Re: And Speaking of Other Windows Crap

Bob Cain wrote:

Somewhere I got the impression that one of its main purposes was to
allow applications that one uses to reside on servers elsewhere in
order to give application developers the possibility of more control
over the use of their products.

Well, in some application architectures the end user runs a "client
application" on his/her desktop, which is a lightweight piece of code
responsible mainly for presenting a user interface. The primary
business logic resides on a networked server somewhere, and then if
there's a database behind it all, that may well be running on yet
another networked machine. It all depends on how many users need to
access the system simultaneously and how quickly it has to respond.

Microsoft invested literally billions of dollars over 10+ years on the
technology ("OLE" or "COM") for the middle tier of that scheme, as
high-end PCs running Windows NT began to supplant the mid-sized
business computers of the early- and mid-1990s. As one of its purposes
for being, .NET is meant to replace COM and OLE--and from the
standpoints of development, deployment, security and maintenance, it is
worlds better than what it replaces.

In a way, Web applications (which most users probably don't think of as
applications, though that's what they are) are leading example of this
"n-tiered" approach. If you go to Amazon.com, the pages you see are
fashioned in real time from the contents of one or more databases, then
sent as HTML to your browser. The only special code that resides on the
user's desktop machine is the script code in the browser, which is
transient.

Whether or not such a Web application happens to be .NET-based, there's
no need for the user's machine to have the .NET framework installed,
since all the .NET application code is on the Web server--not the
client.

..NET applications can access remote components directly, however, and
perhaps that's closer to what you have in mind. For example, a smart
desktop application could call a Web service (whether .NET-based or
not), or it could have a peer-to-peer connection with another user's
desktop that is running the same or another application.

Or it can make remote procedure calls against a .NET-based "remote
object" on a server somewhere--the nearest equivalent of a COM object.
In fact, however, most people seem to prefer Web services over .NET
remoting. .NET remoting can be significantly faster but Web services
are just so nice and easy to create and deploy.

Anyway, I'd like to cut back on this discussion fairly soon since it's
so clearly off-topic. I hope that the immediate need for information
has been met?

--best regards

.

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