Application design - penny for your thoughts?

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Hi guys

 

My primary product at the moment is epos software for bars and restaurants.

 

The next part of the software package I need to design is a way for waiters to use PDA's to take orders and send the orders back to the epos terminals.

 

Each terminal exposes a WCF service, so that is how I plan to communicate, but I have the following choices about how I do this.

 

1> Write an app using .netCF 2.0 that communicates with the epos terminals over web services? This obviously has the disadvantage that it for whatever reason a epos terminal needs to contact the PDA, it cant, because in web services, there is no return path.

 

2> Write the app so that it is a ASP.net application that runs on one of the terminals. This means that the PDA's don't need any installation, but then I need to consider how to get IE on the pda into full screen and keep it that way, and also, it is not guaranteed that the ePOS terminals will have IIS installed, so I would need to look at something like Cassini (?)

 

3> Write the app using .netCF 3.5, so that I can expose a wcf service on the PDA as well, therefore allowing bidirectional comms.

 

 

Do any of you guys have any feedback on my thoughs above, or indeed have any better ideas on how I can achieve this?

 

Thanks

 

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