Bonnie,

Thanks for your input. Nothing better than advice from people actually working with .Net.

As you were writing, we were talking about the same issues here!
What if an student is using a computer in a library?, I guess that that automatic deployment of Dlls will conflict with permissions, and even if it don't, is it right to deploy your DLLs in some public computer just because somebody wanted to query some info?

The zero deployment thing is alluring, just thinking on updating 200 computers with 29 MB (is it?) for the Framework and .exe(s) in a regular basis makes me dizzy.
Surely there are some ways to do it easily, but why bother, better don't have to do it at all.

In the other hand, people here were saying, if an app is just for the Web and you are in corporate offices, not using the speed of the LAN is a waste. If all you have are Web services calls, it always will go over HTTP.
On that matter we lack insight and knowlegde: It will make sense to have some kind of mediator that can make calls to the local dlls if in the LAN or calling the Web Service if remote. Is that possible or provided by the Framework as it is right now?

Maria


>Maria,
>
>We are mixing & matching, both WebForms and WinForms (app is not done yet, but it's getting there). The key is to use the UI *only* for the UI. Have everything else in the middle tier and use WebServices for transferring data between client-side and server-side. Somewhere along the line, there's an issue with Business rules that seem to belong both server-side and client-side, but that's solved by letting them be used in both places. The nice thing about .NET is that it can automatically download newer version .DLLs from the server when they change. Therefore, the WinForms actually do pull down the Business objects that they need client-side, and the WebForms don't need to do that, because everything is server-side for them anyway.
>
>A very simplistic explanation, but my point is that there's no reason not to use both type of forms. As far as the zero-deployment issue with WebForms, that is true. However, with automatic downloading of .DLLs from the server-side, all that needs to be deployed on the client workstations is the .NET Framework and a small .EXE.
>
>~~Bonnie
>
>
>
>>Hi All,
>>
>>In my company we are considering to use .NET for the next version of some apps that we have.
>>As they are VB-SQL Server based, and we have lots of VB developers, our choice will be VB.Net.
>>
>>But now, starting from zero, an interesting debate is going on: WinForms or WebForms?
>>
>>We have been talking for a while and there are good points in both sides and one strong requirement, we want one GUI. That requirement was born from our experience, some times, when something in the middle tier DLLs programmatic interface changed, our web app guys were not aware of that and the web front was broken or viceversa with our fat client.
>>
>>So WinForms have the richness of Windows, WebForms the zero deployment client advantage.
>>Some of our customers are schools and they will like to give their students Web access to some information.
>>I have read about WinForms Web deployment but not too deeply.
>>
>>What are you thoughts or -even better- experiences on this?
>>Thanks in advace for your advice.
>>
>>Maria