The world's simplest — and most powerful — .NET RPC platform.

OSI Model Layer 7: Proxy DLL

Our Proxy DLL® app allows your .NET application to invoke a normal class library (DLL) on a remote computer as if the DLL is on your computer.

No extra coding is needed:

• With just a few mouse clicks, you can generate a proxy DLL from the original DLL you want to invoke remotely. The proxy DLL is a standard .NET assembly that mirrors the original DLL's public interface. However, each of its public methods uses our Layer 4 RPC protocol to instantly invoke the corresponding method in the original DLL and return the result. As a result, the proxy DLL both looks and behaves identically to the original.
• On the computer which has the original DLL, you install and start our Proxy DLL® app, which registers the original DLL as a layer-4 RPC service listening for remote invocations.
• On the computer which has the proxy DLL, you simply add a reference to the proxy DLL in your Visual Studio project as if it were the original DLL, build it and run it.
• When your code calls a method on the proxy DLL, the method creates a layer-4 RPC consumer to remotely invoke the namesake on the original DLL and get the result back instantly.

This way, the application doesn't even know that what it is invoking is not the original DLL, because the proxy DLL behaves the same as the original DLL.

Proxy DLL is built on top of a completely generic and independent layer-4 Remote Procedure Call (RPC) SDK — see below. Programmers may use the RPC SDK directly if all they want to do is RPC.

More details | Use cases

OSI Model Layer 4: RPC

You invented a smart algorithm for routing delivery drones. Or you created a database of every beetle species in the world and where each one lives. Now you want the world to use it, and you want to make money from it.

Without SkyBridge®, you often need to build a web app, integrate a payment gateway such as Stripe, and host it on a cloud platform such as Microsoft Azure. That can cost months of development and potentially hundreds of dollars in ongoing hosting fees.

With SkyBridge®, you can expose your service running on your ordinary laptop to the world in three minutes and three lines of code. If usage is light, you never need to pay a cent.

Our SkyBridge.RPC.Client SDK allows you to write just 3 lines of code in .NET to facilitate instant exchange of byte arrays of any size between computers behind different corporate firewalls.

The party who receives an arbitrary byte array and responds with one is a service, while the party who sends the byte array to the service and expects one in response is a consumer.

A service mimics a website, while a consumer mimics a web browser. The platform does not charge consumers; it only charges the services for the monthly subscription, the connection hours and the data sent and received (see Pricing). Just like a website, a service can be public, which means unrelated consumers can invoke it, like cnn.com. Or it can be private, which means only explicitly authorized consumers can invoke it. It can be free to use, or it can charge a fee per invocation.

Our Proxy DLL® app uses this RPC layer. Due to its generic nature and simplicity, any application that needs to make RPC calls across firewalls can use it.

• To create a service, you call a create-service method of our SDK passing as parameters the service ID and the name of a normal method/function.

  This function receives a byte[ ] as a parameter and returns a byte[ ]. When a consumer invokes this service, this function will be called. We call it the Service Providing Function. What byte[ ] it expects and what it returns define the nature of the service you provide. You can encode any complex data structure in them, and implement any complex logic in the function. The sky is the limit.

• Your service connects to our server and registers itself under the service ID. From now on, it listens for remote invocations from consumers.
• To invoke a remote service, you call a create-consumer method of our SDK, then call its InvokeService method and pass as parameters the target service ID and an arbitrary byte[ ] you want to send to the service.
• InvokeService sends the service ID and the byte[ ] to our server.
• The server routes the byte[ ] to the target service.
• The Service-Providing Function in the target service is called, which returns a byte[ ] to the server.
• The server routes this byte[ ] back to the InvokeService method, which returns it to you the caller. InvokeService is synchronous - it blocks and returns the byte[ ] provided by the target service within 100 ms.

The Proxy DLL above is built upon this very foundation.

More details.