Craig’s Musings

I’m looking forward to contributing to smart client architectures as a member of the Microsoft Architect Advisory Board (MAAB). We have a meeting coming up in early May where this will be a focus. Hopefully we’ll have some material to publish and present more publicly thereafter. In the meantime, there is value in the following resources on the subject of smart clients:

• David Hill weighed in on the definition and makeup of smart clients (also here on his blog). Chris Anderson summarizes David’s original post.
• On 2/27/2004, the Smart Client Offline Application Block was released (announcement). This block is well-accompanied by David Hill’s article. On 1/27/2004, David gave an overview webcast on this subject, too, with Brenton Webster; he also points out a case study on a medical diagnosis smart client application.
• Naveen Yajaman posted his slide deck and demo code from the Smart Client Offline Application Block webcast he presented on 3/25/2004.
• The deployment section on windowsforms.net lists several resources worth mentioning as follows: Updater Application Block (pull-based, BITS-by-default solution)(6/27/2003), .NET Application Updater Component (reference; WebDAV, not BITS, solution)(5/5/2003) and Write Auto-Updating Apps with .NET and the Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) API (Feb-2003).
• David Hill answers some questions (e.g. smart clients and no-touch deployment (NTD)) he received as feedback to his post, above, here and here. Jon Udell warns not to give up on NTD, which is here today, by waiting for ClickOnce. If you’re already actively developing with the current Visual Studio 2005 Whidbey Technology Preview, though, the April 2004 issue of MSDN Magazine features an article on ClickOnce by Brian Noyes that was recently posted online.
• GDN features a workspace for releases related to smart clients here.

7/12/2004 update: more smart client resources:

• Smart client deep dive
• Making a rich client smart: going offline
• Smart client architecture and design guide