Hello, Brian.

Thank you for initiating the discussion. The short answer to the topic question, is YES - Cassini seems to be ready for the prime-time.

To elaborate..
1. Platform availability: We wanted to follow 80/20 rule and we accomplished just that. Even though we'd love to see our baby working on all the popular platforms, including Linux and MacOS - we are simply not big enough to afford such an expansion right now. To sum up, we do not have plans to extend support to platforms beyond what we already have. Our internal wish list for Cassini project includes more features rather than more platforms.

2. We get 100+ new installations of Cassini runtime per day since recent release of a few products bundled with Cassini. So far, with thousands of installations of Cassini out there, we don't get much of a bad feedback. To the contrary, we seem to be mostly exceeding people's expectations and getting lots of very positive feedback. In terms of whether it's safe to ship thousands of CDs with Cassini, we can only give you an informal, off the record estimates, as our license agreement prohibits any suitability guarantees. Here it is: since we think your cost of creating a Cassini-based installation package of your product is going to be very low (compared to porting whole app to WinForms), we'd recommend hedging your (and our) bets by creating a test-batch of about 500 CDs and distributing those to measure the satisfaction/success level in the field, and proceed to full-scale distribution based on the results of the test-run. Another option is to simply monitor this forum for a few weeks - with number of installations growing as quickly as they are now, this way you will get pretty reliable sense of Cassini customer satisfaction level.

3. Cassini service is completely fine with rebooting, but we did not run internal test on hibernation - sorry. With the rest of WinForms vs WebForms approach, the whole reason we created Cassini is that in our opinion world is more comfortable with web UI than with Windows. If you already have a working product in Web, bundling it with Cassini probably carries less risks than rewriting it to WinForms.

4. Cassini is free for bundled applications - period. No fine print, not hidden fees, no surprises in the future. Cassini developer's piece is free too, but exclusive distribution rights belong to UltiDev.

5. Cassini is primarily for Intranet. For Internet usage relevant security issues need to be taken into account (like tightening service's up user account). Cassini has no SSL and Windows Auth. Cassini is a people's server. It's designed to pass BAT (babysitter acceptance test) - to be very simple, reliable and cheap to own and operate.

Best regards,
Vlad Hrybok.
UltiDev Cassini product director.

P.S. I can be contacted directly via email.

This sounds too good to be true!, what kind of limitations does this have? number of concurrent connections like iis under win2k pro? anything else?