Help - which to use - Web Forms or Win Forms?

[joker77]

Hi,

I'm currently in the investigation and planning phase of an application, and have kind of hit a stumbling block over which technology to use for a certain piece of the Application - Web Forms or Win Forms.

The piece in question will authenticate a User during logon to a central server, and display some screens allowing them update their details etc on the central server. The application will be a client piece on a User's desktop (which could possibly be browser based), which connects over a LAN to a server machine.

Regarding the User's local machine - the only thing running will be my application - the User will be locked out of running any other applications or functions. If it's browser based (web application), the browser will be hardened to only run my application.

However, one function that this piece has to do is -> when the User clicks a button, copy a file from the local hard disk to a removable drive (USB / Card Reader). The file will exist on the local hard disk because another application will have put it there.

With ASP.NET Web Forms - is this possible?

 

[Nate Bross]

I don't think you can create files in the local computer via ASP.NET; however, if the file is available on the Web Server, you can use ASP.NET to download the file and allow the user to save it to a specific location. Just like downloading an attachment from a Web Mail Client.

 

[travisowens]

You need to use a WinForm as otherwise you'd have to write a custom ActiveX app to do the file management, which IE7 will pretty much push the user not to install.

Also, since you want this to run at logon time ("authenticate a User during logon") then you'll also want it a WinForm as you can put the .EXE in their startup, which will be much neater than trying to push a web url to the user, which can not function correctly if the user changes their default browser.