This week we have a virtual team meeting for Architects of the Developer and Platform Group across Europe in Poland. At the same time, the Microsoft subsidiary in Poland ran their Microsoft Technology Summit - a conference with about 2500 attendees (damn, that's a large one;)).

I did a session on the experience I made within several prototypes on Composite UI Application Block and Smart Client Software Factory. The key-talking points of my talk where the following:

• CAB and SCSF really focus on composite smart clients, which are a very special flavour of Smart Clients with much additional requirements such as a plug-able infrastructure or loosely coupled communications. It is not that good for the small to medium sized smart clients.
• Then we have taken a look at the object models and patterns followed by CAB. Even if you don't use CAB, at a very high-level perspective they are really interesting and in my oppinion they are a good source for grabbing ideas when designing such types of applications.
• Finally, I really prefer a pragmatic, use case driven approach for identifying and packaging WorkItems within your CAB modules. In many cases a Use Case of a Use Case diagram driven by the client-side (only;)) of the application maps 1:1 to a WorkItem. Of course after a couple of refinement steps you will refactor and mostly simplify your WorkItem infrastructure. This is something I pointed out during my session as well.

You can download the presentation and the demos I did at the conference from this blog-post (see below)... have much fun with it...