I am working on a website that has a significant amount of management
functionality as many of the pages are created dynamically from database tables,
however there are only ever going to be one or two people allowed to use the management
section and in practice only when sitting at their desks.
The site is being created in ASP.Net but I find desktop development
so much faster that I am developing all the management stuff as a C# desktop
app.
I have a fair amount of experience with ASP.Net but whenever
I want a form, a data grid or anything that needs to read/write to the database
it just seems so much faster to create and debug a desktop app rather than a
web page.
I don’t believe that it is just me as I have yet to see
a commercial browser based app that is anywhere near as user friendly or as
fast to use as a desktop one.
With a desktop app it is easy to select a few thousand rows
into a datatable bind it to a datagrid and not have to worry about the
consequences as the resources required are trivial for a desktop. Binding
events to left click/right click and creating context sensitive menus is also a
breeze.
I am only using the standard controls that come with Visual
Studio, actually I am not, I started off using things like the DataGrid but
found it was so hard to set them up the way that I wanted, that the SQL Data
Source would just return nothing without telling you why and I was overriding
some many events that it is quicker to build everything in c# code.
Of course it is possible that I am just so familiar with the
desktop that I just need to get with the browser model, although I don’t believe
this. J
Clearly there is no obvious right or wrong answer, but I am curious
about what others think, especially those heavily into web based app
development.
I am in my mid 50s and have been a full time programmer all
my life working on embedded systems in assembler through C, C++ and C# as well
as various 4GLs/VB/VBA and obscure things like BCPL
Bye
Ian