I am creating a distributed program becuase i wish to be able to centralize the business logic and also have the server do some processing. I am planning on using remoting for internal .NET clients and webservices for external clients with the time comes. I am leaning towards creating the server as a windows service and not hosting it in IIS 6, is this a mistake? I like being able to have complete control over the server but IIS does have some nice features and i will most likely end up running it anyway for the web service interface. So i have a couple of questions.

When you create your own windows service how do you implement security and authorization, load balancing etc as you get these by default with IIS.

The second question is have is regarding file storage. One possibility i am considering is that the clients just pull and write images/files off a network share. The second possibilty i am considering is transfering the image data through a function in the remoting inteface. So in a bit more detail, a client will request an entity, a property of that entitry will contain the location for the image along with its last modified timestamp. It can then check against its local copy and if the timestamp is different, request the image(s) from the remoting interface on teh server as a byte array. Any thoughts?