A couple of months ago, I happended to attend a presentation on a Software Product developed using Microsoft.NET Framework and I was pretty impressed with its features and the user interface. Since the Lead Architect himself was presenting the capabilities, I curiously asked how long did it take for you to come this far in terms of features that he presented. And he said we have been working on this for around 8 months now and we have a 6 people development team. I knew that the team had other tasks as well and I was pretty amazed. Then he said - "Its based on Smart Client Framework from Microsoft" in a way that sounded like - What! you dont know about Smart Client ?
Since then, i have been interested to know what MS is providing that makes Windows Forms Application development simple. So for the last couple of days I have been trying to understand what this is all about. My first stop was google and I would advise reading David Hill's blog to know more about Smart Client.
My attempts to download took me to the patterns and practices home page in MSDN and from there i jumped to CodePlex ( MS Open Source Project Repository). I downloaded everything that is available on SmartClient and when I ran the Setup, i saw a "Check Dependencies" button to the right and could immediately see that there were some items missing on my PC. Oh, btw, I have Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition with Service Pack 1 installed on my Dell Latitude D620 Laptop. And I also have .NET 3.0 and the Visual Studio Extensions for .NET 3.0 In installed. Coming back, the items missing were -
Guidance Automation Extensions
Guidance Automation ToolKit
SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition
You could complete the installation and comeback to have Guidance Automation support. However I decided to install them before I go ahead. So I quit the installation and downloaded all of the above. I also noticed that there is an Enterprise Library 3.1 released in May 2007. uh! There is also a Microsoft .NET 3.0 Framework SP1, but since the installation failed, I gave up. Anyway it was not a dependency. I installed the items in the order as listed above and then finally i installed the Smart Client Software Factory.
I m all set for exploring Smart Client Software Factory. I launched Visual Studio and verified that I can create a solution that is using the Smart Client Software Factory and it works!
Keep looking at this space for updates on my experiments with Smart Client Software Factory.
Thanks for Reading.
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2 comments:
exactly something that i am working on is this project, also we have web client software factory too... almost on the same lines, seems like all of this going to converse ...
Thanks for writing this.
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