Suppose you’ve got a customer who wants an application that has its data centralized stored and maintained, users can connect to it (but can also have data locally stored) and work with it and not using a browser to view and modify the data. Furthermore the application itself should also be centralized maintained.
So no traditional web-app but it should still have it’s benefits. Do some of you have an idea how to tackle that? I thought about a client/server-solution – but I don’t know how that scales with growing users, data, etc.
I would suggest C# with ClickOnce for deployment. For UI, my personal choice would be WPF; for data layer – Linq To SQL or EF (though a lot of people complain about EF).
If you want some of the logic running on the server, you can use WCF to expose it to the client.
Of course, this makes it Windows-centric. So, if you need Linux as well, you could look at C#/Mono with xcopy deployment and WinForms.