What is the major use of MarshalByRefObject?

Question

What\'s the purpose for MarshalByRefObject?

Answer 1

Remoting; it means that between AppDomains or machines, rather than serialize and transfer the object, the object stays at one end and a proxy is created at the other. All method calls to the proxy are intercepted and the call is transmitted as RPC ^{wiki, msdn}, causing the method to execute on the other machine (typically serialising the arguments and return value).

Note: this can lead to unexpectedly "chatty" interfaces. The object/proxy/RPC approach is now less preferable to approaches with an explicit service boundary; Microsoft now recommends WCF ^{wiki, msdn} instead of remoting.