Microsoft's Mark Boulter (Program Manager of the Win Forms team) has just posted a mail that describes how .NET fosters The Rich Client Renaissance (see our post back in early March).

Are you going to be part of the Rich Client Renaissance or have you been warned off Rich Clients forever? Do you see flaws in Win Form design that will have Thin Clients reigning supreme within the enterprise? Do you have users crying out for superior useability than thin clients can bring? If you develop thin clients do they only work on IE, anyway? Will you be as productive developing ASP.NET forms as you will Win Forms?

Give us your thoughts!

Winforms in IE could be great if they worked
*without* an IIS at the other end. You should
not even need a Web Server, IE should be able
to load a Winforms object from a file system.

Or maybe this is actually possible ?

It sounds great. Unfortunately, Mark's last paragraph glosses over the problem with the whole scenario: code access security. It's obvious that MS's security is finer-grained than the old ActiveX controls, but it still puts a large burden on SAs to understand the appropriate levels of security when running remote code. I suspect most SAs won't understand or want to deal with this issue, especially as long as Microsoft OS security can be so easily cracked.

Brandon,
I think you are right that SAs are going to balk. If, however, MS have done their job with .NET Security (and despite their track record on security I'm keeping an open mind), again *IF* they have done a great job with it, then as developers we are in a position to re-educate SAs. Whether we can be bothered, or not, is another matter. And as you say, whether SAs have enough time or inclination to listen is altogether another matter. Particularly as they'll be trying to work out what the heck to do about web services (which may essentially render firewalls redundant) and virus-produced DoS attacks.

I've also been interested to note the dearth of articles and "rah rah" MS are devoting to Win Forms. They aren't giving it much press at all.

Thanks for the post! I think the points you raise help highlight the difficult path ahead, despite any actual technical superiority.