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The subject is distributed computing, but I'm not entirely sure whether this is what I'm after.

We have a system that has been written in .NET 4 to run on a dedicated Windows Server. We would like to make some savings and move away from dedicated server.

In brief, our system can be split into two modules: 1. First module requires a variety of Windows applications to be installed on a server 2. Second module is a website written in .NET with AJAX/jQuery and it doesn't require a dedicated windows server.

Our idea is to write some sort of service where first module will run on one of our internal servers. Once data is processed, it will be (somehow) moved to a second module. My immediate worries are related to security and performance.

Finally, another problem is that first module requires a constant access to one of the databases in the second module, so any slight connection issue is likely to cause a lot of problems.

I have tried searching on here for similar questions, but I don't really know what to look for.

If our idea is feasible, is this really worth the effort? It appears that developing and testing this will take longer (i.e. cost more) than paying for a dedicated server. Having said that, 100£ per month dedicated server will be nowhere near powerful enough to run first module of our system. P4 with 1-2 GB RAM won't cut it...

Thank you

Edit

I guess that alternative is to do a bulk insert through WCF. Did anybody try to do something similar before? I'm concerned that a size of bulk insert will be between 20MB and 40MB, any slight network problem is likely to kill the insert.

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One of the technologies brought about by Microsoft to partly tackly this kind of problem are Web Services.

This allows you to distribute certain parts of your system or open up your data to 3rd parties.

By the sounds of what you've described it sounds like this could be one approach and combined with good caching in your web project, would mean a minimal number of calls to the required services.

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Thank you for your reply. Currently we are using web services all over the second module. I was wondering whether there is a different way of getting data from first module to the second module. I guess that WCF is another alternative, but I'm not sure whether it has any benefits over web services in a given scenario.
WCF is the "blessed" way forward, "Web Service" or "asmx" is depreciated, and WCF is the new way. It also provides much more flexibility than "asmx" services. That said, if performance is key, web services (of any sort) may not help reduce overhead.

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