The Best of Both Worlds
Imagine the flexibility of a PC based application with the ability to update itself. Imagine this application receiving all of it's data from web services, rather than through a direct connection to your database!

Along with the obvious advantages, there are some hidden ones as well. While clients and remote offices are connecting to your company, the home office is shielded with three layers of security. Clients log into their local applications using their assigned ID and password. Once authenticated, the application can re-authenticate the user for each data call required. Each data call is then authenticated through your local Intranet to converse with the internal database servers.

Local resources and user experience
Smart client applications come in many shapes and sizes with varying degrees of functionality. One trait that all smart client applications share is an ability to exploit local resources such as hardware for storage, processing or data capture such as compact flash memory, CPUs and scanners for example. Smart client solutions offer hi-fidelity end-user experiences by taking full advantage of all that the Microsoft® Windows® platform has to offer. Examples of well known smart client applications are Word, Excel, MS Money, and even PC games such as Half-Life 2. Unlike "browser-based" applications such as Amazon.Com or eBay.com, smart client applications live on your PC, laptop, Tablet PC, or smart device.

Smart client applications can be used whether you are online or offline. When they are online, smart client applications can provide an even richer experience. However, one of the key aspects of a smart client is they work exceptionally well, connected or not.

Connected
Smart client applications are able to readily connect to and exchange data with systems across the enterprise or the internet. Web services allow smart client solutions to utilize industry standard protocols such as XML, HTTP and SOAP to exchange information with any type of remote system. Visual Studio, the .NET Framework and the .NET Compact Framework make consuming Web services easier than ever before. Technologies such as Microsoft® SQL Server, Microsoft® Message Queuing (MSMQ) and BizTalk Server also provide readily leveraged ways to synchronize and exchange information between systems.

Offline Capable
Smart client applications work whether connected to the Internet or not. Microsoft® Outlook is a great example. Smart clients can take advantage of local caching and processing to enable operation during periods of no network connectivity or intermittent network connectivity. This functionality is extremely valuable in this new era of mobile information workers especially given the cost, latency and speed of mobile connections.

Offline capabilities are not only of use in mobile scenarios however, desktop solutions can take advantage of offline architecture to update backend systems on background threads, thus keeping the user interface responsive and improving the overall end-user experience. This architecture can also provide cost and performance benefits since the user interface needs not be shuttled to the smart client from a server.

Since smart clients can exchange just the data needed with other systems in the background, reductions in the volume of data exchanged with other systems are realized (even on hard-wired client systems this bandwidth reduction can realize huge benefits). This in turn increases the responsiveness of the user interface (UI) since the UI is not rendered by a remote system.