there's not a great deal of good info available on using MSCS '02 to provide
business services - as i discovered when working on a project with a similar
architecture. as a product it really works best when using it to provide
presentation services with asp.net i.e.deployed on the front-end
load-balanced web servers - using it in a middle-tier service configuration
will no doubt cost you pain. least amongst which are - it uses its own
deployment mechanism (not msi's), the developer edition only runs on
servers, not desktops, and the product is still com at heart with hasty .net
PIAs (primary interop assemblies) simply wrapping many, but not all of the
components. and the wrapped components are, on the whole, presentation layer
objects. many management functions are written into the autogenerated asp
(not asp.net) 'business desk' and so are not available as classes or com
objects - result being we ended up writing a number of pia's and raw classes
of our own to compensate. then of course there's the problem of mscs
integration with AD - only one domain per site and the management of its
profile extensions in SQL leave a lot to be desired.
sounds bad, but then it all depends on your project requirements - to be
fair mscs was the wrong product for that project, and whilst using it to
provide business is not beyond its capabilities, its not exactly the
products primary, or even secondary, use-case...
r.
