A new partnership between Ember and Tendril Networks has created a Web Service that allows developers to work with ZigBee without having to learn the program's intricacies.

Over the past few years, IT organizations have chosen between two primary application development and deployment architectures. However, with the advent of the .NET Framework, there is now a new alternative called 'smart clients'.

The .NET Compact Framework is a managed execution environment (a runtime engine) that runs on devices that use the Windows CE operating system - Pocket PC and Windows CE .NET devices. The runtime components also include a large collection of base class libraries that you use in your .NET applications to do everything from displaying UI on the screen to working with files to accessing network resources such as XML Web services. It's a slimmed-down version of the full .NET Framework that you might use to develop applications for servers and desktop PCs.