Chapter 38. Developing Smart Clients


In This Chapter

  • Practical Web Service Consumption

  • Using the New Application Settings System

  • Supporting Offline and Online Operation

  • Authorizing and Authenticating Users

  • Multithreaded Web Service Consumption

  • Using the BackgroundWorker Control

At last, there is a marked distinction between simple disconnected applications and the new breed of applications made possible by the .NET Framework: smart clients.

The phrase smart client is a broad term that may apply to many different types of applications depending on the person using the phrase. For the purposes of this chapter, the author is referring solely to a specific subset of applications that he considers the only true "smart clients." These applications have the following characteristics:

  • Agile An agile application is one that can operate properly under varying circumstances. Users should never run the application and end up in an environment where the application fails to work. For connected applications, this means that the application can work in both offline and online modes.

  • Distributed client A distributed client basically means that the ultimate back end of the client is not a simple file on disk, but a web service providing encapsulation for some remote data store.

  • Responsive Responsive applications are fast; users should never encounter a situation where they are sitting idle waiting for the application to finish doing something. This means that smart clients need to make heavy use of multithreading technologies to remain responsive while still operating on large data sets.

  • Secure A secure application knows the identity and privilege level of the user working within the application. These credentials may be stored remotely or may be validated locally. The bottom line is that a smart client will not allow a user to do something that the developers or administrators did not intend, including tampering and other malicious activity.

This chapter provides you with what you need to start building smart clients using Windows Forms 2.0. After you learn how to build these applications, you will learn how to deploy them in Chapter 39, "Application Deployment Using ClickOnce."



Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Unleashed
Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Unleashed
ISBN: 0672327767
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 298

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