In today's world of distributed computing and the emerging business requirements, the demand for smart client applications is growing rapidly. Smart Client Architecture is a technology that allows you to design and architect your application into a smart, flexible and convenient platform that utilizes web services for communication and leverages the benefits of Service Orientation to a large extent. Smart Client Architecture provides you the flexibility to design and develop applications with powerful, rich, and responsive user interfaces. It does so with little hassle of deployment and seamless update features. Typically we could have a Web Service holding everything and the Smart Clients consuming this service. The objective of this article is to introduce you to the intricacies of this architecture with discussion of the benefits and the related concepts and terminologies involved.

I would follow this article up with more and more articles that would discuss how we can design and develop applications in Microsoft .NET that can leverage the benefits of this awesome architecture. But, before we delve deeply into the intricacies of this architecture let us take a look at how this technology came into being, i.e., why this drift towards this technology emerged. Let us understand how the drift towards this architecture came into being from the time of the client applications that were designed and developed with the then popular developer tools like Visual Basic, Visual C++, and the like.