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Issue 10.3 ('Hashes')
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COLUMN

Talking Locally

Playing with AutoDiscovery

Issue: 10.3 (March/April 2012)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc taught himself programming in high school when he bought his first computer but had no money for software. He's had fun learning ever since.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 26,777
Starting Page Number: 55
Article Number: 10309
Resource File(s):

Download Icon project 10309.zip Updated: 2012-03-01 00:42:42

Related Link(s): None

Excerpt of article text...

For this issue's column I thought I'd experiment with a Real Studio feature that I think is really cool but hadn't gotten a chance to use yet. The feature is the AutoDiscovery class.

AutoDiscovery makes it really easy to find other applications running on the same network. In theory, you could use this to talk to random apps, but in reality that's not very practical since the apps all need to use the same protocol and talk the same language. A far more likely usage is to set up a communication system within your own application or set of applications.

For example, you could write a chess-playing program that plays against another copy of the same program running on a different computer on the same network, or you could make a networked game that coordinates with the other running copies so several players could play together.

One interesting use would be having your program share information with other running copies so all copies have the same data no matter which copy the user is using at that moment.

A very common use of AutoDiscovery is to prevent unauthorized copies of your software from running on multiple computers at the same time. For instance, you could limit the number of simultaneous users on the same network to one or two unless the user purchases a more expensive site license.

I suspect (but don't know) that Real Studio's own "remote stub" feature that lets you compile on one machine and debug on another uses AutoDiscovery or at least a similar system to pass debugging info back and forth between machines.

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