A huge question and not one easily answered. I guess in a nutshell it all
depends on what your requirement actually is, and what skilled resources you
can call on, your security needs, your data access restrictions. I would
never chose a technology platform and deployment approach because it might
be faster-it could be a wholly innapropriate choice in the end.
For example - If its an application for 10 desktop users thats heavily into
working with the local registry wheree performance is absolutely paramount
then a smart clients unlikely to cut it, however if you have thousands of
distributed users on an extranet type scenario using different access
devices then smart client may be appropriate, but then maybe a well defined
web app would do just as well. That said, poorly specced hardware will
cause any web server setup to grind to nothing, so your performance dies
with it.
As an architect, you should consier all of these things and also consider
the cost of future proofing the application - whats the likely direction of
the app - if its heading for smart phones and the web then theres not a lot
of point in building a fat client that will only sit well on a pc as you'll
have to do it all later.
--
Regards
John Timney
Microsoft MVP
"Pieter Coucke" <pi**********@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:ub****************@TK2MSFTNGP03.phx.gbl...
Hi,
What's in general the most performant for a VB.NET Windows Forms (2.0)
application:
- a fat client (everything one the client, the server hosts only the
database)
- a smart client (an application on the client, that communicates with an
application on the server via Webservices/Remoting/..)
I would somehow think a smart client, but would just like to have the
opinion of others :-)
Thanks a lot in advance,
Pieter