Troy Magennis has posted up about a session that was held at the Sydney Deep .NET User Group recently. I wish I was able to make it but since I don’t get up to Sydney anywhere near as often as I used to I couldn’t come along.
Apparently a web-application was shown that had a companion Avalon application. In many cases this isn’t going to be a compelling scenario for online businesses because they essentially need to do more development – however I think that there is a certain category of business where this would be useful. Take for example Corporate Express.
Corporate Express a major stationery supplier to Australian businesses. You can order products off their web-site but if you are a corporate client you can use a small program that they make available to you on CD to manage the account. I can easily imagine this becoming an Avalon application that is deployed via ClickOnce over the web.
However – there is an even more compelling scenario here. Fast forward just a little bit beyond the release of Windows Vista when Microsoft ships WinFS (you can download the BETA from MSDN Subscriber Downloads).
WinFS allows application developers to map their internal data structures onto an “item store”. Each item can then be related with other items both by the application that first created them and by other applications. The scenario I am thinking of here is relating a tax invoice to a purchase request that came in via e-mail.