Hi,

I have several questions related to strataframe and n-tier.

First of all I will present the scenario for the application that we are developing:

A n-tier solution is to be developed with use of win forms communicating to a central server throughout web-services. The server communicate to a SQL Server and it will not only translate SQL data to XML data, there will be also central processing occurring (like reports generations to be available to all clients etc). There will be also a web component available, showing some of the information shown by win forms.

My questions are as follows:

1)Is there any news related to the n-tier (middle tier server) release? Is the scenario described met by the middle tier server? Because our solution is not truly smart client as much of the processing is going to be at the server (eliminate costly repeated processing from the clients to the server, in order to be done just once per day and available per request).

I confess I am a bit loss on getting the best approach to implement the n-tier using strataframe, despite have reread several times the several topics about this subject.

According to what I've read and experimented, there are two ways to use web-services using strataframe:

- inherit the class DbDataSourceItem, which seems to be much "database" coupled. For instance, what do the following mean, CreateBlankDbConnection() using web services, or CreateDbCommand()?

- Implement "Data Retrieval Methods" at strataframe business objects which do not use the SF data layer but invoke web services. I'm concerned about how much strataframe features I will loose using such approach on design time. If this approach is the best, will I need to have a business object for ASP and a different ones for win forms? As the asp will use the SQL server (using fully the SF data layer) and win form's business objects use web-services invocations (assuming this approach)

From above approach I am concerned another issue:

We are also thinking of using the role based security management (role etc) screen to embed into our win forms. The current security module screens you provide communicate directly to the database. Because the demo does not contain the source code, how much work do you think it will be needed to change the security screens management to interrogate the web services? Note: the web-service is also under our control, so the data it will provide shall be the same as the database.

I am aware I am requesting to much work done for the scenario I am presenting, but this is what I am expecting to have when I buy a framework.

I hope some help could be given, as we are trying to understand the best way to fit web services using strataframe into our project. Note that the concept of smart client is not the best solution because there will be the need to do server processing.

Many thanks