to talk to C# DLLS that are created by my team while i am using Python. Creating a COM C# DLL is the key to bridge the communication since creating COM  interface via C# is the easiest thing to do compared to C++.

Now one of the C# DLLs is loaded as a singleton in Windows Service thus i need my C# COM to talk to the same class via remoting.

That is when i kept on encountering “return argument has invalid type”  whenever the remoting part was done. Putting "[Serializable]” into the class declarating did not help.

It ran perfectly when the class in the C# dll is used as a local class but it balked whenever the same class was returned via remoting and to me that is just ONE line of change.

// MyClass myClass = new ManagerClass()  <--- local class

// RemotingReturnMyClass(out myClass) <—remoting

I went on to combining the COM class code and the C# singleton DLL in the attempt to create a singleton COM so that the C# singleton class can be accessed via my python code to no avail.

After DAYS (yup days) of trying to solve it, i suddenly realize something that i missed. What if i put the C# DLL into c:\python25 since maybe the problem is all about the marshaller and proxy not being able to locate it…….

Bingo.

Plone, Drupal or What?

A quick migration of a static website to a CMS version was needed. However one of the requirement is that it must be as ‘non-programmer’ as possible since an assigned web designer will be doing the project.

After toying around with Plone, its way too technical and the curve is just too much to even be considered. It is also pretty slow, around 1.3 times slower in a Pentium Celeron with 1GB memory compared to Drupal on a dummy blank site.

So Drupal was next in the list and in fact chosen for the job , however as 2 weeks gone by, it was obvious that what we know about Drupal is in fact largely OVERRATED. There are certain theme layouts that doesn’t appear correctly on different browsers, very limited customization without going to php and way too much work for a non-technical person to get it looking nice, not to mentioned that most sites on Drupal looks similar.

Finally we stumbled upon SiteFinity by SmarterTools, the condition however was that it had to run on IIS but in this case we had no issues with that since the project doesn’t mind whether its IIS or Apache (who the hell going to modify apache code in the name of open source?)

SiteFinity not only blows Drupal to stoneage, more importantly we saved the Web designer guy from committing suicide. For once she was able to get something done.

** there is a community version available free for use