Introduction

Unless you have been living in a cave, or are way behind in your reading, you have probably read something about Web services. When you read the description of .NET Remoting it may remind you a lot of what you’re read about Web services. That is because Web services fall under the umbrella of .NET Remoting, but have a simplified programming model and are intended for a wide target audience.
Web services involve allowing applications to exchange messages in a way that is platform, object model, and programming language independent. Web services are stateless and know nothing about the client that is making the request. The clients communicate by transferring messages back and forth in a specific format known as the Simple Object Access Protocol, or SOAP.

The following list outlines some of the major differences between .NET Remoting and Web services that will help you to decide when to use one or the other:

1. ASP.NET based Web services can only be accessed over HTTP. .NET Remoting can be used across any protocol.
2. Web services work in a stateless environment where each request results in a new object created to service the request. .NET Remoting supports state management options and can correlate multiple calls from the same client and support callbacks.
3. Web services serialize objects through XML contained in the SOAP messages and can thus only handle items that can be fully expressed in XML. .NET Remoting relies on the existence of the common language runtime assemblies that contain information about data types. This limits the information that must be passed about an object and allows objects to be passed by value or by reference.
4. Web services support interoperability across platforms and are good for heterogeneous environments. .NET Remoting requires the clients be built using .NET, or another framework that supports .NET Remoting, which means a homogeneous environment.

Summary

.NET Remoting and Webservices are left upto you based on the environment you are in. If both, Client and Server are under you control, then .NET Remoting is better way. If any one of them is not under your control, you have to choose Web Services.