Hi guys,

I will be building a SalesForce application which will take records (Upton several hundred thousand) out of salesforce pass them to an external webservice which will process them and return the results, which will be stored back in SalesForce.

I am wandering on advantages and disadvantages for building the application in Apex and VisualForce on with .NET and be hosted outside of SalesForce.

I have come to the following at the moment:

Building in .NET

    Advantages:

          - Easier to develop, more popular, much better IDE, stepping through code 

          - Easier to support - since it is hosted on your server you have full control and you can turn on debugging features and collect debugging information very easily and quickly. And you can fix and replace the app easily and quickly.

          - Faster to process a lot of records - you can use the salesforce data loader to export a large number of records, then process them in batch and use the salesforce batch API to upload the results back in batch.

     Disadvantages:

          - User interface will not look exactly the same as it would look if you develop it with VisualForce although with a good designer I think it will get very very close.

Building in Apex and VisualForce:

     Advantages:

           - User interface will look very familiar to users.

           - Integrated security model provided by SalesForce.

     Disadvantages:

           - You need a trained person who knows appexchnage to develop it.

           - Boy would it be difficult and time consuming to develop it compared to developing with VS and .NET or Java let say.

           - Cannot figure out how discovering and fixing a bug after a release would be done easily.

I am not sure on the following:

If developed in Apex would I need to use the SalesForce API ?

If I can avoid it my app will be available for people with lower editions than Enterprise which is quite and advantage.

Also is it possible to build such an application without using the API which will make it available for wider range of users ?

For processing batch records which will be faster .NET processing or Apex ?

I tend to think that for batch processing .NET will be faster since I will be able to get all records as a batch and upload them back as a batch.

Please help me know what you think on the above.

I appreciate your ideas on the above.

Thanks,

Kostadin Mitev