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In my personal experience and professional experience as Director of Technology and chief architect at our company, sysadmins dislike doing anything that keeps them from playing solitaire or hiding out in some room playing Xbox. It doesn't matter if they have to install a native app or the .NET Framework + a managed app.
The way to market this is the ability of a correctly written .NET application to not require installation. Yes, the .NET Framework and any service packs (.NET 1.0 will have SP3 and .NET 1.1 will have SP1 shortly) are a little bloated, but nothing typical IT solutions can't push out to machines (it is a Windows Installer package when you pass /c /t:path options to the installer executable). The managed application could sit on a share somewhere that all users can use, though IT will also have to push out a code group (if necessary) so that CAS (code access security) is granted the appropriate permissions to run certain code. That, too, is easy.
One that app is out there, they never really have to worry about it again. If there's update to be installed, they can simply drop the new assemblies on top the old ones. Through publisher policy assemblies and/or .config assembly settings, even old assemblies can use new assembly versions that they weren't linked against. Assemblies can also be deployed like this over the Internet or an intranet. This is all known as touchless deployment. The IT folk don't have to worry about pushing out updates to an application; when written correctly, the .NET applications will update automatically through Fusion (the assembly bindiner portion of the CLR). .NET 2.0 will make this process even easier (and not require a 24/7 connection to check for updates) with ClickOnce technology.
The only major downside is that managed apps can require quite a bit of memory. If you use a lot of types (our flagship app uses almost every assembly of the BCL plus a few other third-party assemblies), it will use quite a bit of memory. A well-written app isn't so bad, though. Another downside (sort of) is that it can be slow to start up since types must be JIT compiled. Once they are compiled to native code, however, the native code is cached and executes about as fast as native calls (stalk walks and the sheer depth of some execution stacks may degrade performance a little more than purely native code). If IT doesn't mind, assemblies can be pre-JIT'd into the GAC using ngen.exe, but that would require some sort of installation.
So, depending on how your application is written to be deployed, IT may in fact have more time to sit around and play civ3 or whatever it is they do when not complaining about having to do their jobs and help people. It really works out better for them.
I'd recommend reading the topics in the .NET Framework about configuring and deploying .NET Framework applications, as well as security topics as necessary. Truly understanding these topics can help you write an app that makes deployment easy and can help you write an easy-to-update application (like assembly binding redirection so that you don't have to re-deploy every assembly just because you changed one and changed the version - something that should be done).
Microsoft MVP, Visual C#
My Articles
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Hi Heath
Thanx for such a valuable information.
We look forward to see more such information from you on why to prefer .NET then Win 32 Apps.
Hope you would share more such in-depth knowledge with us.
Naveen
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hello,
i have some problems with the NSpring Framework. I want to use this framework to log in a file, which events occurs in a ASP.NET Application. But i do not really know how i can use this framework and how to start with it.
The situation is as follows: i developed a ASP.NET Application for a PDA and now i want to change the code in that way that it would be logged in a file on the PDA what actions a user execute (which events would be execute, which method, at what time,..).
Can anybody help me with this problem?
thanks in advance.
yours sincerely
patrick
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Hi
i am using Application.StatrupPath in my windows service to locate the configuration file but it is saying that the type namespace Application could not be found. Do i need to give reference to any dll to make use of it. if it yes which dll that i have to refer bcaz i am using System.Windows.Forms.dll but it is not accepted in windows service.
Can anybody help?
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Hi
i am working on windows service which is hosting the Remote object by using configuration file. what i am doing is in the OnStart method i am using
RemotingConfiguration.Configure method and i am giving the commandline argument as a parameter to this method and i am starting the service by giving path of the config file in start parameters option in Service Control Manager while starting the service.
Now what i want is i don't want to give the path of config file in the start parameter just i want to make the service that automatically identify the path of the config file in RemotingConfiguration.Configure method. Can Anybody help
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Hi how can I develop games using .NET Framework, thnx    
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Download and install Managed DirectX 9.0b from http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx[^] and then pick up a copy of the book, Managed DirectX 9 Kick Start : Graphics and Game Programming[^]. It's an excellent book.
Familiarity with the .NET Framework is required.
Note that Managed DirectX is not simply a wrapper like many other implementations you may find (including those on this site). It was written from the ground up using the DirectX drivers for optimal performance. More is explained in the book and the Managed DirectX documentation that comes with the DirectX 9.0b SDK.
Microsoft MVP, Visual C#
My Articles
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Hi,
I'm new to this forum but have yet a question :
is it possible to get the whole type description of a class at runtime ?
I can get the name with the .GetType but I also want to know all his property's, method's and attributes (fields)
is this possible ?
greetings  ,
Tim
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Sure, just take a look at the System.Reflection namespace.
