Hello Steve,
As you mentioned that the application communcation is over internet, so the
database server should be be directly accessible via other remote
clients(due to security and network restriction). I also think that
webservice should be a reasonable approach as it is designed for loose
coupled distributed environment.
Using webservice, the most important thing is defining class types that
will be transfered over internet(over webservice http protocol). Normally,
for data accessing application, you need to define class types that
represent those database table, record and fields. The .net dataset is a
built-in data component class that can be transferred over XML
serialization based protocol. You can also define your custom class that
can be corretly serialized as XML and transfer over http.
For example, you can directly transfer the data base query/update command
to server-side for execution or transfer DataSet (or custom class
collection and command objects) to server-side and let the server-side
webmethod do the actucal data accessing to backend database:
#How To Update Server Data Through a Web Service by Using ADO.NET and
Visual C# .NET
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310143/en-us
#Querying and Updating a Database Using Web Services in InfoPath and ASP.NET
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa192516(office.11).aspx
#Toward a Generic Data Access WebService
http://www.eggheadcafe.com/articles/20031106.asp
For more information about webservice, you can visit the MSDN websevice dev
center:
#Web Services and Other Distributed Technologies
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/webservices/default.aspx
Hope this helps.
Sincerely,
Steven Cheng
Microsoft MSDN Online Support Lead
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