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The Smart Client / Web Application bet

Paul and I have a friendly discussion and now bet going.

The discussion (and bet) centers around our discussion of Smart Clients vs. Web applications:

1. My first post, Is “Smart Client” a “Dumb Idea”?

2. Paul’s reply, No Rob, Dumb Terminals are a Dumb Idea

3. My reply to Paul, Show me the money

4. Paul’s acceptance of “the bet”, The Web App/Smart Client Discussion Continues

In Paul’s latest post he defines a list of “Smart Clients”. However, I definitely stated in my first post what the exceptions were (such as games), but I think the best example he gave was: Quicken/Quickbooks. Quickbooks has both a “smart client” and “web” version. I personally use Quickbooks “smart client”, but I know many other people that use Quickbooks “web” version.

But as Wim correctly pointed out in Paul’s comments, my point was to come up with a list of Smart Client applicatons that could be either (key word of either) be a web application or a Smart Client. Tools such as Windows Media Center don’t fall into that list, sorry šŸ™‚

Here is the criteria I would use for our contest: the appliation must:
1. Written in .NET (not required, but would be nice)
2. Can exist as a smart client or web client; there are obviously — as I so carefully mentioned in all my posts on this topic — things that cannot be web applications. Our decision critieria here needs to be applications that could legitimately be one or the other, such as Quickbooks.
3. Should have no install/uninstall, i.e. “Click once” enabled. I see this demoed a lot, but have yet to run into an application.

On December 1st of 2006 Paul and I will meet and see who won. Paul I’ll buy you a steak at Del Frisco’s next year just for the conversation. The bet is for a signed $1bill adminting defeat šŸ™‚

Show me the money

To quote PC Magazine’s recent Best of the Year issue:

“One of the biggest trends in the software industry today is Web applications, exemplified by SalesForce.com, Yahoo! Mail, and Google Maps. …I found Microsoft’s annoucement last month of its new Windows Live and Windows Office Live strategy fascinating. Microsoft is really endorsing the concepts of Web applications.”

I don’t think web applications are always the right solution, but I think more and more people are starting to view web applications as more than just dumb terminals; and yes, I do realize that Microsoft’s plan for Windows Live is potentially a “Smart Client” connected application.

Paul (who promised me a rebuttal at the Whidbey Launch event) makes a great case against web applications. And it seems we both agree that doing what works best for the end user is always the right solution. However, rather than get into a long drawn-out debate: show me the evidence for Smart Clients.

Where are all these Smart Client applications I keep reading about? Oh yeah, I guess they all start out with the same sentence, to quote Paul, “Imagine if…” Paul continues the example with, “Imagine if JC Penney decided to create an application that would let you scan in a picture of yourself and then shop for clothes by superimposing the image of the clothes onto the picture of you?” Hmmm… sounds like a Flash application to me. Think about it. We’re talking about consumers here. Are you as a consumer going to install a new Smart Client application for every online store you visit? Sure, I can imagine Smart Client applications for eBay, Amazon, and so-on but more for the power-users.

Are there Smart Client applications available today? Absolutely. Are there places where Smart Client applications are better than web applications? Absolutely (and Paul makes some excellent counter points). However, if you want me to change my mind, don’t give me theoretical examples and what-ifs. To quote a movie, “show me the money”. What whiz-bang Smart Client applications can I install now (besides the obvious, e.g. Windows Media Player, Outlook)?

To quote from my previous post on this topic, “Watching someone like my wife use a computer makes me realize that she, as a pretty typical user, does about 95% of her computer usage through the browser: hotmail, amazon.com, ebay.com, wellsfargo.com, quicken.com, etc. The other 5% is spent in Word, but even those uses (printing cards, printing labels, etc.) could be easily replaced by a web interface. Case in point, if I bought my wife a Mac, as long as it has a web browser, she would be absolutely content.“

Paul concludes with, “Do What Works Best For Them.  Iā€™m betting it will be a smart client application.” I agree with the first sentence — and the second is a bet I’m willing to take! So how about it Paul? Loser buys lunch? How about a year from now we each list the top 10 consumer applications for 2006? The qualification being the application can exist both as a Smart Client or Web Application (runs in a browser)?

Ok, the above is all in good humored rib jabbing – Paul and I are friends after all. I want to see Smart Clients succeed too, but so far web applications (I think Web 2.0 sounds silly too Paul) seem to be more prevalent.

Updates to forums.asp.net

forums.asp.net was upgraded to Community Server 2.0 last night. While there are a myriad of new capabilities, one of the bigger improvements was search. There are still some kinks we’re working out, but there is some great new capabilities, such as forum personalization and ink (although we haven’t enabled ink on this site yet).

Community Server supports 2 search systems now: regular search and enterprise search. The new enterprise search, what forums.asp.net is using, moves the entire search index out of the database and puts in on the web servers (search was the most intense db operation) and is designed for sites that need to support > 250,000 posts.

The new search tools are unbelievably powerful. While the RSS feed on search is currently disabled, searches don’t hit the database and are super fast (and more accurate). Give it a whirl:

http://forums.asp.net/search/

The index isn’t fully up-to-date yet either. Currently it is indexing 250 posts once every 3 minutes, it can do this operation much, much faster but it’s a resource intensive process so we’ve gated it.

Secure RSS, building custom feeds, and reading feeds

If you haven’t read The Tipping Point, I’d highly recommend it.

