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Can a DB driven .Net app be distributed on CD?Hi all, any advice on the following would be much appreciated:
My company wishes to distribute a CD which provides our customers with a limited functionality version of our Website, which can be used off-line to compose orders, find out product info etc. Given the size of the product range that we wish to include, the solution needs to be database driven, it also needs to be able to handle local read/write, in order to hang on to user specific information, save partially compsed orders, etc. A brief look around suggests that we may be able to accomplish all this by using .net. I come from a Web background and have wide experience of a number of scripting languages and have used ASP in the past. But can anyone confirm that this is the case, and what the intial steps might be? We anticipate that the solution will be installed on the customers PC. Thanks in advance, CH Well I'd recommend using .NET simply because for me it is the quickest
platform to be developing in. For what you want to do, you would probably be best off storing your product range's data in an XML file on the CD (and .NET has great support for XML). Obviously depending on the size of your product range, you might not want to load the entire XML file in one go but you can just scan the file on the CD and select the records you need. Local read/write would be difficult (as CDs are read only!). You could again use XML by having a local dataset in the application to store orders, and serialising this to a file in the user's home directory when you need to. Cheers, that pretty much answers it then. The idea would be that the app
would eventually be installed on a customer PC and therefore could make use of local data stores. Thanks for your help, sorry if this was a basic quesiton, but I'm kind of at investigation level for the whole thing!
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"CH" <C*@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message The Net framework really has little to do with databases.news:A0C27210-D5B9-4939-9D83-82379F6BDD97@microsoft.com... > Hi all, any advice on the following would be much appreciated: > > My company wishes to distribute a CD which provides our customers with a > limited functionality version of our Website, which can be used off-line to > compose orders, find out product info etc. > > Given the size of the product range that we wish to include, the solution > needs to be database driven, it also needs to be able to handle local > read/write, in order to hang on to user specific information, save partially > compsed orders, etc. > > A brief look around suggests that we may be able to accomplish all this by > using .net. I come from a Web background and have wide experience of a > number of scripting languages and have used ASP in the past. But can anyone > confirm that this is the case, and what the intial steps might be? We > anticipate that the solution will be installed on the customers PC. > > Thanks in advance, CH > It does have a number of useful classes for accessing and working with databases, but nothing worth mentioning as far as database per-se. You will have to use the Jet engine or MSDE or something similar to store the actual data "given the size of the product range" Take a look at the Visual Studio Express Products at:
http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/ You can deploy SQL Server Express 2005 to the client computer for your database. Much better than MSDE. These products are still in Beta phase though, but try them out, especially if you are new to .NET programming.  
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