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I am creating a service to be exposed on the internet. One of those things you would normally say "Web 2.0", but that I want to expose as a SOAP webservice, with desktop clients.

I know that it may sound a little bit outdated, but despite the apparent "uncool" factor, is there any real reason why this approach shouldn't work?

Yes, I will buy a VPS for this thing, it's an experiment for now - but who knows the future.

I am just wondering, well, what you think of it :)

Andrea

Andrea Raimondi
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The only weakness I see to your approach Andrea, is that the deployment of the application is harder. What if you need to install in 100 PCs, and then you need to upgrade the application, and then the program stops working in 3 of these PCs, etc.

For the previous reasons, if your software functionality can be implemented in a Web Application, I would definitely be headed in that direction.

Marcelo
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    Be this said without any bitterness, but I really do not understand how cross browser problems can be any less painful than a handful of PCs that cannot start the application :) It's actually quite the contrary: they are generally worse, in my experience, but your mileage may vary. – Andrea Raimondi Jun 08 '11 at 16:20
  • @Andrea You are correct, but that is something that can be solved before putting your system to production. – Marcelo Jun 08 '11 at 16:23
  • @Marcelo I have been bitten by the firefox updates more than once... and I still remember the pain. I think programmers some times do not give the right importance to things like that. Not implying anything, just stating what to me seems apparent. – Andrea Raimondi Jun 08 '11 at 16:27
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    If you're in the .NET stack, click-Once deployment pretty much puts an end to deploying the application as an issue. – Walter Jun 08 '11 at 16:49
  • @Walter In most part yes, but you still have to make sure that the right version of the .NET framework is installed in the clients, firewall is not blocking your application, user doesn't delete shortcut of application, etc. – Marcelo Jun 08 '11 at 16:54
  • @Walter Have you actually ever deployed one such application? I have seen it done, actually I was one of the testers(I was leaving the company, my works had been handed over and it was still a few days before I'd flee) and I find ClickOnce significantly misleading in practice. For one, it's really in a perpetual install state, because it checks for updates everytime. This means you need to have an ongoing connection at all times. Secondly, to what I could understand, you still have no access to the hard drive – Andrea Raimondi Jun 08 '11 at 17:00
  • which is bad because you can't save data locally. I don't know if this has changed in the last 2 years, but I am afraid not. Saving data locally, even with all of its shortcomings, is still something major in my opinion, because it lets you free from a connection. But that's for another discussion I guess. – Andrea Raimondi Jun 08 '11 at 17:01
  • @Andrea - I"ve deployed a bunch of Click-Once applications. By default it does check at statup whether there is a newer version, but this is configruable. Additionally you have access to the Click-Once API so you can customize any part of the process to meet your needs. Using the most secure settings for Click-Once you can have access to Isolated Storage on the hard drive. If you choose to change those settings you can have complete access to the hard drive. Click-Once is not perfect but is a viable option in that stack. – Walter Jun 08 '11 at 17:14
  • @Walter I hope that means that the use can change the access, not the programmer. However that means, well, to have a support "department" and walk your users through doing it, this sounds like a support "cost" to me: mind you, I don't know if ClickOnce is bad, and please don't take the "cost" in a necessarily monetary term: cost can also be the time spent analyzing the issue, helping the user, etc, time that could be better spent in other departments. I am still failing to see where the web beats the spider. – Andrea Raimondi Jun 08 '11 at 17:23
  • @Marcelo I was also thinking today that the argument "what if you have to distribute on 100 pcs" does not hold any water for me, because the same could be said for *any* desktop application. I find extremely interesting that, having said it's a service, nobody actually took the time to think through it and say something like "with a desktop application you can't do $X, while with a website you can" or something like that. It's, well, interesting. – Andrea Raimondi Jun 10 '11 at 12:15
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A lot of applications have been built this way and still get built this way. It's been proven to work and can be very reliable and secure. We've built a number of desktop applications this way and have had a lot of success with it. And given the right circumstances, I'm sure we would do it again.

Ali
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