Does anybody have strategies on when to through your Data Access and
Middle-Tier into a Web Service opposed to a Control Library?

I mostly deal with intranet ASP.NET web applications, and occasionally
create web services that access my Data Access (which is in a control
library). Right now my data access passes back datasets, datareaders,
or XML. I know passing datasets and datareaders over web services can
be pretty expensive.

I have talked to a number of people who put everything in web services,
but I don't see the advantage if it is an internal application. Is
there a big drop off in performance using Web Services?

Have not worked to much with Web Services. Want to know if I am
missing out on something I should be taking advantage of.

Thanks.

To clear things up, my question is the following (for Intranet Web
Applications)

Here are my tiers

Front End - ASP.NET Web Application
Middle Tier - Control Library or Web Service or Both?
Data Access - Control Library or Web Service?

Dollar wrote:

> Does anybody have strategies on when to through your Data Access and
> Middle-Tier into a Web Service opposed to a Control Library?
>
> I mostly deal with intranet ASP.NET web applications, and occasionally
> create web services that access my Data Access (which is in a control
> library). Right now my data access passes back datasets, datareaders,
> or XML. I know passing datasets and datareaders over web services can
> be pretty expensive.
>
> I have talked to a number of people who put everything in web
> services, but I don't see the advantage if it is an internal
> application. Is there a big drop off in performance using Web
> Services?
>
> Have not worked to much with Web Services. Want to know if I am
> missing out on something I should be taking advantage of.

Webservices are often misunderstood. Webservices should be seen as
services to which you send messages, like 'do this for me'. THey
shouldn't be used as a full tier to which you dump 1000's of rows or
request 1000s of rows from, typically because it's very inefficient to
do so.

So I'd strongly advice against a 'data-access webservice', because
that's completely missing the point of why webservices exist. It's a
big problem actually, especially since vs.net makes it so easy to
create a webservice which is actually a low-level tier.

FB

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Get LLBLGen Pro, productive O/R mapping for .NET: http://www.llblgen.com
My .NET blog: http://weblogs.asp.net/fbouma
Microsoft MVP (C#)
------------------------------------------------------------------------