Microsoft's white paper "Smart Clients in Business: Expanding the Edges of the Enterprise Network" rightly points out: "Smart clients exploit the power of today’s computing hardware, work online or offline, and access information in a standard way through the use of Web services, helping users and businesses respond to rapidly changing business needs. With smart clients, users don’t have to worry about where the data resides and how to get the data—they just have the data when they need it". This article has introduced the reader to the basic concepts of Smart Client Architecture, one that promises to be the technology of choice for the next generation of client applications. The forthcoming articles in this series of articles on Smart Client architecture would discuss how we can implement Smart Clients using Microsoft's Smart Client Application block or the Smart Client Software Factory and address the architectural challenges and the design issues involved for designing and implementing Smart Client Applications in Microsoft .NET.