The sales pitch: "Browser-based clients have slow, clunky UI's. Smart
clients address this providing rich UI's with zero-deployment for
WAN/Internet scenarios." Hurrah - the holy grail arrives! (ignoring the
.NET runtime install)

However, network admins say that externally accessible web-servers must
live in a DMZ, not talk directly to database servers on the internal
network, but must go via an intermediate application server. This leads
to a four-tiered architecture. No problem for browser-based apps, but
how do smart-clients fit into this 4-tier, DMZ scenario ?

This MSDN article http://tinyurl.com/294ks shows a four-Tiered solution
where the smart-client bypasses the web-tier (DMZ) and talks directly
to the application server on the internal network. Doesn't this violate
the network admins security concerns ? Alternatively, this article
http://tinyurl.com/2fh8l does show a smart client application with
4-tiers, adding a web-server containing an externally accessible
"service interface". But what does this service interface do, other
than passing calls straight through to the app-server ?

So, do smart-clients fit the 4-tier DMZ scenario ?

Thanks,
Andy Mackie.