Well, appropriately since my last post was about a current Smart Client framework, this next post will get into some of the future of Smart Client or Windows Forms development. 

One of the issues with Windows Forms development in my opinion through the past .NET development models is that a good-looking UI is very tedious to produce.  One of the areas of difficulty in development and design is that usually skillsets of developers don't overlap with those of good graphic artists and UI designers.  Some graphics/UI specialists are able to sit down with a Visual Studio IDE and work in it to produce a fantastic looking application, but most I've run across are more adept at producing images and graphic files.  Then the developer is left to port the graphics and UI portions in to the application, which again is tedious at best.

Microsoft's answer to this in the next generation of tools release is a tool called "Expression" (note that the code names and branding on this have changed).  This is a tool geared more toward graphic artists, and the output of this tool is XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language).   XAML code is portable to the Visual Studio environment, and availble to hook app development in to the back end.    From what I've seen in the way of demos on XAML it really expands features from the UI perspective, opening up 3-D avenues and making them easy to accomplish.   XAML probably will redefine Windows Forms and Smart Client development in the future.

One good resource on XAML is Ani Babian's blog.  Ani is a Microsoft Developer Evangelist (DE) for the Rocky Mountain Region based out of Denver.  Her nickname is "XAML Chick", and she has a lot of resources on her blog tying together efforts in XAML as well as the related technologies that tie into it like WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) and WinFX SDK.

So there's my take on XAML, Smart Client Development, and a brief overview and writeup on some tools involved.