Best way to do this?

[ian.johns]

We have an application where a manufacturing company has a dedicated PC
to help manufacture our product. This PC needs to:

1/ download information from our web site application;

2/ pass that information via a local application to a piece of hardware
attached to the PC via a COM Port;

3/ pass a log file back to our site (this could be ftp).

We have full rights and access to that PC.

We would like to make this as seemless as possible for the user. Just
bring up the information on a web page then press a button. We do
*not* want the user to actively download a file (Save As...). Just have
the information passed and start the local process.

What would be the best way to do #1 and #2 above in .Net?

A User Control talking to a Web Service? An executable talking to a
Web Service?

 

[David Browne]

We have an application where a manufacturing company has a dedicated PC
to help manufacture our product. This PC needs to:

1/ download information from our web site application;

2/ pass that information via a local application to a piece of hardware
attached to the PC via a COM Port;

3/ pass a log file back to our site (this could be ftp).

We have full rights and access to that PC.

We would like to make this as seemless as possible for the user. Just
bring up the information on a web page then press a button. We do
*not* want the user to actively download a file (Save As...). Just have
the information passed and start the local process.

What would be the best way to do #1 and #2 above in .Net?

A User Control talking to a Web Service? An executable talking to a
Web Service?

The best way to do this is a .NET 2.0 SmartClient deployed through
ClickOnce. This application can access the COM ports of the local machine
and communicate with a web service to move data back and forth to a web
application.

David

 

[ian.johns]

Hmm, the SmartClient looks promising, however according to MS regarding
ClickOnce:

"if your application does need to do something risky at install time,
ex. installing drivers, MSI is still your best choice."

I believe we do need to install drivers.

 

[David Browne]

Hmm, the SmartClient looks promising, however according to MS regarding
ClickOnce:

"if your application does need to do something risky at install time,
ex. installing drivers, MSI is still your best choice."

I believe we do need to install drivers.

Then SmartClient, with MSI deployment.

David

 

[ian.johns]

Then SmartClient, with MSI deployment.

David

Ok sorry, I just checked with our guys and the driver that gets
installed only needs to be setup once.

So back to SmartClient...I guess the issue we have there is we will
already have the user using our web application and we envision that
user switching back and forth seemlessly with the web application and
local application all within the browser. We are also considering a
Java applet which would run right in the browser. Does SmartClient run
in the browser or as a separate windows application?