In the words of Chris Anderson, Architect on the Avalon team, “This is not the final API set, XAML spec, or anything else - this is a ‘Technology Preview’”. And still, I’ve spent all day installing in on my machine. Wahoo!
Channel9 has a nice video of Scott Garvey, a Microsoft Smart Client Evangelist, talking about what’s a smart client and what’s not. Scott also discussed some examples of smart clients, e.g. eBay for "power sellers."
For me, things boil down this way: if it’s something I’ve got to spend significant time in, I really want it to be a smart client, otherwise I’m going to get frustrated. For example, Outlook Web Access is great for occasional use from any PC under the sun, but if I’m using it for more than 5 minutes, I’m guaranteed to press a hotkey like Ctrl+A and get nothing like I expect, forcing me to find my laptop so I can get some real work done in Outlook.
Business Desktop Deployment Framework: all you’d ever want to know about deploying Windows in an enterprise so that you’ve got a suitable platform on which to deploy smart client applications
Since the Smart Client DevCenter now has a Content Strategist (me), expect to see regular releases of articles and samples exploring smart client-related technologies, including but not limited to Windows Forms, the Compact Framework and Visual Studio Tools for Office.
And don’t hesitate to send Jonathan or me your complaints and suggestions. We don’t put this site up for our health, you know; we do it for you!
“Bill Wagner takes us through using the more extensible Updater Application Block to automatically install and maintain applications. He also discusses the importance of validation and how to use post processing commands.”
Mark Levison of Databeacon talks about the first commercial-grade .NET No-Touch Deployment application to be deployed over the internet (at least, as far as he and I know). I asked Mark what his motivations were for using a smart client instead of a web app. These were his reasons:
“Integration with Desktop – export to excel, word, send to mail recipient, etc.
“The user never has to wait for a round trip to the server. Once the application is up and running everything is done locally, the user is never left waiting by a suddenly slow internet connection.
“Our application gets a full blown window with its menu and toolbar, we’re not stuck inside of IE.
“Uses the clients CPU do all of work. Our application is graphically and sometimes computationally intensive, if we did all of this work server side, we would eventually run into scaling problems.”
Congrats Mark and Databeacon. This is but the beginning of much greater things to come.
NOTE: I don’t know if this was exuberance at making the instructions for running the sample easy or not, but you should absolutely not “[u]se the Microsoft .NET Framework wizard to grant full trust to trusted sites.” Trusted or not, you should not award any code any more permission than it needs. For instructions on how to build an MSI setup for configuring a NTD client for just the right amount of permissions until you can use ClickOnce (which handles permission elevation much better than NTD), you can read this article on the topic.
My Windows Forms partner in crime, Mike Weinhardt, pointed out to me this morning that the Windows Forms team has posted their way cool Windows Forms 2.0 samples, including:
Design Mode Dialog- Mike Harsh This is a sample dialog component that allows any form to go into “design mode” at runtime. This component highlights the new, easy to consume, designer infrastructure APIs in Whidbey and has the same usage pattern as other common dialogs.
Stock Quote Chart Generator- Joe Stegman This app uses the sample asynchronously polls a web service for stock quotes and charts the results over a customizable time period.
MSN Messenger Clone- Scott Morrison This is a Windows Forms app that emulates the functionality of MSN Messenger.
Internet Explorer Clone- Joe Stegman This is a Windows Forms app that looks like Internet Explorer 6 and uses the new WebBrowser control.
Windows Forms RSS Portal- Joe Stegman This is portal type application that aggregates RSS feeds asynchronously.
Outlook 2003 Clone- Joe Stegman This is a UI front end that has the look and feel of Microsoft Outlook 2003.
