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