Am enjoying this book thoroughly. After reading this, I wll be developing an application for our company. It will be used by our field personnel to submit expense reports. It must be able to access client data from our corporate db (so I assume a Web application), then download this data (I assume as an Xml file) to their local computer(since they must work offline and be able to save data locally) so I assume a Distributed App for our personnel using a local database. Then they will need to edit their local database and then transmit back to our server via the web (also as an Xml file). Does this make general sense? I will have numerous other apps to develop based upon this same structure.

Hey,

Yes, you may want to look at smart client information; smart clients can edit the data on their local machine, and then sync it to the database. Also, you don't need to use XML; there are free databases available, such as SQL Server Mobile, SQL Server Express, Oracle Lite, and Oracle XE(?) developer.

Brian

As I continue my studying I will pay attention to smartclient. But the user often has no access to the internet when filling out expense reports, therefore has to have something on his machine, thus I assume an application that contains a database and when he can connect to internet can then transfer the data to corporate via web application. Make sense?