Hi all,
 i am trying to get you all's suggestion/poll for a matter.

[u]Secnario: </u>I work in a company and we develop softwares for the state police dept. we need to develop a software which needs to be installed in every police station. Basically that software will be used to store all the crime/incident reports and everymonth those agencies are supposed to send it to the central database.

[u]Question:</u> The previous version of the software is written in delphi and now we need to write it from the scratch. I want to know your opinion in what should we use to develop the software.

Option 1: Should we develop that software in VB .net in which there will be a database server in every office and a interface designed in vb.net which updates it.

Option 2: As my boss likes web related things more, he gave me this option to develop the project browser based , in which we will have IIS installed in every office and update the database locally using web pages (ASP).

I am good in ASP, but i dont know how can i install asp files in the local IIS server and make web browser to update local database.

Please advise, which option you think is better.

thanks a lot.

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http://www.indrajal.com

Using the web means you don't have to wory about updating clients- so it's better for support issues. However, if you don't know how to do it that way, it's not such a good choice for you.

Hal Levy
Web Developer, PDI Inc.

NOT a Wiley/Wrox Employee

Thanks Hal, thanks so much for the reply. you gave me a good point to talk in to the meeting.
well, i know a little bit and i am sure i will figure it out. i was concerned about the performance issues of both the options.

If you are good with ASP what makes you think you will have problems? With .NET, the code to deal with the database can be exactly the same whether you are building it with ASP.NET or VB.NET so the learning curve will be about the same with regards to that part of it.

Like Hal says, a web based solution is much easier to maintain. The only problem I can see with it is an acceptance issue. I can just picture a police big-wig looking at you and saying "What?? We surf the web to our crime software?"

Is there a reason that each police station needs to have a separate installation of the system? Can't it all be centralized and used that way in real time? (I can understand system uptime/availability being an issue.)