InfoPath Dev

Hi,

I am hoping someone can point me in the right direction.
I want to create a web application that allows end users to pull up certain forms and submit them online. The user will first have to register and the forms will load with the users general information pre-filled. The end user will submit the application online or print it and send it in.
A caveat is there will be numerous forms that I would like our business users to initially create and then maintain.

Is there an elegant solution to my problem? Or even a not so elegant I have looked at InfoPath but have not found any way to access these in a visual studio web application. The articles I have found discuss using InfoPath with SharePoint. I do not have any experience with SharePoint and am curious if a regular web application with login, user maintenance, reporting, etc can be developed or deployed to SharePoint and the learning curve.

Thank you

Hi DaveMC1969 and welcome,

The InfoPath Form Services shipped as a standalone install in 2007 but that product was discontinued. Today, the best way to submit InfoPath forms in a Web App is to use SharePoint which comes with an InfoPath Web Part that allows you to create very rich SharePoint web apps that leverage InfoPath and it's wonderful support for XML.

There are other vendors (including Qdabra Software, sponsor of this forum) that provide SharePoint-less solutions to submit forms from the Web. In fact, Qdabra Software has a web-based alternative to this called FormsBoard, but while submitting data from browser based forms is supported for simple forms, it is currently targeted at users who have InfoPath rich client. There are other vendors out there selling tools to submit InfoPath forms via non-ShP web frontends, but they are nowhere near as good as SharePoint at doing this. Even SharePoint's InfoPath Form Services has limitations, though.  

Sorry I couldn't be more helpful. Please contact me if you'd like to see a demo of FormsBoard.