Update: See the relaunched Smart Client Developer Center
Dave Hill, from the Microsoft .Net Enterprise Architecture team, has finally definitively explained the term “Smart Client”. He even gets into “Rich Client” and “Thin Client”. Now we can put these terms to bed. I was going round and round discussing this with architecturally minded folks. I can finally refer folks to this document. Thanks, Dave!
A Smart Client:
- Utilizes Local Resources
- Is Connected
- Is Offline Capable
- Has an Intelligent Install and Update
- Has Client Device Flexibility
Here's a very nice graph you should bandy about when you're explaining Smart Clients.
The document unfortunately does not give a dictionary definition of Rich and Thin clients, but the document does explain what Microsoft means by them. Rich client is a traditional Client/Server client application and Thin Client is a browser client.
Dave also has a Smart Client Architecture Webcast. Check it out. His blog also has some No-Touch Deployment goodies.
The article introduces a new application block:
Smart Client Offline Application Block Release Set For Mid February
The Online/Offline Application Block is a set of documentation and reusable code components that the developer can use to enable an application to continue working even when the network connection is not available, and switch to working online as soon as the network connection becomes available. This block will provide guidance on when and how to develop Offline Support for Windows Forms-based clients, while addressing the issues of presence detection, caching of reference and transaction data, reconciliation of reference and transaction data, and two-way data synchronization schemes.
and let's us greet Martin Fowler. Martin Fowler is on Microsoft's Architect Advisory Board. Hi, Martin!
Please don't make us use Party objects!
From Miguel de Icaza's, blog:
Mainsoft's J2EE product (Permalink)
A fascinating product from Mainsoft has been released: Visual MainWin for J2EE.
This product lets you run your ASP.NET applications written in C# or VB.NET inside a J2EE application server and integrates beautifully with Visual Studio.NET. All .NET applications can also use EJBs and reference Java classes, you can see a live Flash demo of it.
Mainsoft has been using Mono's class libraries to deliver the functionality and they are regular contributors to the code base. We wish them much luck with their new product.
.NET keeps encroaching on Java! ASP.NET on one side and even DB2 CLR on the other! You can join the party any time, Oracle.
Lluis Sanchez, on the
Mono team, just
improved the Mono binary formatter by 3x by using
CIL instead of
reflection. Run out and buy your favorite
IL book today!