Has .Net 4 ClickOnce made full trust XBAPs viable?

Question

Here's my situation.

I've just started a new job and I've inherited an application recently which is going to need a rewrite. I know what you're thinking but trust me,...this really IS one of those rare cases where the system I've got is beyond refactoring and almost everything has to go.

The current app is a Silverlight 2.0 app with a whole host of WCF, WCF Data Services, ASP.Net, Entity Framework and a bunch of other stuff. At every juncture the original 'outsourced' development seem to have used this project as a learning exercise and have flat out failed to learn anything. It's just about the worst I've ever seen. Problem is this project should have been complete last September so it's 12 months late now.

What I've been tasked with is to rewrite the solution and have it functionally complete in 3-4 months. I can definitely do that (it's actually little more than a bit or forms over data) but I'm looking at what my best options might be now to save time. I'm considering XBAP but last time I looked at it deployment was a nightmare!

So,...we can target .Net 4 and thusly, ClickOnce deployed Full Trust XBAPs. This means I could drop that middle tier, opt for a simple DAL assembly and ignore the complications of Web services, HTTPHandlers (for uploads) and such for now. This will be an Intranet deployment so I can guarantee IE7+ and Windows boxes on the WAN.

This all sounds too good to be true though. What are the remaining issues with Full trust XBAPs or XBAP development itself. Is it worth pursuing this or should I look elsewhere for now?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

So far, I've opted for partial trust for our XBAP application in .Net 4.0 - We've had severe problems getting the signing/certificate thing working for full-trust even on the intranet. We might be dumber than other people's kids, but we decided to go the way of a WCF-service and a partial trust XBAP as it was just more friction-less.

Click-Once has been working perfectly, tho (except from a few IE hick-ups where caching went a wee bit too far).

Our largest problem is printing now :-). Fixed layout is a pain.

Hope this helps a bit.