Visual Studio® 2008 ALL-IN-ONE DESK REFERENCE FOR DUMMIES®

Chapter III.1. Getting Smart about Smart Clients

In This Chapter

Visual Studio has all the tools you need to build everything from the simplest to the most complex Windows applications. By using the Microsoft .NET Framework, Visual Studio provides the visual designers that make building Windows applications a breeze. For example, Visual Studio gives you the following elements to accomplish common tasks:

• Project Templates help you set up your project.

• Visual designers help you lay out Windows Forms.

• The control toolbox makes adding user interface (UI) elements to your Windows Forms a breeze.

• Wizards, property-setting windows, and shortcut task lists enable you to easily configure UI elements.

This chapter walks you through some of the tools that Visual Studio provides for building managed Windows applications that use either Visual Basic or C#.

Switching from Fat Clients to Smart Clients

The Windows operating system (OS) and applications that run on Windows have been around for more than 25 years. With ubiquity, early Windows applications became bloated and hard to deploy. In response, developers snubbed their noses at these newly dubbed fat clients and started using a combination of client and server resources to create leaner applications.

Proving that the grass isn't always greener, folks quickly learned that thin clients had their problems, too. Although thin clients were easier to deploy, they weren't all that feature rich, and they didn't work when the network went down. Then came the ...