This week Ken Scott gave a presentation on Smart Client Software Factory at our South Colorado .NET User's Group. The Smart Client Software Factory is a project by the Microsoft Patterns and Practices Group offers an architecture framework to build Windows Smart Clients in C#. A lot of work has gone into building the framework and appropriate design patterns in this project where a development team can come up to speed pretty quickly on writing plug-in modules into a basic Windows Smart Client project.

This is a great benefit because pluggable modules can allow instant customization of pieces based upon user types or configuration. A module .dll is plugged in to the architecture by including the .dll name in an xml configuration file.

The other benefit is that instead of this appearing on Microsoft's product list and being sold as a server product or a developer product, Microsoft is releasing it on Codeplex. For those of you who are open source project proponents, Codeplex appears quite a lot like SourceForge. The license is very open on Codeplex as well, allowing for building products and services for sale based upon Codeplex released projects.