Question

I am working as a web developer and my department in the company now asked me to think in a way that let us able to create a CD that contains all the intranet web applications that we developed in our department in order to distribute this CD to the other departments in the company to show them the applications that we developed and used.

The problem now is the following:

1. Each application has a separate database
2. Each application is an intranet application that was developed in ASP.NET and it uses Windows Authentication
3. The access to these application are restricted to the users from our
   department or the selected users from the other departments.
4. My department wants to distribute this CD to the other departments
   in the company in such a way that the one who has this CD can see
   the application and he can try the functionality of this application

How can I do that? Any ideas?

Answer 1

Wow, I’m sorry about that… it seems you’ve been asked to do something by someone who isn’t remotely a developer or administrator, nor did you have one to stand up for your department and say, “Umm… excuse me, but perhaps it would be better if we did this a different way…”

It makes no sense to distribute a web application on a disk to end users so they can run it from the disk. It would be a huge pain in the arse to do so – and a gigantic waste of your time, working on issues that are not remotely related to providing value to your company.

Hopefully you have someone in your department who can suggest that setting up a set of demonstration web sites would be better; Use the same code base as your existing applications, but create separate databases (on non-production systems) with sanitized data and test logins, etc, so people can play around with the application there.

If someone in management has a bug up their arse about it being “distributed on a CD”… then fine; distribute a CD with Internet shortcuts that just load up the test web sites you have set up. My guess is if they were ignorant enough to make this request, they won’t know the difference (but PLEASE consider carefully before taking that particular advice; you know better than I do)