VB and the intranet

[juliemac]

I have an application that I am reworking. It has many reports and a pain to compile and roll out.
I'd like to make a root user interface that "calls" the functions and subs remotely.
I was concidering pulling them and making formless exe's of them, passing the needed criteria via command line. Yet still be able to update and control them.

Any ideas how this might be done?

[Hack]

If it is going to be running on your intranet why not redo the project in ASP.NET?

[juliemac]

Some of it could be. I have quite a bit in ASP already.
I may contract to a major company, but they are primative in their IT systems.
Its written in VB6 and a mish mash of downloaded code and hand written stuff.
Shudder.

[chris128]

Are you basically just saying you want to have an app that all of the users run from their PCs, which calls methods from a program running on a remote server? If so, then you have a few options:
1. Use TcpClient and TcpListener to send and receive data across the network between the two programs. This is quite a low level approach where you have to convert everything to Bytes and send it and then convert it back to whatever it is supposed to be at the other end etc
2. Use WCF - this is a fairly new technology that is part of the .NET Framework (as of version 3.0 onwards) that simplifies calling methods from a remote program. Unfortunately there is quite a steep learning curve when you first start using it but once you get the hang of it you will find it much easier to work with than any of the other solutions mentioned here. You dont have to worry about actually sending the data across the network, you just call your method like you would call any other method and WCF takes care of sending it to the remote server and returning the data back to you as a managed object. For more info see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netf.../aa663324.aspx
3. Use .NET Remoting - I've never used this but I believe it is similar to WCF in that it is quite high level and you work with .NET objects rather than bytes. However I have heard several reports of it being quite complicated to setup and get working.

There are probably other ways as well but those are what springs to mind

[juliemac]

Ok.
Good things to look into.
I suppose its sort of like building a browser, but instead of showing web pages, the tool would call "reports", opening excel, access, pdf's etc from that remote location.
I am already creating Excel sheets via ASP,, maybe the easiest and fastest thing would be to covert the VB6 to ASP.