Randy Holloway at Microsoft

I would say it's fair that 85% of my Internet usage (between desktop and device) and are client apps. I use Outlook for email, MSN Messenger for messaging, and Outlook Express for newsgroups. I've also started using Skype more and more often over the past month for voice, as well as Windows Media Player for MSN Radio. There's also SharpReader for RSS.

The browser (IE) is still the primary way for me to access information on the Internet from a machine, whereas Outlook, MSN Messenger, and Skype are better for exracting data from humans.

Hey Randy, welcome back!

Windows Forms is absolutely fantastic, by far the best GUI building system I've ever seen. And I say that as someone who switched 100% of my development to Windows Forms and then switched as close to 100% as I could off of Windows Forms and onto ASP.NET.

The original switch to Windows Forms was easy. Windows Forms is fantastic. 'nuff said.

The switch away from Windows Forms was much harder but I suspect that my reasoning is pretty common.

1) The browser's where it's at. Cross platform, true click-once delivery, control over my applications (subscription models are possible, no pirate-able code for people to get their hands on, etc), and people 'get' that they just go to a web page to do things. An increasing number of people never use anything *but* their browser anymore (about three times a year my wife asks me how to start Microsoft Word on her laptop... the rest of her time is spent entirely in the browser, which she never needs to ask me how to use).

2) Longhorn/Avalon scares the willies out of me. Artistically, not technically. Every time the default look of the shell changes, apps suddenly look old. Who wanted to use a DOS app in Windows? A Win3.1 app in Win95? or a Win95 app in WinXP? Sure, Windows Forms will still work in the Avalon era, but the look and feel of apps will be completely different. I'm working on an app that wont be released until sometime in 2005. If MS hits it's targets then something like 12 months later my shiny new Windows Forms app would be totally old-school and not at all cool. The web, however, will probably change far less in those same 12 months, and my ASP.NET app will look far less dated than a comparable Windows Forms app.

A year ago, I was sure that Avalon was my future. I was incredibly excited about it. But now, having switched gears to ASP.NET, I'm not so sure. All that Javascript and DHTML is a horrid thing, but ASP.NET is doing a great job of protecting me from it and the 3rd-party component products are fantastic (have you looked at ComponentArt.com for example?). My guess is that with another two years of advancement, the ASP.NET components will have done such a good job of hiding the html cruftiness and will have done such a good job of facilitating web-service based web applications that there will be no reason for me to switch back to a "rich" client technology.

-Don

I am writing a personal CMS/blog/gallery and I didn't even bother to write the web administration pages. Everything is managed by a smart client. As a side effect the whole ASP.NET canonicalization issue passed by without me worrying a bit :)

"Smart client" is anything that rely on abilities/services of hosted platform(excel/word/IE dosen't matter) hence managed environment.So browser based apps is "smart client" apps anyway and it's available for a long time now;-)

Randy, I just answered you here: http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2004/10/18.html#a8429

I can't resist mentioning a project I've been working on: http;//www.blogbridge.com. Yes, it's YARR (Yet-antoher-rss-reader) but with some twists:

- It's designed around the idea that there's information overload and introduces numerous ways to make it more efficient to scan lots and lots of blogs
- While it's a smart client, it integrates with a companion service (the blogbridge service) providing the best of both worlds.
- it's cross platform and open source
- It's pretty to look at (if you care about that kind of thing :-)

There is maybe one technical aspect of the smartness of a client that may be a factor in their absence around Scobleland. The kind of data a client gets to deal with is significant.

There is interesting potential in the quantity of 'Simple' brand RSS data, but it doesn't lend itself to interoperation with other kinds of data. What you end up with doesn't actually need much more than a browser (c.f. Firefox Live Bookmarks) or email-style app (c.f. virtually every other RSS reader).

Check out some of the developments around FOAF (and RSS 1.0). Things are still pretty new, but there's generally a broader range of data, more interesting user interactions needed, and more scope for fat clients.

http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/discovery/rdf/resources/#sec-tools

DroppedPackets » Smart Clients? or Not So Smart?

It may partly be due to the fact that Windows Forms 1.x sucks big time (even compared to VB6). I have high hopes for 2.x, when Windows Forms finally stops being the poor step-child of ASP.NET.

This is not a political statement - check out the John Kerry News Reader (a smart Flash(tm) client) that's now in use by 150,000+ non-technical users - most of which don't know it's RSS driven and don't care.

http://www.download.com/3000-9227-10297071.html

--bf (a republican ;-)