I have some development experience in Lotus Notes. Although limited, it gives me a basic understanding of OOP and classes, methods etc. It's been a few years, and while Notes could do what I need doing, this seems like the place to be.

OK. I have some basic questions...and yes I did indeed look through this and other forums, including MSDN and MS KB prior to asking the questions.

A little background...

The project I have in mind is a data based application to track all aspects of a service oriented companies activites. I realize there are solutions out there, but as a Corporate Service Manager I can tell you the solutions available all lack a lot in various areas. This drove me to learn Notes, self taught, and develop the application still used by that organization today. So the following questions arise about developing an app with VB.

  1. We need to be able to access data remotely on a regular basis. This includes employee laptops, but could and probably should also include customers. Should I do this as a web-based application, or is there no real advantage in that? I see no reason I can not provide for remote connections, but I am a newbie to this, so input here would be great.
  2. I have purchased several books on SQL Server, ASP.NET and VIsual Basic/Visual Studio. None of these seems to mention much in regards to deployment considerations I should be looking at during the intital stages of solution creation/development. Obviously I haven't been through devlopment start to finish, but I don't want to get there and find out I needed to do something way back at step one. (best practices?)
  3. I understand the basics, I think, of declaring something Public or Private. (public is for use wherever, whereas private restricts use/access to the page or form etc.?) My confusion stems from an MSDN doc that gives an example of a class declaration in which several string variables are declared as private, and a boolean is declared public...why? A link to a good explanation would be great.
  4. I noticed while looking through the Adventure Works DB tables are created for a person, and then other information, such as address info, is stored in a seperate table. Is this simply to help on the server side so that an app isn't asking more of the server than it needs? EG: I just need the name and phone, not the full details of an employee?


TIA for looking and help.

Regards,

Joe