With the Smart Client Software Factory, architects and developers can quickly incorporate many of the proven practices and patterns of building composite smart client applications. These practices and patterns have been identified during the development of many smart client applications and their components.

By using the software factory, architects and developers can focus their efforts on business opportunities and create smart client applications that effectively address the needs of their organizations.

The Smart Client Software Factory provides an integrated set of guidance that assists architects and developers in creating composite smart client applications. These applications have one or more of the following characteristics:

• They have a rich user interface that takes advantage of the power of the Microsoft Windows desktop.
• They connect to multiple back-end systems to exchange data with them.
• They present information coming from multiple and diverse sources through an integrated user interface, so the data looks like it came from one back-end system.
• They take advantage of local storage and processing resources to enable operation during periods of no network connectivity or intermittent network connectivity.
• They are easily deployed and configured.

Overview

Architects and developers identify and discover the proven practices and patterns through application development. This is an expensive process, especially when proven practices and patterns are discovered later in the application life cycle and applying them causes refactoring. Alternatively, development teams can investigate and attempt to identify proven practices and patterns before starting the application development project. This also can be a time consuming and difficult activity because patterns and practices are often coming from different sources and have to be compared, selected, and integrated before use.

With the Smart Client Software Factory, architects and developers can quickly incorporate many of the proven patterns and practices of composite smart client development. The software factory provides a set of proven and integrated practices that are exposed through patterns, How-to topics, QuickStarts, a reference implementation, a Visual Studio Guidance Automation Toolkit package, and architecture documentation. The software factory guides projects through the development of smart client applications based on the architecture of the Composite User Interface Application Block. By using the software factory, architects and developers can focus more of their efforts on implementing business requirements.

New In This Release

The April 2008 release of the Smart Client Software Factory includes support for Visual Studio 2008 and Guidance Automation Extensions – February 2008 release and Guidance Automation Toolkit – February 2008 release. This release does not support Visual Studio 2005.

Intended Audience

This guidance is intended for software architects and software developers. To develop applications using this guidance, you should have an understanding of the following technologies:

• Microsoft Visual Basic or Microsoft Visual C#
• Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5
• Windows Forms

System Requirements

This guidance was designed to run on the Microsoft Windows Vista, Windows XP Professional, or Windows Server 2003 operating system. Applications built using this guidance will require the .NET Framework 3.5 to run.

Before you can use the software factory, the following must be installed:

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
• Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5
• Guidance Automation Extensions (February 2008 or later). Note: if you do not install the Guidance Automation Extensions, you will not be able to use the guidance package, but you can still install the factory.
• SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition

Optional components are the following

• Enterprise Library 3.1. Download this component if you want to make full use of Enterprise Library.
• Guidance Automation Toolkit for Visual (February 2008 or later). This is required to modify the guidance package.
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SDK. This is required to modify the guidance package.

More Information

The Smart Client Software Factory, like other patterns & practices deliverables, is associated with a community site. On this community site, you can post questions, provide feedback, or connect with other users for sharing ideas. Community members can also help Microsoft plan and test future offerings and download additional content such as extensions and training material.