Developing for EXE and ASP

[Sean]

Could someone give me a few bullet point notes on how I go about developing
a system that can be deployed both as an ASP intranet as well as a stand
alone EXE.

In essence we are aiming to provide both ASP/EXE to our clients, but to try
an minimise the amount of development work involved with maintaining the
applications. This would take over from a standard ASP Intranet and
stand-alone Access applications (of course, the latter being a key decision
to make this move).

The development would be completed with VB.Net and/or Visual Studio .NET

Regards,

Sean

[Spam Catcher]

Spam Catcher <sp**********@r ogers.comwrote in
news:Xn******** *************** ***********@127 .0.0.1:

>Seems like a n-tier is the way to go, but from what I have read here
(and the other replies), I don't see a benefit here from using .NET
and DLL's over writing a solution with VB, ASP and DLL's.

n-tier is definately the way to go, but typically you'll need an
application server as the middle tier... and without a web server, you
don't have n-tiers.

I should take the last comment back. I was thinking of SOA not n-tiers :-)

[Spam Catcher]

"Sean" <sean.anderso n@[nospam]oakleafgroup.bi zwrote in
news:11******** *******@kestrel .skynet.co.uk:

>
So, with the HTML application there's one UI ... one set of code, etc., ?

Yes and no...

UI - 2 sets of code (ASP.NET/WinForms/PDA/etc)

Business Logic - one set (deployed on app server or as DLL)

Data Layer - one set (deployed as DLL, on app server, or on data base
server).

This sounds like what we could be looking for. Will investigate further.

If you have any pointers for getting me started, would appreciate it.

Could you advise of what development environment you would use.

We use VS.NET 2005. LLBLGen Pro is a great Data Layer Generator - saves
hand coding the data layer (DLs are very redundant to code).

[Spam Catcher]

"Sean" <sean.anderso n@[nospam]oakleafgroup.bi zwrote in
news:11******** *******@kestrel .skynet.co.uk:

I am not sure what you mean by "the inbuild Click Once deployment
method" ?

Click one is a deployment method in .NET 2.0 (supports auto-download, auto-
update, etc). However, I believe Click-Once needs a web server which you
don't have.

BTW, is there a reason your clients don't have access to a web server? I
noticed your clients need to send read-only data files which are sent
through your Intranet?

[Sean]

"Spam Catcher" <sp**********@r ogers.comwrote in message
news:Xn******** *************** ***********@127 .0.0.1...

"Sean" <sean.anderso n@[nospam]oakleafgroup.bi zwrote in
news:11******** *******@kestrel .skynet.co.uk:

>#1 isn't possible as not all clients have a webserver that we can
utilise.

So where are you storing the data? Directly to SQL server?
Couldn't you just as easily deploy a web server?

For those that don't have a SQL server, they work with an Access DB stored
on a shared folder.
Deploying a web server would be wonderful ... but, they wouldn't allow us to
do it.

.NET is entirely OO which makes for easy maintainance. ASP.NET has a
nice event model which makes programming complex web apps MUCH easier
than ASP. Also VB/ASP is considered obsolete, so your app is already
obsoleted.

The standalone application is an Access application ... so, yes we know
about obsolete.

But if your team has significant learning to jump to .NET ... then yes,
it can be a pain. But it's the sort of pain you'll need to take sooner
or later? Perhaps this isn't the project to do so ... but you should
definately consider moving your team to .NET. The benefits of .NET will
be apparently once you move :-)

Good point, perhaps a starter with a smaller project ... difficult as we
only really have this set of applications (our primary product) and a
development team of two.

[Sean]

"Spam Catcher" <sp**********@r ogers.comwrote in message
news:Xn******** *************** ***********@127 .0.0.1...

"Sean" <sean.anderso n@[nospam]oakleafgroup.bi zwrote in
news:11******** *******@kestrel .skynet.co.uk:

>I am not sure what you mean by "the inbuild Click Once deployment
method" ?

Click one is a deployment method in .NET 2.0 (supports auto-download,
auto-
update, etc). However, I believe Click-Once needs a web server which you
don't have.

BTW, is there a reason your clients don't have access to a web server? I
noticed your clients need to send read-only data files which are sent
through your Intranet?

Not all have a webserver, some do, which is a growing number (thankfully).

Our standalone application has a readonly mode which is used when they don't
have a webserver, but in this environment the total deployment is much
smaller than when they have a webserver, but it's also fairly true that when
there is a need for a wider range deployment, the organisation is
proportionally bigger and more technologically up to date, with a webserver
and usually SQL.