I’m in the situation that I have to design and implement a rather big system from the bottom. I’m having some (a lot actually) questions about the architecture that I would like your comments and thoughts on.

I don’t hope that I’ve written too much here, but I wanted to give you all an idea of what the system is.

Quick info about the applications, read if you want: I can’t share much detail about the project, but basically it’s a system where we offer our customer a service to manage their users. We have a hotline where the users call and our hotline uses an (windows) application (intranet) to manage the user’s data, etc. The customer also has a web application where they can see reports, information about their business and users, and the ability to modify their data. Modifying data is not just user data like address and so, but also information about the products/services the user has, which can be complicated.

The applications will be built on Microsoft .NET Framework 4, with a MS SQL Server 2008 database. There will be a few applications that have to access this database, such as:

• Intranet application (used by us and our hotline)
• Customer web application type 1
• Customer web application type 2
• Customer web application type n different applications)
• …

Now my big problem is what .NET parts I should use for such a system. For the “backend” I’ve considered using Windows Communication Foundation: Would WCF be a good choice?

The intranet application will be an application that has to edit lots of records in the database. It has to be easy to navigate using the keyboard (fast to work with). Has a feature such as “find customer, find that, lookup this, choose this and update that”. What would be the best choice to develop this application in? Would it be WPF or good old Windows Forms? I don’t need all of the fancy graphics features in WPF, like 3D, but the application has to look nice (maybe something like the new Visual Studio/Office tools).

And the same question goes for the web pages. They have much the same work to do, but not as many features as the intranet application, and not the same amount of data (much less).

That is my questions for now. I’m hoping to get a discussion going that will open my eyes to some of these technologies, helping me decide architecture to go with.

I would like to say thanks in advance, and let you all know that any thoughts will be much appreciated.