New Project: The Smart Client Baseline Architecture Toolkit

  • Article

As many of you already know, we are working on a new project whose goal is to provide comprehensive, end-to-end guidance for building common Smart Clients.

We know CAB is a good starting point, but it is certainly not enough. For example:

  • What would be the best way of adding offline capabilities to a CAB based application?
  • What if you need to add an authorization service?
  • How would you structure a project?
  • Does MVP always make sense?
  • How to maximize the amount of code that can be automatically tested?
  • Which is the most effective way of integrating Enterprise Library blocks?

These are some of the questions we want to provide answers to with this new deliverable. We also recognize there's no single architecture for Smart Clients. We believe there are many depending on the scenario.

Creating a solution for sales force automation is one thing, creating a call center desktop is another one. The first one will probably require offline capabilities, and some "lightweight" deployment (you might not own the machine for example), the second one will probably consist on many many modules, using different technologies, will probably be centrally deployed and managed, etc.

So we started with the first one: guidance to build occasionally connected, mobile Smart Clients using Winforms on .NET 2.0

There is already an interesting amount of content available in the project's workspace. We have now moved to weekly publicly available builds and the third one is ready for download here.

This 3rd drop includes:

  • A Reference Implementation (a more comprehensive example of a well written CAB application than the BankTeller Quickstart included in CAB)
  • A Visual Studio Guidance Package (automation to generate the most common artifacts using GAT right from Visual Studio)
  • Some initial documentation

As usual, please let us know what you think, help us prioritize, etc. Send an e-mail to eugeniop AT microsoft.com