Programming .NET Windows Applications

Web Applications Versus Windows Applications

The choice between creating a web or desktop application is one of the first design decisions made for any project. Previous development technologies had a fairly clear demarcation between the two categories. Web applications run on a web server and receive requests from, and serve web pages to, users running a browser on their local machine. Windows applications, on the other hand, are generally executed independently on the local machine, although there might be network resources brought to bear, such as remote databases.

Tip

This book focuses on Windows applications and rich-client web applications. For a complete discussion of ASP.NET web applications, please see Programming ASP.NET, Second Edition (O'Reilly).

With the .NET Framework, this distinction between the two categories is considerably blurred. Rich-client Windows applications may interact with servers using web technology. Web applications may use controls that run on the user's machine. The distinctions between desktop and network and network and Internet, are less crisp than they were a few years ago.

While web applications still run on a web server and Window applications still run on the local machine, many strengths formerly of one modality or the other now apply to both. The "right" decision is not always so clear cut.

You need to consider many issues when deciding whether to build a Windows or a Web application:

Deployment

Web applications are, admittedly, easier to deploy ...