Catching Up On the Server Side
Fat and Rich—Furthering the Lead
The Microsoft Mobility Mission
Forms, Clients, and Developer Kudos
End-User Productivity Really Does Matter
James Governor
September 24, 2002
So what about Microsoft? Not only does Microsoft own a rich client already, but it also owns the related developer tools market. This is Microsoft's space to lose. For every improvement in Visual Studio .NET aimed at making the IDE a better place to build transactional apps, there have been numerous improvements to the older VB and GUI canon. For every server-side improvement by a Microsoft middleware competitor, Microsoft has counterpunched with further improvements to its own developer tools, extending its lead on that side of the client/server internet/rich client divide.
Visual Studio .NET is a significant step forward in a couple of major areas—low level systems administration is one of them. Let's examine Microsoft's "smart client application model," for example. The .NET framework-built components are self-contained and isolated. The new architecture then offers two major improvements over Visual Basic and Windows classic—that is, DLL conflicts, a traditional Microsoft development bugbear, are eliminated, while the granularity of component security in terms of executable code is dramatically improved.
These developments help underpin a push by Microsoft to create an architecture in which components can be downloaded dynamically and more important securely, from web servers onto "smart clients." Microsoft explicitly accepts that browser-based computing does offer benefits in terms of deployment and ongoing maintenance, but claims, for the kind of reasons outlined above (local data storage, richer user experience, better use of available resources, less network latency), that rich clients are the best option. The idea is to offer developers the best of both worlds with no-touch-client deployment over HTTP, which allows Microsoft component executables to be downloaded from Web server to Microsoft-based rich clients, just like Web server/browser connections.
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