Re: Webforms vs. Winforms decision

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Hi,

I have a windows application written in Visual Basic 6.0 that is going
to be redeveloped in dotNET. We are trying to decide if we should
deploy using Webforms or Winforms and I need advice from someone who is
not on my team.

4 years ago (VS 2002) we had to make the same decision when redevelopiong a
big financial app.

Webforms was chosen by management, based on some good reasons (ease of
deployment, no installation on clients, can be used worldwide) and some bad
(webapps are hot, no more DLL-hell).

Nevertheless, at that time it seemed the best option (also to me), but
looking back we should have gone the Winforms route...

Why?

- Develoment time is significant higher. You need state-management. You need
need to know about HTML, CSS, JavaScript (possibly cross-brower) & IIS.
- Some parts of our app demand a lot of data-entry. Because most of the
field are related, this means postbacks. On every postback all data is send
back & forth, making it slow. We had to write a lot of JavaScript to
minimize this, but even then there are limits.
- Users *demand* the same user experience as desktop apps can give them,
meaning you will write a lot of JavaScript. This is a very time-consuming
task.
- You can't access resources on the client's PC (obviously).

This is just my opinion. I took the time to write this down because I feel
it might help you. Learn from the mistakes of others.

Steven


.

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