Writing applet-like apps...

[Terry Mulvany]

I am constantly struggling with the problem of what 'type' of application to
develop. WinForm or WebForm?
The customer says I need a central database for all sites but the sites are
geographically disperse limited to DSL Internet access (VPN solution not an
option due to huge support burden).
The users at each site want a rich, high performance interface but the folks
back at headquarters want a birds-eye view of all data.
It would be nice to provide a solution that provides the richness and
performance of Java Applets all hitting a central DB. I've tried no-touch
deployment/href exe and do not like the fact that I'm restricted to the
IEExec 'sandbox'.
What is the equivalent to Java Applet in .NET?
I spent 10 minutes slapping together a quick href exe that just brings up a
form and I launched it over the Internet and was pleased with it, but when I
tried adding simple DB access (to SQL Server), either directly through
ADO.NET SqlClient or through a Web Service... nightmare! All kinds of
security errors. In my opinion the only protection .NET should provide is
on the client machine (file I/O, registry, etc.), not on the server as in
the case of DB access. I even gots error when I added that web site (where
the exe lives) as a Trusted Site in IE. Are these errors correctable on the
server or the client? If it's the client, then we would have to support
hundreds of people which would be crazy!
Any advise or recommended reading on this supject is greatly appreciated.

-Terry Mulvany

 

[Tim Jarvis]

Terry Mulvany wrote:

no-touch deployment/href exe and do not like the fact that I'm
restricted to the IEExec 'sandbox'.

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnbda/
html/updater.asp>
This application block might have some of the answers for you, and
coming in Longhorn will be a "built in" way to do this.

Regards Tim.

 

[Terry Mulvany]

thanks but the updater block is just a way to 'pull' in new updates for a
winform app. i am raising the question of what type of solution to
provide... webform or winform because they need a central db for many
goegraphically disperse sites (need to report on all sites) yet the sites
need a rich/high performance UI.

 

[Muckeypuck]

I just wrote an ftp component. I used the embedded win control hosted in
i.e. template and was quite pleased. It took me more time to realize i had
to upgrade to 1.1 from 1.0 then it took me to get 90% of the functionality i
needed going (i/o etc).

As for the updates and hence the other guys suggestion i think, there are
ways to push updates and even the neccessary permissions down to the user
and i have even read posts from wile e. coyote super geniuses who say they
did it with no user interaction, Our admin does updates that occur while the
splash screen is up so it really is possible if you have enough power.

If i remember tomorrow when im at the office, ill gather up all the links i
used and get em posted for you.

 

[Itai Raz]

My $0.02:

IE has progressed immensely since the days of version 2.0 (hence v6.0...).
In my opinion there's a fairly small amount of things that you cannot do in
dynamic HTML nowadays. You can see some wonderful GUIs out there (check out
hotmail or Yahoo). If you can make all of your users use IE6 (and it sounds
like you can, because you're considering having them use a proprietary
client), then I would say go with web GUI and make the best of what IE6 can
do. I would be curious to know what are those things that you want to do in
a regular windows form app that you cannot do on a web GUI.

--itai

P.S. I did not relate to the fact that writing a web GUI still requires a
lot more expertise than writing a windows forms GUI. Granted.