I'm trying to come up with a nice system for syncing RPC calls on a client-server system (in C#).

Currently a call looks something like this:

static public void swapItems(int itemIndex1, int itemIndex2)
{
sendRPC("swapItems", Network.player, itemIndex1, itemIndex2);
}

protected void swapItems(NetworkPlayer user, int itemIndex1, int itemIndex2)
{
User tempUser = mUserMap[user];
 
Item item1 = tempUser.getItem(itemIndex1);
Item item2 = tempUser.getItem(itemIndex2);
 
tempUser.swapItems(item1, item2);
}

This system works okay, since the call wrapper is strongly typed. But there are still a few problems. One is that the actual RPC call isn't strongly typed, so if I change the definition on the server side, the compiler doesn't flag the RPC call as invalid. The second, is that it basically doubles the code required to create all the call wrappers.

I'm wondering if there is an easier, cleaner way to create the call wrapper. One solution would be dynamically creating the code based on the server's call definition, but that seems like a bit of a hassle to work into the work-flow.

Anyone have a better idea, and/or a library that already does this?

Define the RPC in an IDL-like file, have it generate the code, and go.

That sounds reasonable. I'm wondering though - just for the sake of the workflow - if it might make more sense to generate the files based on the initial class definition (I.E. C++ or C# code). Do you know of any libraries that can parse code into memory like that? Once the code is loaded, the generation should be reasonably trivial, I would think.

So, I've done some reading, and while this theory is not yet completely formed, it seems to me that using std::bind and/or closures may be a better way to go about this.

The closure encapsulates the function call, and is then serialized to some sort of stream to be sent over the network. In C# you can pretty easily serialize the closure with Reflection (I would assume), not 100% sure how you'd go about it in C++, though. The data in the closure is strongly typed though, so I imagine it is possible.

I shall continue working on the problem with this approach.