Client Winform Applications Working with a main application

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jay Douglas
  • Start date Start date
J

Jay Douglas

Greetings,
I'm hoping somebody can help me come up with a quick software
architecture solution to address the following issue:

I need to come up with an Winforms (or something similar) application
that multiple users will use over a network. I would like the client
machines to actually use an application that sits on a master server
(without using terminal services) .. The reason I would like to use this
type of set up is for easy software updates (which are going to be
plentiful) and easy maintenance. I really don't know where to start
researching this type of solution. Maybe I'm at a lost for the terminology
for this type of architecture. I thought there was a .net solution that
would allow for an application to run in this matter.

Any and all suggestions are appreciated.

Please reply to the newsgroup as I can't receive e-mail at the listed
address.
 
Jay,

Have you considered ASP.NET? It would let a client anywhere in your
intranet access your application through their browser, while it runs on a
server. It would solve many of the security issues as well as keep this
simple as far as software updates go.

hth,

Marco
 
I've made quite a few application's in ASP.net ... I need more control in
the user interface that a browser and asp.net doesn't offer.
 
Use standard winforms app for client and create one or more remoting objects
on the server side.
Say you have a remoting class called Server. Your client code can create a
proxy of that Server object. That server object can be hosted as a service
or just as another winforms or console app for your testing (which makes dev
nice because your not dinking with IIS and vdirs, etc.) Remoting is a big
subject, but the docs are pretty good. You will then be in good position to
port over to Indigo when that comes out and can host the server part in
almost anything, IIS, ASP.Net, Service, EXE, dllhost.exe, etc. Keep your
interfaces small and simple as possible with native types if possible.
 
Erik, William, and Philip,

Thanks for the awesome suggestions. This gives me a perfect launch pad
for research and sample development. I really like the remoting concept,
this will development update a breeze. Yes, remoting is a huge topic, but
I'm hopeful that the learning curve with be minimal. Using this
infrastructure along with the no touch deployment for the "thin" client
applications will help out a ton. Keeping the objects on the server using
remoting will make developing the additional portal / service applications a
breeze.

Cheers!
 
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