Remoting is a system for Microsoft .NET platform that enables interprocess communication in a homogenous environment. With the help of remoting, we can communicate between two processes running on different machines (or different application domains) in a network (but having the same OS). Because remoting uses binary serialization, it is much faster than using web services. However, we cannot use remoting in a heterogeneous environment (say, where an ASP.NET web application is talking to a J2EE application) using a .NET specific API, as other systems, such as J2EE, cannot understand it. Also, the use of remoting when we want to talk to processes outside of the LAN (say, when communicating using WAN or Internet) can be troublesome, as it cannot bypass a firewall until specific access is given to the service. Using web services is preferred in such cases.
source: ASP.NET 3.5 Application Architechture Design
