Can a DB driven .Net app be distributed on CD?

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Guest

Hi all, any advice on the following would be much appreciated:

My company wishes to distribute a CD which provides our customers with a
limited functionality version of our Website, which can be used off-line to
compose orders, find out product info etc.

Given the size of the product range that we wish to include, the solution
needs to be database driven, it also needs to be able to handle local
read/write, in order to hang on to user specific information, save partially
compsed orders, etc.

A brief look around suggests that we may be able to accomplish all this by
using .net. I come from a Web background and have wide experience of a
number of scripting languages and have used ASP in the past. But can anyone
confirm that this is the case, and what the intial steps might be? We
anticipate that the solution will be installed on the customers PC.

Thanks in advance, CH
 
Well I'd recommend using .NET simply because for me it is the quickest
platform to be developing in. For what you want to do, you would
probably be best off storing your product range's data in an XML file
on the CD (and .NET has great support for XML). Obviously depending on
the size of your product range, you might not want to load the entire
XML file in one go but you can just scan the file on the CD and select
the records you need.

Local read/write would be difficult (as CDs are read only!). You could
again use XML by having a local dataset in the application to store
orders, and serialising this to a file in the user's home directory
when you need to.
 
Cheers, that pretty much answers it then. The idea would be that the app
would eventually be installed on a customer PC and therefore could make use
of local data stores.

Thanks for your help, sorry if this was a basic quesiton, but I'm kind of at
investigation level for the whole thing!
 
CH said:
Hi all, any advice on the following would be much appreciated:

My company wishes to distribute a CD which provides our customers with a
limited functionality version of our Website, which can be used off-line to
compose orders, find out product info etc.

Given the size of the product range that we wish to include, the solution
needs to be database driven, it also needs to be able to handle local
read/write, in order to hang on to user specific information, save partially
compsed orders, etc.

A brief look around suggests that we may be able to accomplish all this by
using .net. I come from a Web background and have wide experience of a
number of scripting languages and have used ASP in the past. But can anyone
confirm that this is the case, and what the intial steps might be? We
anticipate that the solution will be installed on the customers PC.

Thanks in advance, CH
Click to expand...

The Net framework really has little to do with databases.
It does have a number of useful classes for accessing and working with
databases, but nothing worth mentioning as far as database per-se.
You will have to use the Jet engine or MSDE or something similar to store
the actual data "given the size of the product range"
 
Take a look at the Visual Studio Express Products at:
http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/

You can deploy SQL Server Express 2005 to the client computer for your
database. Much better than MSDE. These products are still in Beta phase
though, but try them out, especially if you are new to .NET programming.
 
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