Hi Viv & Gary,

Sorry to come in late on this discussion, especially since I "started" the argument. ;0) I've been offline for a few days, spending a nice weekend in Monterey, CA.

>I was referring to the fact that, AFIAK, Bonnie's work is mainly in-house and Intranet based applications so a reasonable degree of control of the environment is possible and acceptable

Nope. Not in-house. Our company writes software for fire and police. The first .NET piece we did was for fire records management (actually, we were a small startup at the time, but we were bought by a larger company for our .NET know-how). We're working on the police records now and we've got a mobile app (you know, the laptops cops always have in their cars) that's almost ready for beta. The dispatch stuff (911) is being moved eventually to .NET too.

So, while we don't have control of the environment, we can certainly specify what kind of operating system our customers need to run our apps, and the minimum is Windows XP for the workstations. I mentioned our deployment scenario previously, which is really our own version of MS's Click-Once ... it accomplishes the same thing.

Gary -- As far as all that web stuff goes, I plead ignorance. I have done absolutely nothing recently with anything "web", so I know nothing about all those new technologies you mention. I don't really think firemen and policemen care about whiz-bang stuff anyway. They just want to get their work done as quickly, easily and painlessly as possible. Most of them hate the darn computer anyway ... it's an unfortunate necessary evil. =0)

~~Bonnie