FTP download

I am trying to write a program to download Excel file from a remote server to client's browser.

Initially I thought of setting a shared drive in web server, pointing to the remote server. But our web server is actually considered a public server, that should not have any mapping to the remote server, which is our inhouse internal server. Make any sense? Not sure what I am talking also.

Anyway, the solution is to write an FTP class, that will download data from remote server to the browser. Also know that there are 2 kinds of downloading - ftp and http. FTP is actually slower than HTTP.

I found an FTP class which is written in C#. Unfortunately, our company's program is written in Vb.net. Actually I would rather use C# because it is much more an elegant language, and I studied C# in Microsoft.Net. Well due to time constraint, I am thinking of just compiling the C# class into a library and used it.

For one thing, I dont have the luxury to convert the C# class to vb.net.
Secondly, I don't know if the codes work yet, no point wasting my time converting.

Anyway, if it is usable, I will convert it eventually, not sure when though...

Dot Net Remoting

Since our web server is not allowed to install Microsoft Office, I am going to use an application server to process Excel objects. The web server will then call this remote object.

Design considerations:
a. to remote only Excel portion and pass in dataset from web server? or

b. to remote the entire Controller - i.e. from extraction of data to excel formatting.

I am inclined towards method A as I will not need to have two copies of objects for data access. Disadvantage of method A however is passing of dataset to the application server. I am not sure whether this is the most effective solution.