How to get your network support team behind click-once?

Question

I'm trying to make the case for click-once and smart client development but my network support team wants to keep with web development for everything.

What is the best way to convince them that click-once and smart client development have a place in the business?

Answer 1

They have a place in the Windows environment but not in any other environment and so if you intend on writing applications for external clients, then your probably best sticking with Web based development.

I heard this "Write Once, Run Many" before from Microsoft when Asp.net 1.1 was released, it never happened in practice.

Answer 2

Here is a couple of ideas that may help

1. long running processes, they are not asp.net best friend.
2. scaling, using client side processing as compared to bigger or more servers reduces cost etc.

Answer 3

@Mark

scaling, using client side processing as compared to bigger or more servers reduces cost etc.

I'm not sure I would entirely agree with this. It would seem to cost less to buy 1 powerful server and 1,000's of "dum terminals" than an average powerful server and 1,000 of powerful desktop computers.

Answer 4

@GateKiller

when i speak of scaling i was talking about the cost of buying more servers and not clients.

most workstations in an organization barely use 50% of their computing power right through the day. If i was to use a click once deployed application i would be using the grunt of existing workstations therefore not having any further cost on the organiztion.

Answer 5

We use ClickOnce where I work; in terms of comparison to a web release I would base the case around the need for providing users with a rich client app, otherwise it might well actually be better to use web applications.

In terms of releasing a rich client app ClickOnce is fantastic; you can set it up to enforce updates on startup thus enforcing a version throughout the network. You can make the case that ClickOnce gives you the same benefit of having a single deployment point that web deployment possesses.

Personally I've found ClickOnce to be unbelievably useful. If you're developing rich client .net apps (in Windows, though let's face it the vast majority of real .net development is in Windows) and want to deploy it across a network nothing else compares.