Smart Clients

There are too many keywords floating around these days like Ajax, WCF, WPF and many more. While I was going through the basics of ASP.NET 2.0 and Ajax something struck me unknowingly. Out of no where people around me started talking about SmartClients. As usual I dived into this genre of application development with lots of enthusiasm. With a bit of googling around I found few links which I feel like sharing with others who might be interested in knowing more about the same.

Smart clients are basically Windows applications which are deployed on a centrally located web server but can take advantages of loca resources of the client. The traditional problem of deploying a windows application on each and every cleint is overcome using this methodology. Any updates to the application are deployed on the server and the cleint can update itself. Visual studio 2005 has built in support for this type of deployment model which they call ClickOnce deployment.

Among many other benifits that the smart clients offer is the offline databases which allows occasinally connected clients to sync up with the centralised database server. So without wasting too much of blog space here are few links that I found interesting

• MSDN FAQ's
• RSSFeeder - end to end example on code project
• FotoVision - end to end example on MSDN
• Appraiser Workbench solution - sample application that comes with Smart Client Software Factory
• There is also the Smart Client Architecture and Design Guide which is downloadable as pdf.

Looks like I have got at least week filled with lots of reading and hands on things to become bit smart at developing smart clients :)

Till I start showing off my smartness, happy programming and as always hope this is of some help.

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