Kevin said:
Could someone please clarify for me why I would rather choose to develop a
distributed c# application as opposed to an ASP.NET application. What
reasons would sway my decision? Any comments/directions would help alot, I
am a newbie to C# so if this sounds like a dumb question please bear with
me.
Well, it depends on what you are doing.
An ASP.NET application generally executes entirely on the server side, it
makes for easy distribution to clients but overall trys to do the job with
less resources than a distributed app would have. These apps are ideal for
any centralized application, like planning, resource management, etc, more
or less anything that requires move viewing than actual processing on the
whole(jobs may be posted to process, etc, but that is irrelevent). ASP.NET
applications, if written properly, should work across quite a few browsers
as well, while distributed apps will be limited to systems using the .NET
framework(or possibly mono).
A distributed app, on the other hand, would most often be something that
uses up significant processing power or requires\benifits from a more fluid
and powerful interface. They are harder to distribute to clients because its
not always possible to simply point a browser at a URL to get the newest
version, downloads and installers can end up being involved(however a simple
url is possible in some cases).
It can comes down to a balance of ease of distribution, security, etc versus
the power required to actually do the job. For example, if I was writing
Human Resources management software, I'd probably use ASP.NET right
now(although I wouldn't ignore the possibliity of a fat client), but if I
was writing, say, a reporting application that performed dozens of xslt
transforms across multi-megabyte xml files, I'd certainly try to use a
distributed winforms client.
