I am a big advocate of fat client applications, WinForms in the .NET lingo. My rule of thumb is that if the user will use the application on a daily basis and more than just a few minutes a day, then he/she needs a full blown application. If the user will use the application just occasionally or just for a few minutes, then a web front end is OK.

In your case, I think the piece of the app that students will use will definitely benefit from web forms. If you have staff that will use the system several hours a day, they will probably prefer WinForms for their modules.

I've done some testing with .NET "auto-deployment" for WinForm applications and it is very good. It is certainly much better than what we have before .NET. Yet, it only works if your users already have the .NET Framework installed on their systems (not a big deal for staff users probably.)

As Bonnie mentioned, WinForms and WebForms are not mutually exclusive. You can mix and match and get the best of both worlds. They key is a good n-tier design.




>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