Smart Client Application Part3

Office Smart Client Applications

Microsoft Office System 2003 provides you with a useful platform on which to build smart client applications, especially in an enterprise setting. With an Office smart client solution, you can integrate data sources, accessed through Web services, with the features of Word 2003, Excel 2003, InfoPath 2003, or other Office applications to develop smart client solutions.
Microsoft Office 2003 & 2oo7 has a number of key features and options for building smart client solutions. These include:

Smart tags: Smart tags give applications a way to provide users with context sensitive data pertaining to the contents of a document and allow them to easily see and use relevant information when working within a document.

Smart documents: Smart documents provide a more powerful way for the user to interact with documents and business Web services.

Microsoft Visual Studio® Tools for the Microsoft Office System: This suite of tools enables developers to create managed code Office smart client applications by using the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET development system.
Microsoft Office InfoPath™: InfoPath is an application that can gather structured data from the user by using a form-like interface. InfoPath provides support for XML Web services, a form-based user interface, and support for standard technologies such as WSDL and UDDI. InfoPath supports limited offline use by allowing the user to interact with the form when offline and then allowing the user to forward the form to a Web service when the user is online.

Mobile Smart Client Applications

Mobile smart clients are applications that run on smart devices — Pocket PCs, Smartphones, and other small form factor devices such as set-top boxes. These applications are developed using the .NET Compact Framework, which is a subset of the full .NET Framework.
The .NET Compact Framework has many of the features of the full .NET Framework, supports XML, and consumes Web services. It is optimized for use on small form factor devices, and it includes the Windows Forms designer for developing the user interface.
By using the Visual Studio .NET Smart Device Projects, you can develop smart clients that will run on the .NET Compact Framework. This approach allows you to develop, test and debug an application by using Visual Studio .NET on an emulator of the small form factor device. The use of an emulator significantly speeds up development and testing of these types of applications.
Mobile smart client applications are typically used to provide mobile access to essential data and services, or to collect and aggregate data when the user is mobile.
Examples of these types of applications are insurance and financial data-gathering applications, inventory management applications, and personal productivity management applications.
This guide does not specifically focus on mobile smart client applications, although many of the architectural issues and solutions that it discusses are relevant to smart devices.