Andrew,

>I was wondering if anyone could give me some pointers on the best way to deploy an MM based application. Our customers usually have one main file server and multiple Windows XP clients.
>
>My question is this : Is it possible to deploy just the Business dll on a server and have the Forms dll on each of the XP clients? (failing this, does anyone know of any good resources that explain distribution and deployment of .Net forms applications?)
>
>The reason I ask is that the Business part of our application depends on a COM object which in turn depends on a special runtime environment and we would like to avoid having to install this runtime on every XP client.

I recommend keeping the .NET business object DLL on the workstations, but deploy the COM object either behind a Web Service or ".NET Remoted" wrapper if you don't want to install its associated runtime on workstations.

I highly recommend you check out the book "Improving .NET Performance and Scalability" (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0735618518/qid=1109434809/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/102-5454049-4048109?v=glance&s=books&n=507846). It's a book that contains best practices recommended by the different .NET teams. I agree with their recommendation that you should create a logical three-tier architecture (where the business object DLL resides on the workstation) and only go to a physical three-tier architecture if you absolutely need to. Remember that a call to a component on another machine can be a few thousand times slower than a call to an object on the same machine. Also, with the advent of ClickOnce in .NET 2.0 deployment is much easier for Windows applications.

Regards,