ClickOnce - Not an ad for your camera!

On Feb 7th, 2005, I will be doing the keynote at VSLive! in San Francisco. Among other things, I will be speaking about ‘Smart Clients’.  

 

One of the key advances that we are adding in Visual Studio 2005 for easy, secure, reliable deployment of smart client applications is the ClickOnce feature. ClickOnce combines the best of the Web and Windows – the richness of a Windows-based application and the deployment benefits of a Web application. Users can download rich client applications from a web based server and run the app offline. The deployment server automatically updates client applications on the user’s machine in a safe and secure manner i.e. the client applications run in a security context that can prevent them from doing harmful things at runtime. Not only that, subsequent deployments of a new version of the application (caused by a dot release, or a security fix or the next version) is automatic with ClickOnce.

 

I am very pleased to see the excitement around ClickOnce. Several people have blogged about it –Wei-Meng Lee ‘s article talks about how smart clients are supported in Visual Studio 2005 and how it makes deploying them easy and painless as does Jay Glynn in his blog and Bart De Smet in his blog.

 

I am interested in knowing what you think about Smart Clients – especially the ease and power of ClickOnce. Please let me know your thoughts.

- Namaste!