What is a Smart Client.
Microsoft say: “Smart clients are easily deployed and managed client applications that provide an adaptive, responsive and rich interactive experience by leveraging local resources and intelligently connecting to distributed data sources.”
With that said it is true that most Information Workers still deal with document-centric processes and spend the vast majority of their desktop time using Outlook, Word, Excel and more and more are taking advantage of the data collection power of InfoPath. This is why these Information Workers resist browser-based applications when it comes to document-centric processes, for the most part.
With Visual Studio 2005 and the Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 (VSTO), you can build Smart Client Office applications using 100% managed .Net code, and can easily deploy these solutions without embedding code into the document.
The benefits of developing office solutions to solve document-centric processes are numerous:
• Leverage the familiarity your users have with the office products that use on a daily bases such as Outlook, Excel and Word
• Leverage the power of Word and Excel without reinventing the wheel (such as formatting in Word, calculations in Excel and communication capabilities of Outlook)
• Leverage the full power of .Net, using 100% managed code
• Develop Word and Excel application using the Visual Studio Visual Designers
• Fully support document-centric problem domains and finally address the needs of the Information Workers
If you’re building Line of Business applications for Information Workers, you should be looking at building Smart Clients Applications that target Microsoft Office System 2003 using Visual Studio 2005 and the Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 (VSTO)
