Server in .NET ?!

[xera]

Greetings all,,,

I am about to develop a basic server, and I'm wondering whether or not I should use .NET. The reason I'm not sure about using .NET, is because I've had several bad experiences of it crashing, and those occured when just running a basic app

My server will not be too busy, but it will have numerous connections(several thousand maybe). It will also have a database, and simple UI.

Any suggestions? Should I rather use something else? Thanks..

Another q I'd like to ask is which Database would you use with .NET ? It needs to be both secure and reliable..

edit: typo- lol

[Hack]

A network file server is typically run from a commerically purchase network operating system. I'm not getting what you mean by "building a server" using .NET - that is a development platform not an OS.

As far as the database question is concerned, what are you doing to be doing with it?

How many people will be using it?
How much storage do you anticipate requiring?

[xera]

You're right there, but I never mentioned an OS. The server(see above^) will just run on XP. It's going to be a plain socket server. Please correct me if this is the wrong approach..!

About the database, it will basically store all the clients information, ie: username, password, email. So it needs to be really reliable, and secure.
Only the server will directly access the database, so the clients access it indirectly.

[Hack]

Reliability and security to me mean either SQL Server or Oracle, depending on what kind of budget you have.

Both can also handle muliples connections and large, large amounts of records.

[xera]

Thanks for the advice..

The server and database isn't going to be for me, it's gonna be for another company..!

Also it won't have to be that large, as it'll only contain several thousand records - say one record for each client.

And back to using .NET for a relatively simple server.. - do you think it's reliable enough?!?

[Hack]

Even though the amount of records may never get too large, I would still go with either SQL Server or Oracle for their reliability and/or security features.

And back to using .NET for a relatively simple server.. - do you think it's reliable enough?!?

What will you be using? The .NET studio comes with different development platforms such as VB.NET, C#, ASP.NET, etc.

Is this going to be a desktop application or a web site?

[xera]

I use C#, but would use either C# or VB - if I knew that one was more reliable than the other. Is this the case..?

It's going to be a desktop application..

[Hack]

The reliability of your program will depend on your code.

If you are comfortable with C#, then I would use that.

[xera]

I'm not so sure..! I've had a few instances in which the application has crashed - and it didn't say where in my code the bug was, it only gave a memory location

That's why I was wondering about reliability whilst using .NET