The subtitle of this book includes the term smart client, and it's that kind of application that I had in mind for most of the scenarios used in the examples throughout the book. As such, I think it is worthwhile to quickly define what constitutes a smart client application.

A smart client application is first and foremost a rich client application, or fat client, that runs on the user's desktop. This most often means a Windows Forms application in a .NET world, but it could also be a Visual Studio Tools for Office application, or it could be a smart device user interface. Smart client applications typically aren't standalone applications that run exclusively on the user's desktop; they are most often distributed applications, and the Windows Forms application is just the presentation tier portion of the application that communicates over the network to middle-tier application servers, Web services, or back-end databases.

Smart client applications often support offline use, allowing the application to still be useful when not connected to the network, or when the back-end servers of the application are unreachable, such as when using a laptop computer on an airline or in a customer's offsite location. Smart client applications can be most effectively operated if they support automatic deployment and update over the network, such as using the ClickOnce technology that is part of .NET 2.0 (and which is the topic of my forthcoming book in this series, written with Duncan Mackenzie). Finally, a smart client ideally runs under a constrained security context on the user's machine, and it prevents the smart client application from doing anything it wasn't designed to do, or anything that the user isn't willing to let it do based on who created the application or where it came from.

This book focuses on presenting data in a Windows Forms application and lets you interact with that data in a rich way. This is only a small slice of the architectural and technological considerations you need to master in order to develop a large-scale smart client application. To design and develop smart client applications, you will also need to become acquainted with distributed communications, data caching and synchronization, automatic deployment and update, and code access security. However, having a rich user interface is one of the most critical factors for moving to a smart client architecture successfully instead of just building Web applications. Learning how to build good data-bound interfaces will help you along the path to being able to build successful smart client applications.