wpf - thick client or thin client and what about when wcf comes in to play with SOA!

Question

I usually work on web apps or faceless apps with the occasional winforms utility so I'm in need of some help to clarify my understanding of WPF and terminology.

I would term ASP.NET apps as "thin client" apps because apart from some javascript the bulk of the applications work is done on the server. In the same way I would view a WPF app (apart from a stand alone XAML app) as "thick client" as all the business logic is executed on the client machine. So my first question is whether this a correct understanding of ASP.NET and WPF's places in the world?

My second question is. Say you wanted to centralise things into a service oriented architecture via WCF webservices so that ASP.NET OR WPF could access common functionality via web services that live on a server somewhere else. Could you start viewing WPF as a thin client in that soley provides the (rich UI) to interact with business logic encapsualted on webservices on another server?

Answer 1

One of the cool things about WPF is that you can choose whether to implement it as:

• a thick client on your user's PC, or
• as a thin client hosted in your (IE) browser.

In either event, you can hook up to your WCF services to provide the data layer for your application.

Also, as a side note, if you choose the client-application route, there is a technology called Click-Once that allows you to centralise the deployment of that client to your user-base...

Hope this helps :)