This would probably be a good time for Microsoft to define "smart client" ;) Essentially, a smart client app is simply an app that runs locally on the client PC and runs offline. You could build one using VB6 or VBA in Office. It just so happens that the .NET Framework, the .NET Compact Framework, and Tablet PC SDK, among other technologies now shipping, provide the BEST approach to building smart client applications. One of the things they enable -- which developers can optionally take advantage of -- is no-touch deployment. For this app, instead of doing "URL-based," no-touch deployment, we decided to use the .NET Application Updater Component (http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/windowsforms/appupdater.aspx). While you do have to install the app the first time, this component, which was used in Terrarium and which has been used by a number of enterprise customers -- see our Customers tab above, allows for automatic updates (no-touch updates if you will). The first time you install the client exe, you'll notice about 4 minutes later it downloads v1.1 of the app and prompts to see if you want to restart with the updated version (which provides the language menu, showing off localization). You can witness this all over again, by going to C:\Program Files\TaskVision (if that's where you installed the client) and opening the AppStart.config file. Change this line <AppFolderName>1.1.0.0</AppFolderName> to <AppFolderName>1.0.0.0</AppFolderName> and the app will download and launch the update all over again for you. (great for demos) This is explained in detail in the URL above, which is also cited in the TaskVision Solution Overview whitepaper. The .NET Application Updater Component is a great, stable piece of code -- you can get all the source at the URL I listed above -- which gives some hint of what we plan to build into the .NET Framework natively for no-touch deployment in future versions (e.g. the ability to have the app no-touch deploy and run offline natively, without having to do special things in the code to enable that; the ability for the user to roll back to previous versions; etc.) You'll note we say TaskVision shows off no-touch deployment, and it does, when it comes to pushing out updates, anyway. Hope that helps shed some light. thanks, Mike |