Winforms to Asp -- where to start?

[D. Yates]

Hi,

I am investigating how much work it would take to convert an existing
winform application to a web based application, but need to be pointed in
the correct direction.

We have an existing winform application that attaches to a socket server to
get periodic GPS location updates from CE devices. As these GPS reports
come in, we display the location, which is constantly changing, on a map
that sits on a windows form. How can a web based application receive these
updates? From my limited understanding of ASP, I don't believe it is
possible for "stateless" web page to have a client socket, which is always
open, to receive GPS reports from our server. How would I notify an ASP
application of potentially dozens of updates per minute, so that I can
despite the CE devices moving around on the map?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Dave

 

[Guest]

One option is to have a thick client embedded in the browser so more advanced
networking code can happen on the client. Several security hoops need to be
jumped through to make this work, however.

For a thinner client, the web page could request updates from the server at
regular intervals so the server can reply with updated information.

 

[D. Yates]

Steve,

Thanks for your response.

Inline:

One option is to have a thick client embedded in the browser so more
advanced
networking code can happen on the client. Several security hoops need to
be
jumped through to make this work, however.

By thick client, do you mean an Active-X control or is there more than one
way to do this?

It would be nice if the client didn't have to run a formal install....does
this leave me with just Active-X for a thick client?

For a thinner client, the web page could request updates from the server
at
regular intervals so the server can reply with updated information.

Can this be accomplished without a lot of "clicking" page updates?

Since a web page is suppose to be "stateless", I assume that you would have
to create, open, retrieve, and close a database connection or at least a
client socket each time you wanted to update...is this true? If so, I would
have to do it at least once every five seconds....seems like a lot of wasted
CPU power. Your thoughts?


This new ASP application would also have to receive real time messages from
the CE devices. Would this put me back to the "thick" client model?

Thanks,
Dave

 

[Mark Newmister]

I don't know much about working with web map controls but you might want to
look at using:

(Javascript + Timer) + Ajax

This combination will allow the client to periodically request information
from your web server without posting back to the server.

 

[D. Yates]

Mark,

Thanks for your reply. Your suggestion of AJAX has led us to ATLAS
(http://www.asp.net/default.aspx?tabindex=9&tabid=47), which will wrap AJAX
for you in an object oriented way. We will now investigate the two to see
they can do what we want.

Thanks,
Dave

 

[dudegizmo]

Hi,

My name is Guy Peled and I am the architect of a new development
platform called Visual WebGui which uses WinForms API to
create AJAX applications. As you may think it is another rendering
solutions that takes code and transforms it to HTML it is not, but
rather a true runtime library based on WinForms API. This means you can
take your application and convert it by copying your code and changing
the namespaces from Microsoft namespaces to our namespaces, resulting
in a very cool, no installation, high performance, browser based
application. WebGui runs in the IIS using the core of ASP.NET creating
a "risk free" framework.... You can download the community edition from
http://www.visualwebgui.com and try it your self...

Hope I helped
Guy Peled

 

[dudegizmo]

Hi,

My name is Guy Peled and I am the architect of a new development
platform called Visual WebGui which uses WinForms API to
create AJAX applications. As you may think it is another rendering
solutions that takes code and transforms it to HTML it is not, but
rather a true runtime library based on WinForms API. This means you can
take your application and convert it by copying your code and changing
the namespaces from Microsoft namespaces to our namespaces, resulting
in a very cool, no installation, high performance, browser based
application. WebGui runs in the IIS using the core of ASP.NET creating
a "risk free" framework.... You can download the community edition from
http://www.visualwebgui.com and try it your self...

Hope I helped
Guy Peled