Johan,

RE: Remoting.
What speed is the WAN? Binary formatting isn't necessarily "faster" it just
requires less data to travel over the network. Big XML versus relatively
small binary data. If you have a decent speed WAN, then I wouldn't go
binary, especially if it's more troublesome. Over a local network, unless
you're dumping huge amounts of data, it probably isn't a big deal.

Remember with remoting, the actual instantiation of an object exists on the
remote machine (using the remote machine's memory/cpu/etc) . This may or may
not be what you intended.

I'm not sure why your would go the remoting path (or distributed). It seems
like more than just a client server application that you are working on. I
guess you want a middle tier (the remoting server)?  Generally, I would just
do client directly to database, but I am also mostly used to writing
web-based applications also.

Finally, with regards to the database access, Windows authentication is
fine, but it means that your sql server needs to be on the domain, or that
you will need to create local Windows accounts on the machine. Generally,
atleast in my line of work, we don't put production servers on a domain.
For controlling access, I wouldn't attempt to rewrite the wheel. I'd rather
admin sql server logins/users which can give me column level security to the
database. (I don't think it does row level). So I guess my reasoning is that
you might as well use sql server's internal security since I would admin the
users on the SQL server level anyway.

Didn't mean to write so much, and I hope it makes sense.

Steve