Below is a similar illustration of a mult-tiered, distributed application.  The application consists of three logical tiers:  data, business object, and user interface.  The data tier is a database in SQL Server.  The business-object tier handles accessing the data and distributing it to the clients.  The user-interface tier has both a Web-based application and a traditional Windows application.

This is a simple data application that can lookup and edit records from the Authors table in the Pubs database. The process for creating this application is as follows:

1. Create the middle-tier business object
   1. Create an ASP.NET Web Service project
   2. Create and configure a database connection and dataset schema
   3. Expose the dataset from the business object
2. Create the user interface
   1. Create a Windows user interface
   2. Create a Web user interface
3. