Summary

Whether we developers like it or not, users are expecting more and more from our applications. When a platform like the .NET Framework comes along, it raises the bar for what users expect professional applications to do and how they should behave. The demand for agile applications that follow the IJW ("It Just Works") credo is at an all-time high.

To keep users pleased and to produce high-quality applications, developers need to know the techniques involved in building agile, scalable, powerful smart clients. This chapter provided you with samples of how you can create applications that detect the presence of the network, consume web services asynchronously, perform background tasks without interfering with the foreground UI, and present users with a login prompt upon entering the application. These tools and techniques, combined with all of the other information this book provides on Windows Forms programming, should help you create extremely powerful and compelling applications.