Pro Service-Oriented Smart Clients with .NET 2.0

Smart clients are desktop applications that take advantage of the benefits of a web application and a Windows application. Web applications, for example, are easily deployed; you simply copy files to a server and instantly the application is deployed to millions. Windows applications have the advantage of being very responsive but are difficult to deploy because you have to install the application on the end-users machine. Smart clients are the best of both worlds, making them attractive for both technological and financial reasons.There is something else about smart clients that make them very attractive to organizations (and particularly their executives). Smart clients save organizations money in two obvious ways; they ultimately run on the end user's machine therefore, unlike web applications organizations need a lot less hardware to run the applications. Secondly, due to the applications responsiveness you can do the same amount of work in less time with fewer people. The resources available today that discuss smart clients are totally insufficient when it comes to building solutions to solve practical problems. The current set of resources doesn't even address what it means to be a smart client, much less cover issues like agility, service orientation, testing intelligence, etc. This book, the first covering service orientation with smart clients, offers a unique blend of theory and practical examples. With a comprehensive focus on testing agility in smart clients, the book gives pragmatic case studies to re-enforce theory and also explores the use of smart clients. TOC:From the contents:Part I: Introduction; Types of Smart Clients; A Windows Forms Smart Client; Windows Forms Front-end; Deploying the Solution.- A Smart Client Built Using Excel 2003.- Part II: Web Services Communication; Code Access Security; Offline Support; Smart Agents; Deploying Smart Clients; Testing Service Oriented Smart Clients; Resources; Conclusion.