Windows App (One Click) Vs Web App

Question

We are moveing our old Access VBA / SQL 2005 application to new technologys and have 2 options do we build a Windows Form Application with Microsoft One Click Deploy or a ASP.Net Website?

The application is a work force mangement system booking jobs dynamic scheduling gantt chart components. It will be used by 400 + Users over 20 Locations.

Can you give me some feedback on these options.

Answer 1

If you want the application to be maintained in one central location and accessed by the users over the web...go with a web application. If your team is more familiar with Windows Form applications, there's going to be a learning curve involved with this option (maintaining state, dynamic controls, page events, the DOM, etc.) so the time investment is going to be greater.

If you want the clients to have a rich interface installed on the desktops that you can manage easily from a central location...go with Windows Forms (or WPF to provide a nicer user experience). Using ClickOnce for deployment will make sure that the client applictions stay up to date. It sounds like this would be the more familiar option for your team and produce the best product in the shortest amount of time.

If your users are all inside your corporate network, either option can use a central SQL Server database (or shared Access/SQL Server Compact Edition/SQLLite database).

Don't get caught up in the hype. Web appilcations aren't always the best option.

Answer 2

I would create a web application. This will provide the benefits of a central location to manage. With 400+ users and 20 locations a windows app will take more time and headaches for updates and maintenance.

Answer 3

Provided all your users have good bandwidth to the hosting site (10mb at least) then the port route to a Click-once app is probably the easiest, and should give your users the shortest learning curve.

Answer 4

Have you looked at silverlight as an option? This will give you the benefits of a web application but will allow you to create a richer UI.

Answer 5

I have deployed a ClickOnce app to over 110 locations with 500-600 users, and ClickOnce does a nice job handling deployment, maintenance and updates. A couple of things to keep in mind:

1. ClickOnce apps still are software running on users' machines rather than in a browser, so even though in most cases it is just as easy to support as a Web app, there will be occasional maintenance problems you won't normally have to support with a Web app (corrupt registry, local machine security snafus, hard drive issues, etc.). You also have to maintain certificates for the ClickOnce assembly permissions, which is an additional area of administration/support.
2. With the advent and gradual maturing of Silverlight and better AJAX tooling, the UI gap between Windows and Web is getting smaller and smaller
3. The bigger your app gets, downloading of updates can take some time, particularly at remote locations that may not have the fastest network access speeds.

You will need to weigh the benefits of deploying a Windows solution over a new Web one; in our case, the application we were replacing was a Windows app, and we wanted to reproduce a lot of the screens and workflow to look/act the same as the older version for productivity and training purposes, so we picked ClickOnce. I don't have any regrets, ClickOnce worked well for us.