This blog note is about the new Smart Client BAT.

1. What is a Smart Client?

Short answer: something between a thin and a thick client as shown by this drawing by Microsoft:

A smart client combines the benefits of a rich client application with the deployment strenght of a thin client.

Long answer: Read the Smart Client Architecture and Design Guide (212 pages).

2. What is a BAT?

A Baseline Architecture Toolkit is a toolkit provided by Microsoft pattern & practices team. It consists of:

• Reference Implementations
• Application Blocks
• Documentation (How-To, Hands-on-Labs...)
• Guidance Automation Packages

3. What to download for the Smart Client BAT?

The Smart Client BAT needs the following downloads:

• The Smart Client BAT
• The Composite UI Application Block (CAB, December 2005)
• The CAB Hands-On-Labs (Februar, 2006)
• The Enterpise Library Application Block (EntLib, January 2006)
• The Guidance Automation Extensions (December 2005)
• The Guidance Automation Toolkit (GAT, December 2005)

Let's present MSBuild, the Microsoft's build engine shipped with Visual Studio 2005. It's a build management tool like Ant or NAnt.

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This tutorial is about NAnt, a free .NET build tool. It also deals with the integration of NAnt in Visual Studio 2005.

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This blog note will deal with unit testing in .NET using Visual Studio 2005. It will present two options to implement unit tests in .NET: NUnit and VSTS.

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The goal of this blog note is to give pointers and basic information about the development of Windows applications using Windows Forms and Visual Studio .NET 2005.

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This note is an introduction to .NET.

=> Read more!