[emjoes1]

Prob C++... At least that is the only thing that I believe will meet your requirements exactly.

I ended up (a few years back) going with WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) in C# targeting .NET client profile. Of course you still need .NET, however, the client profile is a much smaller install than the full version and I have no problems going from .NET 4 to 4.5. No specific version is needed unless you want to use new features.

In regards to your needs here is a couple of reasons I like WPF: -The entire GUI can be written in markup XAML (an XML based markup language) so its kind of web like. You can use the GUI if you like but doing it in XAML forces good design patterns and IMO is easier. -"Click Once Deployment" allows you to publish the app build to a network share which can be run directly over the network (no local install). There are various options so if you choose to run locally you can. If you update your app, you simply publish again, and when the end users launches the app again it will be updated.

You can bundle dependencies so the first install would include the large (41MB) .NET client profile but after that it would just be the size of your app. This has worked well for me to allow users to install/update the apps over slow VPN connections.