A winforms app to interact with web forms?

[CattleRustler]

Can anyone tell me how to get started with writing a windows forms application that will send and receive data (mostly receive) with asp.net/html browser sessions. I am trying to remake/update an app that I wrote in vb6 that is a data entry app using SQL Server and doing tcp ip comms with banking institutions. For each data entry terminal, there had to be my exe, greentree controls, crystal reports dlls, pay server sdk, etc etc. Usually we had 4 de terminals and then a server pc running SQL. This is all well and good and has worked fine for 3 years but now I envision 4 browser sessions, everything being handled server side with asp.net, and 1 main vb.net exe to queue and handle all sql transactions, printing, banking comms, etc. the part I need help with is how would I have my vb.net exe collect the data when sent from browsers, as opposed to using IIS, or do I use it in conjunction? I am a little confused on this part. Is it as simple as instantiating a isapi object?

 

Thanks

James

[CattleRustler]

I guess basically I am trying to recreate a small scale web server, to handle incoming client connections, retrieve their data, do some processing with a sql db and a tcp bank connection, then return some result info to the client browser - this shouldn't be terribly hard, but I have no prior experience with this type of web/comms coding. I have mimiced this functionality in a web service, but I need a web service with a front end! Any advice or a good slap in the right direction would be very helpful.

From what I've read I think I need to use ISAPI but one know not how to get started - is ISAPI COM? I'll keep looking around for info - thanks for any help!

 

Anyone?

[PlausiblyDamp]

Why not keep the functionality as a web service and build both a windows front end and a web front end to the system?

[CattleRustler]

How do I have the winform exe interact and pull data from the webservice? Sorry if this is noobish - I am a VB developer but I have no prior experience with this stuff, not sure what the available tools are. An explanation (not code) of how this would work would be greatly appreciated. :)

[PlausiblyDamp]

Right click on the References entry in solution explorer and slect add web reference. Enter the url to the webservice and hit enter. If everything is okay you should be able to hit the add reference button at the bottom of the screen.

 

You can now dim an instance of the web service pretty much like a normal class.

 

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/using/building/webservices/default.aspx

[CattleRustler]

aha! Ok. thank you I will give it a look. I am digging the web services thing - just a class exposing some or all of it's methods over the web! Very Nice.

 

I will have other questions soon, I am sure. Thanks!

[CattleRustler]

Good info at that link!

It seems I want to be doing .NET "Remoting" as opposed to a web service, for this particular project.

cool.

Thanks

[CattleRustler]

still need help, regardless of what is in this thread

 

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