I've been having some performance problems with the current implementation of how PainlessSVN read the Subversion server's info. It works fine for local browsing, but it bogs down to unacceptable levels when reading information across the LAN. It doesn't work for WANs in it's current implementation. One big issue I haven't been able to work around is removable flash drives. For some some reason, flash drives slow down file operations for PainlessSVN.
There has been a few times now where I needed to manage my Subversion server from a remote location. I would have loved to have PainlessSVN to do this across the Internet. I'm one of those people that absolutely hate command-line utilities. I am reminded of this everytime I have to go tweak something in Subversion by hand.
I know I had talked about creating a self-contained RPC styled backend, but now I'm seeing the wisdom of just using the built-in resources. In this case web services running in IIS. My biggest concern was deployability. Web services have been notoriously hard to deploy. I have finally started seeing installers that will do this. I currently can't afford the installers that do this, especially on my budget.
I'm gaining some valuable experience dealing with web services at my hobby open sourced project at http://www.wheelmud.net I've been following the example that DoFactory has set in their sample reference app. This sample app has a lot of good practices, which have saved me many hours of hair pulling and head banging sessions. Btw, DoFactory has been one of the best purchases that I've made in a while. I highly recommended to those programmers that want to move up to the next level and to learn effective software engineering patterns. I considered their for pay downloadable stuff a "Concise Introduction to Being a Software Architect."