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Asked: 2026-06-03T09:09:10+00:00

I have a large vb6/sql database app (hundreds of tables, classes, and forms) that

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I have a large vb6/sql database app (hundreds of tables, classes, and forms) that I want to migrate to c#, with both web, phonegap, and winform clients. There is a lot of database and business logic that I want to centralize, and since I prefer ASP.Net MVC as my web UI platform, I’m considering the following:

MVC Web project to include:

  • MVC Web controllers and views for web UI
  • MVC controllers to serve JSON objects to phonegap apps and rich html pages
  • Service classes to provide BLL services to MVC controllers
  • DAL classes to provide persistence and POCO objects for use by service/BLL classes
  • Webservices that expose Service classes to Winform apps. They would accept and return POCO objects

The Winform app will rely heavily on the Webservices for all of it’s data. Since I have hundreds of database tables, the webservices will be returning this data to clients as POCO objects (some nested, some Lists of POCO objects). I’m worried that 1) the WSDL will be huge, and that as the app grows and the number of classes exposed grows, it will become unruly (will VS choke?), 2) returning POCO objects through a webservice may not perform well. I am used to calling SQL server directly from my winform UI, so the prospect of going through a webservice seems like it could become a bottleneck since everything gets serialized and goes through IIS.

Btw, I know the service layer is logically separate from the MVC UI layer, but I’ve combined them to make deployment simpler. I’d also consider WCF if it solved any problem, but as far as I can tell, it adds unnecessary complexity.

Are these valid concerns? Do you have any other advice?

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  1. Editorial Team

    How are you building the services that the WinForms consume? Depending on how things are setup, you may want to reconsider WCF. You could put the BLL in a WCF service. Then your MVC application, WinForms and PhoneGap application can all use the WCF service which means there is a single location for all of your business logic. As long as you’re not dealing with gigantic POCOs and you’re making async calls, you shouldn’t have any major performance problems with your WinForms apps using a service.

    WCF could be very nice here due to being able to easily expose different endpoints based on the clients you’ll have connecting. Your MVC and WinForms app could use a binary interface for example, while your PhoneGap application could leverage a REST endpoint.

    If you are worried about your service becoming too big, you could also consider breaking it up into multiple services, each which operates on certain parts of the database, or some other logical separation which may already exist in your BLL.

    I also wonder why a WinForms app is necessary at this point. Is there something you cannot do on a website? Have you looked into WPF or Silverlight? Both work quite naturally with services.

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