How to distribute ASP.NET app on lightweight hardware (such as NAS)?

I want to ship a piece of hardware to clients that they plug in to their network via Ethernet or USB. This device contains an ASP.NET web application that they access via a web browser on any PC in their network.

This needs to be a small device that costs less than $500, meaning it can't be a full server with a Win2008 server license. This would be repeated hundreds or thousands of times - once f开发者_如何学编程or each new customer.

Are there external hard drives or NAS devices that can run as an IIS/ASP.NET web server?

Thanks, Roger

If you stick with a PC setup, you might be able to use a desktop OS and IIS Express. It should support everything you want, you might even be able to get this on a cheap netbook.

I'm sure you could build a small PC based an an embedded motherboard, or even a mini-itx board. But, this is a programming Q&A site and not really the place to ask about building servers.

If you're looking into keeping it cheap I would highly recommend looking into Mono which is free and runs ASP.Net very well. If you have any Windows-specific things you'd need to possibly change those but hopefully you wouldn't have those on a website.

You should look into converting your app to Mono.Net running on a virtualized environment. The OS and the runtime environment would be open source and would allow you to freely distribute it.

Mono.Net

Virutal Box - VM Enviornment

Ubuntu Linux OS

Buy a netbook with windows 7 home premium on it as that bundles IIS7. If you need any more "capacity", then you should look at bigger hardware anyway.