I am thinking about creating an offline app. For deployment and maintainence reasons I don't want to have my users using SQL Express. I am thinking we can save the data as an XML file which more or less maps to the database schema.
The users will be able to connect to the internet sometimes to upload the data. They will never be able to login to our Windows network.
What's the standard solution here? Send the XML via a web service? Do we then use stored procedures to clean and insert/update this? Or is this something we can use the Sync framework for?
I've looked at some examples with Sync but they have been using Sql Express, which is not something we'd have an easy time getting going on local computers.
Any feedback and links to best practices along these lines would be appreciated.
Cheers.
Ola Amigo