Rob Barker - Why Rob cares about SmartClients?

Is Eugenio Pace working at the SmartClients group on Redmond???

Do you see a backlash against SmartClients? I mean that back in the good/bad old days, when the Novell network goes down, it was time to stop working & start relaxing, because everything was on the network drive. Now you can't even go to the middle of the Nevada dessert and be "offline".

About 3 mins in the video jumps, was this edited?

I first heard about smart clients a while back on www.windowsforms.com.

I think is a cool idea. I've just downloaded the Smart Client Architecture and Design Guide, Patterns and Practices. Its 200+ pages, ah well some bed time reading.

I think a really cool use of this technology is in the service industry, engineers visiting site taking details, connecting when the can, to sync. Great stuff!

Any Quick Start Guides about?

 

He mentions a Dell case study...

Anyone have more information on that?
Please can you share some...

TIA

-Hitesh

PS: I'm busy to find out more about it myself right now... Will post again when I know more.

Tried to search on MS for the case study and had no luck, then tried Google and found it: http://www.microsoft.com/resources/casestudies/casestudy.asp?CaseStudyID=16276 

Cheers, chullybun.

I am just wrapping up the first part of a pretty neat Smart Client / SOA project.  Its a fault tolerant system for monitoring drug manufacturing facilities for FDA compliance that runs on ruggedized Tablet PCs with touchscreens, with the Smart Client Offline Application block and a pluggable framework for different types of things being monitored, etc.  The system will be fully validated in a high profile pharma environment.

The Smart Client Offline Application block works nicely, its a little complex but it works.  We did write a custom connection detector because the default will not tell you when the server is down, only when the local network is down...and it gets confused when you have both a wireless and wired network adapter.  So we wrote a connection detector that pings a web service, which in turn gets the current date/time from the database to verify all links in the chain are working, if not it goes into offline mode.  We also wrote custom cache and queue storage providers to share local data between users, in case the network or server is down across shifts.  We've got electronic signature, which is entered with onscreen keyboard now, but in the future I hope to implement real signature with inking.

Without C#, the .NET Framework, and all of the cool application blocks there is no way I could have written the core of this product, by myself, so quickly.

The Logging application block is another story however.  Just too much of a hassle, fills the event log to capacity with useless messages, etc.  So I swapped it out for log4net.

15.55 minutes in to the video Rob changes the Web client from .net 1.1 to .net 2.0. This changes the grid control from a standard asp.net grid view to a richer grid control with scrolling similar to a WinForms grid view.

I have VS beta 2 and .net 2.0 framework installed but have been unable to achieve the rich web grid control shown after 16:33.

Can you point me to an example or article?

Orbit86 wrote:

you forget to mention those call Centers are in India,Pakistan and taking away US jobs.

They are Jobs that were being done by US workers which are now being done by foreign workers because they are prepared to work for less pay. Now the consumer pays less or the company makes a bigger profit. This is something all capitalist democratic countries should welcome. Protectionism just drives up prices, prevents competition and hence stifles innovation.