While some may disagree with me, I don’t think RSS has reached it’s ‘tipping poing’ yet. While growing in popularity, RSS is still largely in the early adopter phase. I think the tipping point, or mass adoption, will really happen when Microsoft releases Office 12. You see, Outlook in Office 12 will have a built-in RSS reader.

At Telligent we are eagerly looking forward to this. We’ve been working with RSS for a long time and like to think that we’ve done some forward thinking when it comes to using RSS in our platform Community Server.

For our 2.0 release we’re doing some really great stuff with RSS. First we’re RSS enabling almost everything. While RSS support itself is not new to our platform, but there is some powerful new functionality in our 2.0 release:

  • RSS for Search Results – The new Enterprise search functionality for Community Server allows you to search across blogs, forum posts, files, photos, and any other data stored in your Community Server system. New with 2.0 is also the ability to get an RSS feed for your search results. For example, when we update blogs.msdn.com to the newest version you could create a custom RSS feed that returns results only for users and topics that you care about across all 2800+ bloggers!
  • News Reader – We’ve built in an RSS reader so you can add RSS feeds and read them through a single web based interface. It does some cool stuff such as aggregating common feeds together when you click on a folder. What’s nice about this is that you could, for example, create some “favorite searches” in Community Server and watch them in your reader! Using Community Server as the proxy for RSS feeds makes a lot of sense for a lot of organizations — it can dramatically cut down the amount of bandwidth that RSS readers are using since shared feeds are pulled once instead of once per-user.
  • Secure RSS – There are lots of areas in Community Server that are considered private. For example, private forums, private blogs, private photo, or private files. These areas are secured through permissions. Previously non-public content would not expose an RSS feed. We’ve done some great work in 2.0 to allow administrators to enable secure RSS feeds. Thus a unique URL is created for each user that can access the content along with passing a username and a unique identity hash (which can be changed or invalidated per-user). Of course people can share the URL, but it provides a nice option when the reader doesn’t support passing credentials (which we support too).
  • External News – Another new capability in 2.0 is an External News page. Similar to the aggregate roll-up you can see of bloggers now, such as blogs.msdn.com‘s landing page, the idea with the external news is that a site manager can add external RSS feeds that are brought in as common aggregate page. A great example: there are lots of well known Microsoft bloggers that blog at other locations, Scott Guthrie, Robert Scoble, and Don Box to name a few. The external news feature allows you to bring in those RSS feeds, but to read the content you are still directed to those ‘off-site’ blogs.

There is more, obviously, but those are some of the highlights. We’re really excited about our 2.0 release of Community Server. For us on the team it’s the product we had in mind when we set out to build Community Server. We’re starting to do the initial planning on version 3.0 now too, and it’s only going to get better! 

Silly questions about ASP.NET and VB

I had the wonderful opportunity to present at the Dallas Visual Studio 2005 launch event today and presented the ‘Building Web Applications with Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0’ talk. It was an absolutely packed house — I think we had just under 3,000 attendees and the ASP.NET 2.0 talk was in the keynote room and filled with people!

During the Question/Answer session after the talk, which had some great questions about ASP.NET 2.0, Visual Studio 2005, and even Community Server someone asked, “When is ASP.NET going to become a real development tool and support something other than Visual Basic.”

— mental pause —

(deep breath) Exhale…

— resume —

As much as I enjoy the rivalry between C# and VB this question just got under my skin. First of all, ASP.NET has never been just a Visual Basic tool. Period. I’m not even going to explain the rest of that; just Google or MSN it (hmmm… ‘MSN it’ doesn’t sound as cool does it?). Secondly, I personally believe VB as a language has done more for software development, and software developers, than any other development tool — and that’s what I told him. To which he replied, “No professional software development company uses Visual Basic (names of those companies here).” Right …that’s why something like 70% of developers use VB. Sigh. Next question?

Seriously. VB is simple, easy to learn, and is the first language many of us started with. Most importantly with .NET the only people that care about the language are, well, the developers! All CLR code gets turned into MSIL at the end of the day. Nevertheless I’m glad that ASP.NET has such a strong tie to VB …but still happy that it supports other CLR languages, like C#, too.

As for our friend who asked the question, a challenge: you write your ASP.NET pages in C++ — or better yet a real language like assembler — and I’ll use VB. We’ll see who gets done faster.

Google

I’ll admit it: Google scares me.

We don’t compete with Google (at least not yet <g>), but I’m more concerned with how Google is doing business and the type of data they are collecting. If Microsoft were to do half of what Google is doing they would (a) have the U.S. DOJ and EU all over them (b) privacy people going nuts (c) consumers angry. Somehow Google does not.

The recent announcement of Google providing Urchin, the web analytics software they recently acquired, for free is fantastic. But it also means Google just acquired more of something they love: data about how people visit and use web based software. So far Google runs on my desktop, in my browser (search toolbar), email (GMail), etc.

Companies like Wal-Mart, a giant retailer here in the U.S., is now also starting to view Google as competition, as does Microsoft. Why? Google is able to sift through it’s massive database on consumer profiles and site information and then provide predictive patterns about consumer behavior.

Furthermore, while I can absolutely appreciate free functionality, such as Urchin, it’s a just a bit anti-competitive. Google doesn’t care about selling analytics software, what they really want is usage data.

I like Google, they’ve made the experience of the web better. But, I liked them much better when they were just a search engine.

~= Edit =~

A macro-point which I didn’t clearly make here is that Google is being allowed to do things that Microsoft wouldn’t be allowed to do.