.exe for All Clients? 2

[Headwinds]

I can put a Visual FoxPro .exe file on our LAN server, give all the clients a shortcut to it, and it runs fine for all users, accessing SQL Server on another machine. If I build a VB .NET Windows Forms project, other users (with the .NET CLR) can run the project without having it installed so long as the code doesn't touch the database. If a form's method code includes anything having to do with the database (even dimension a connection), it gets a "Request Failed" System.Security.SecurityException.

Must every client workstation need to install a VB .NET application in order to be able to run it? If so, bug fixes and minor upgrades will be a much bigger event than in the past!

Thanks for your assistance.

 

[RealQuiet]

You may be running into an issue with .Net's built in security that protects you from unknowingly running someone's malicious code. Anyhow, deployment in .Net is made much easier and updates can be put on the server and automatically distributed to the clients. The following article talks about the "no touch deployment" as well as the security issue.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/d...tml/vbtchNo-TouchDeploymentInNETFramework.asp

 

[Headwinds]

Thanks for your note. Let me recite what I think I now understand about this. Please correct me if I'm wrong. For a VB .NET Windows Forms application to run correctly, the products of a build must be present on each client's workstation. Clients can't just navigate to the .exe file on a server and launch the application from that. (With Visual FoxPro, you can do it either way.) The no-touch deployment feature makes it possible to distribute and maintain a Windows Forms application using an IIS Web server.

I'm making the transition from Visual FoxPro and still bumping into things are apparently so fundamental in the VB culture that they're unwritten.

 

[RealQuiet]

Correct, the products of a build should end up on the client machine. I think that it would be possible to keep the program on a server and run it from there. I haven't done that, and I think that it would create a lot of unnecessary network traffic since the code is actually executing on the client machine. You could also do this in VB 6, but there was the traffic issue as well as the problem of necessary dll's not being registered on the client, etc.
The no touch deployment is very easy as this since someone can basically point to the program on the server and have it automatically sucked down and run locally. This avoids the network traffic during execution and any other issues that you may encounter running it across the network. You will still have to deal with the security issue and have the clients configured to trust the program.