What .Net tools should I consider using to build an application to provide monitoring of our real time systems?

Question

I want to build some sort of interface that will monitor our real time routing/switching system. I would like to give a lot of visual feedback to be able to monitor its status visually. Our system and clients are not co-located so they would need to connect via TCP/IP.

I would like to be able to service any number of monitoring clients (although this will probably only ever be about 4-6 clients). I thought of using SilverLight but there appears to be one or two tricks involved in getting SilverLight to connect back to an application running on a different port.

I have also thought of using HTML5 canvas and websockets. Another alternative is to just create the clients using normal Window Forms and perhaps WPF. But this means that to monitor the application the client will have to be downloaded before. I would prefer something that is as easily accessible as web app?

What are some of the more common application stacks to achieve this? What should I watch out for?

EDIT:

Just to add: This will be an internal tool only. But we have offices in a couple of locations.

Answer 1

any choice in this direction could be subjective and arguable, surely somebody could suggest any possible web framework or language...

I would consider, however because of your .NET and C# tags, ASP.NET MVC 3, so basically web based plugin-less ( NO Silverlight ) HTML 5 solution.

Consider that StackOverflow is done in same way (MVC, ASP.NET, SQL Server... ) and outperforms as we all know.

the way you grab the underlying events from TCP, so the way you capture and provide the data from TCP, it's another thing from the front end, I would probably write a Windows Service if the traffic is so high and you want to grab and store data anything regardless any active client connection.

There are plenty of real time charting controls out there also for MVC, MS Chart Control. DevExpress, ExtJS integrated ones...

Answer 2

"real time" and Browser is bothering me. I would indeed go WPF or WinForms. Using the ClickOnce-Deployment you can make this a no-pain for the user and you can roll-out new versions just by redeploying them and having the user restart the application. In my company this works really fine and we have no problems whatsoever. The only problem with this is, that the app.config is somewhat hard to find and keep current/valid (redeploy) but in your case this won't change per client (or so I guess).