Architect Smart Client Applications.

The article discusses the foundations of architecting and building smart client applications in Visual Basic .NET. Leveraging the Windows user interface is the most obvious of the pillars and entails creating applications that take advantage of the Windows Forms application program interface in the .NET Framework and installing them locally on the client machine. The need to create a responsive and appealing user interface is not particular to smart clients. Primary among these techniques is designing your user interface to be adaptive. This will be useful if you want your smart client to be able to add new features over time through the auto-deployment of additional assemblies. The second pillar of smart client applications is the need to work seamlessly in both connected and disconnected scenarios. To support this kind of functionality, an application with offline usage in mind must be designed. The third pillar is the ability for smart client applications to be auto-deployed and updated. To many,this is the quintessential feature of smart clients and addresses the second of the two driving factors that led architects and developers to move away from Windows-based applications installed on the desktop in the first place. The infrastructure of the .NET framework supports both auto-deployment and auto-updating by providing automatic application isolation through the use of private assemblies and removing the need to register code on the machine, as was the case in the unmanaged world. The final pillar in building smart client applications is to provide secure access to data and services.