Hi Viv,

>Thanks for clarifiying. I wasn't right on the detail but I guess I was broadly right about how much control you have over the users environment.

Well, maybe not as much control as we'd like, but good enough to make things work. =0)

>I'm curious to know why you used a 'roll your own' deployment solution rather then using 'Click-once'. I recognize its shortcomings but I wonder how you have improved on it.

You've got to remember that our "roll our own" approach goes way back ... we started working on this concept back even before 1.1 was released ... I forget exactly when that was, but we officially started our company April 1, 2002 and had been playing around with .NET for a couple of months prior to that. I'm thinking that Click-Once either didn't exist then, or wasn't very robust. I honestly don't remember exactly what the details were. All I know is that by instantiating stuff through Reflection, all the downloading of newer DLLs residing on the web server down to the workstation is all done automagically. =0)

>On the 'Cops with laptops in cars' front I think that, locally, we're lagging behind a bit in my neck of the woods. Most of them don't even have cars let alone laptops :-) (Actually, I don't know why I said 'most of them' - we've only got one)

hahaha ... funny! Actually the mobile stuff is pretty cool, although I have not been involved in that aspect of it really. Communication is done via radio frequencies (I don't have a clue what the details are behind that), except that I will be involved somewhat in tweaking our Framework to allow the mobile app to run our desktop apps by connecting to the desktop app's required web service after the mobile app has connected via the radio (it will "pass thru" the web service call) ... I just don't understand the radio piece (and don't need to at this point).

~~Bonnie