Microsofts Message: Smart Clients

At VSLive, emphasis on .NET clients, Tablets, Avalon, Indigo

By Alan Zeichick

March 1, 2005 —

SAN FRANCISCO — At this winter’s VSLive conference, held here in early February, Microsoft’s core message was about the importance of so-called “smart clients.” That is, that developers should build server-side applications that can operate through a browser using ASP.NET 2.0—but if the server detects that the client is a Windows box with the .NET Framework installed, developers should push down a Windows Forms client application instead.

VSLive is a Windows-specific developer conference from Fawcette Technical Publications.

S. “Soma” Somasegar, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s developer division, described smart clients as bringing together the best attributes of thin clients, which operate solely through a browser, and rich clients executing binaries on the local machine. The smart clients would combine local resources, if available, with network-attached distributed data sources, such as on an enterprise LAN, and offer offline and online capabilities.

“If you want to take the low total cost of ownership [and] the ease of deployment ability from the Web client, and combine it with the rich user experience, the online/offline capability and the ability to leverage local computing resources,” Somasegar said, “you have a new breed of client software, which we call smart client.”

Smart clients are a way of envisioning two-tiered or three-tied development that leverages the .NET Framework and in some cases, Microsoft Office. However, there’s no specific set of technologies that enable smart-client development, and Microsoft wasn’t promoting any products or other initiatives around them.

In other news, Microsoft has released a Tablet PC Game SDK created jointly with 3Leaf Development. Somasegar also promoted a set of ink controls from Agilix, called InfiNotes, which developers can use to embed rich note-taking capabilities into Windows Forms and Web Forms applications. A version of the InfiNotes controls is available for deployment at no cost.

Microsoft also announced a Connected Systems Business Kit, a collection of sample apps and white papers for implementing service-oriented architectures using existing .NET technologies and products, and the Patterns & Practices Enterprise Library, a set of reusable building blocks for large-scale application projects. Those are both offered at no charge.

Pieces of Longhorn
Another theme of VSLive is the gradual release of Avalon, the new presentation subsystem for Windows desktops, which uses a dialect of XML, called XAML, to improve the layout of elements on a video display. Somasegar announced that the second community technology preview (CTP) of Avalon will be released in March.

According to a separate conversation with Ari Bixhorn, director of Web services strategy, Microsoft also will release a CTP of Indigo, the new unified communications subsystem for Windows, around the same time as the Avalon preview. This was also publicly announced in a keynote address by Microsoft’s Eric Rudder, senior vice president for servers and tools.

The value of Indigo, according to Bixhorn, is that it collapses a number of separate Microsoft communications subsystems into a single service broker; essentially, developers code to a single API, and then Indigo (and the .NET Framework) takes care of the rest. The subsystems moved into Indigo include .NET Remoting, ASMX, Web services and MSMQ.

At last year’s Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft touted Avalon and Indigo as “pillars” of Longhorn (the next version of Windows XP), along with WinFS, a new object-oriented file system. Last year, Microsoft announced that WinFS would not be part of Longhorn, and the company had decoupled Avalon and Indigo from the new operating system. So, where does that leave Longhorn?

John Montgomery, director of product management for Microsoft’s developer division, told SD Times that the Longhorn release will contain not only a new user-interface shell, but also significant improvements in security, stability and administrative features.

However, the biggest factor may be that it’s based on the new, tighter Windows Server 2003 codebase and will include a new device driver model. “Eighty percent of blue screens have to do with drivers,” he said, regarding system crashes on the Windows XP client.

The Non Announcement

Share this link: http://www.sdtimes.com/link/28471

Integration Watch: A smart programming project Developers looking to hone their programming skills can try programming a virtual machine that implements a virtual processor

Industry Watch: Clients augment the Web experience New client-side technologies are paving the way for more interactive, and user-centered, Web experiences

Guest View: Be smart and lazy The optimal solution for problems is the simplest one, so always aim to streamline your approach to testing and requirements building. Clayton Long, a software engineer, gives five practices on how to deliver more maintainable applications that give solid results.

Add comment

Name*
Email*
Country

Comment
Preview

News on Monday
more>>
SharePoint Tech Report
more>>

Download Current Issue
ISSUE 3/15/2010 PDF

Need Back Issues?
DOWNLOAD HERE

Receive the print Edition?

Google Code turns 5
Google Code Turns 5, and adds a Paxos Algorithm to make the system more stable and reliable.
03/17/2010 11:16 AM EST

Test your Visual Studio 2010 know-how
Microsoft is offering free beta certification exams for Visual Studio 2010.
03/17/2010 11:08 AM EST

Microsoft lifts the hood on IE9
Microsoft is previewing IE9.
03/16/2010 01:10 PM EST