Deploying dll components in a LAN?

Not sure this belongs in VB.NET forum ;)

Anyway... in my company we develop web application that we use internally. They are written in vb.net(web apps). On a meeting, we talked about how we should deploy standard component (like database access, error logging(these are dll files) etc so that they only needed to be installed on one server, then all applications could call them.

All the application we write make HEAVY use of database communication, it is not uncommon that a dataset contain like >4000 rows/table. Also we make heavy use of error logging... and the exception handling component support mail, mq, logfile and eventlog. Right now we have about 10 apps alive on different intranet and webservers.

When we(the devs) asked how this problem could be solved, the webmaster replied "write web services". He meant that all the methods in our db component and logging component should be exposed as web services... That is all methods that return datasets, tables etc...


How does this sound to you experienced developers on this forum. I have myself worked very little with webservices and wanted to get a few "second opinions"... Please share your thoughts with me...

kind regards
Henrik

This wont solve your problem but you should find it very interesting. Its about 'ClickOnce' deployment coming in Whidbey.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de.../clickonce.asp

or here is a video that really shows more:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...DisplayLang=en

Here is an interview with one of the developers who talks about it being meant for intranet deploys.
http://www.franklins.net/fnetdotnetr...aspx?showid=48

As for Web Services I don't have much experience with actually running many of them beyond test scenerios. Although I know they can be a bit resource hunger.

Thank you... it looks like we won't be using whitbey any time soon here :(

My primary thoughts on using webservices was that it would be so slow and use up too much system/network resources. I didn't realize that SOAP was designed to carry large binary objects or HUGE XML-streams... since I read that the overhead is quite large. And to deploy the db layer in a webservice felt very bad... in our classic asp we used COM+ to deploy the db dlls...

But like I wrote, I have very little practical experience in using webservices... We are right now running about 10 webapps that are pretty much admin interfaces to huge oracle database models... it is running quite slow even now, I was concernet about performance when switching to a webservice :


kind regards
Henrik