.NET Remoting exception

float and double are floating binary point types. In other words, they represent a number like this:

10001.10010110011

The binary number and the location of the binary point are both encoded within the value.

decimal is a floating decimal point type. In other words, they represent a number like this:

12345.65789

Again, the number and the location of the decimal point are both encoded within the value – that's what makes decimal still a floating point type instead of a fixed point type.

The important thing to note is that humans are used to representing non-integers in a decimal form, and expect exact results in decimal representations; not all decimal numbers are exactly representable in binary floating point – 0.1, for example – so if you use a binary floating point value you'll actually get an approximation to 0.1. You'll still get approximations when using a floating decimal point as well – the result of dividing 1 by 3 can't be exactly represented, for example.

As for what to use when:

• For values which are "naturally exact decimals" it's good to use decimal. This is usually suitable for any concepts invented by humans: financial values are the most obvious example, but there are others too. Consider the score given to divers or ice skaters, for example.

• For values which are more artefacts of nature which can't really be measured exactly anyway, float/double are more appropriate. For example, scientific data would usually be represented in this form. Here, the original values won't be "decimally accurate" to start with, so it's not important for the expected results to maintain the "decimal accuracy". Floating binary point types are much faster to work with than decimals.

I did experience a similar issue in .Net remoting quite awhile ago, using IPC. I do not remember all the specifics, so forgive me. The problem that I discovered was that my client application was making a remote call to the server application which took a long time (minutes) to complete. After hooking both the client and the server up to the debugger, and catching all thrown exceptions, I discovered that the remote call actually ended up throwing a timeout exception of sorts (my memory wants to say the internal message was COM-related) since no activity was occurring over the IPC channel for the timeout period. Apparently when these remoting connections time out, the links on both sides are essentially dead-men-walking. Strangely, I was only ever able to see this exception through the debugger - in release mode, my application just hung like yours, without any indication as to why. I found the remoting Timeout settings, and simply turned off the Timeout (or made it ridiculously large, again I don't remember exactly), which fixed the problem.