The origins of the Composite Application Block

Last year, during our visit to the Microsoft campus in Redmond, I got a chance to talk to Brenton Webster, a solutions architect of Microsoft Austrialia. He told us about a great project they've been doing for the Austrialian Commonwealth Back of Australia (CBA) based on Smart Clients and many back-office systems.

The cool thing about this project is that it involved creating a lot of framework development. Amongst them is an idea that eventually resulted in something what we now all know as the Composite User Interface Application Block.

At that time he told me that his team was working on a white paper about this project, its architecture and the technical solutions. Well, it took almost a year to complete this paper, but last month, the complete story has been release as a case study. Make sure you check it out (there's a PDF version as well). It's full of great ideas. 

Update: By the way, if you live in the Netherlands, and you're subscibed to the Dutch version of the .NET Magazine, my collegue Jonne Kats wrote a great introduction to CAB and the Smart Client Software Factory.