Chapter 8: Building Smart Client Applications

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Introduction

Microsoft Office-based applications have been an integral part of enterprise data applications for many years . One of the traditional problems faced by developers is that their binary formats have made extending and sharing their information difficult. The integration of XML directly into Microsoft Office System 2003 and the .NET Framework enables developers to create a new class of applications called smart clients . These types of applications have quickly become a central part of the enterprise application infrastructure. Their tight integration with XML enables these applications to freely exchange data and interact with all types of business logic as well as exchange data with Web Services.

There are a variety of advantages to using these types of applications, especially when using Office 2003 and InfoPath. One of the most important is that you can separate data and business logic from the other aspects of the actual document presentation. This allows a clear division of data and business logic that enables easy data reuse across other enterprise-based applications. Additionally, because these applications can use customer-defined XML schema, the data becomes easily transferable and reusable across multiple applications.

Developers can leverage smart client applications to integrate their solutions into various offline and online scenarios. This chapter covers how smart client applications are built using the .NET Framework, InfoPath, and the rest of the Office System family. We will also cover how these types of solutions enable a broad set of functionality that can be both connected and disconnected from enterprise data stores.