Regards,
mav
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hi there
i have a pro
i made a report whit the crystal reports engen
when i want to see the report ill get a LogIn Form
i dont know what to type in the Login fileds
maybe someone can help my
my database in Oledb (Accses)
i am in C#
--------------------------------------------
the fileds in the LogIn Scrren are :
Server Name :
DataBase :
Login ID :
Password :
what do i need to write in does fileds ?
thanks to all Helpers ...
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You have many ways to solve this issue by Crystal.engine library using the setlogininfo, or the simplest way: reset sa database password to blank and then screen will never pops up, enjoy it....
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Hi,
I'm looking for a way to implement a network based mutex. For example, if one application on a LAN called Mutex.WaitOne() and got the mutex then all of the other applications using the network mutex would have to wait.
Is there anything out there that does this kind of thing? Something simple if possible 
Thanks!
Cheers,
Chris
Smarten Up Your Assets...
www.identecsolutions.com
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To implement such a thing like a mutex without direct operating system support (and as far as I know there is no such thing as a network-wide mutex in windows) you need an atomic operation that cannot be interrupted by any computer in the network.
Traditionally, a lock file was used to perform such a mutual exclusion.
The client trying to aquire the mutex tries to create a file on a common path.
If the file can be created then the client holds the mutex as long as he doesn't delete the lock file and for all the other client the creation of the file will fail, since it already exists.
Might not be failsafe in every constellation but usually works well enough.
mav
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Thanks for the idea.
Unfortunately this won't be fast enough for what we are trying to do.
-Chris
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Why not just implement a request/fulfill operation with a singleton remoted object? I have a distributed application that assigns jobs to multiple computers based on their availability and their CPU usage. They communicate with a master system, and ask for resources, the master computer returns a name of a "free" computer on the network, or a NULL if none are available. You could use the same concept...
Why not make a request server that tracks an availability status? If unavailable, return a FALSE. If available, set the availability immediately to unavailable (to prevent returning available status to multiple clients during subsequest calls) and return a TRUE. When finished with the "mutex", call a second method which resets the availability to available.
This would be even easier to track with a web service than a remoting object, but both would get the job done.
- Jeromy
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I want to connect to a webpage and get it's HTML source (like ASPTear). The problem is, the page requires a login. You first have login at login.asp page and after that it redirects you to main.asp and that's the page I want. Login page uses a form based authentication, so I _think_ this can be done with a WebRequest using cookies. What should I do? Can you give me any ideas please?
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Assign a new CookieContainer to HttpWebRequest.CookieContainer and add a Cookie instance with the login data in the cookie returned by the web site. Do this before calling HttpWebRequest.GetResponse.
There are many ways of finding out the cookie's key/value pairs. One easy way is to use Mozilla Firefox and, after logging in, right click on the page and select Page Info. One of those tabs will show you current cookie values, IIRC.
Depending on how the site implements authentication, this cookie could be preserved for quite some time.
Microsoft MVP, Visual C#
My Articles
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Can somebody please tell me if it is possible to add some dlls to my setup project of my application (some graphic application), dlls like gdiplus.dll, so that the setup program will not check for the existence of the .net framework on the client machine - that is : it should run without it installed . the problem is that my application has 1.5 mb and including dotnetfx makes it over 25 mb.
thanks in advance, Bogdan
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Sorry, can't do.
I believe you can compile your .Net application with the framework (necessary assemblies) embedded in it with Mono but I'm not sure.
Carl
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Hi
Your concern is right. But to make the .NET independent of platform Microsoft has made it mandatory that if the client does not have the .NET platform but he wants to run .NET application then he has to have .net framework in it which you can download from Microsoft site.
So there is no other way to make your app run on client machine.
(This is same as having the Java JRE for Java app to run)
Hope you will get the point.
Naveen
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ok, I understand it is not possible, but can I use the functions in gdiplus.dll and not use the whole .net framework? like include the gdiplus.dll in my source code and in my setup program for my application... is this the solution?
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Yes sure, you can use the gdiplus.dll in your apllication.
No need of using whole of the .NET framework
Naveen
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You're sure?
I'd rather doubt that Microsoft's license agreement allows you to rip apart the framework and distribute parts of it on your own...
mav
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what im wondering is if there is a smaller version of the framework redistributable the one i found is 23698 KB
i mean thats just crazy for the ppl that are on a 56k hookup to have to DL that big of a file to run programs that were created in the .net framework
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No, there is no such thing as a "micro .NET" doing everything the framework does but at 1/10th the size 
There's no way around installing the framework on a client machine at least once. Newer windows versions already have .NET preinstalled, so in the future this will not be such a big point.
If you're only targetting people who have to download everything over a 56k modem then perhaps you should really opt for a different platform. Or make an ASP.NET application, so that you can use the advantages of .NET on the server side and your clients only need a browser.
mav
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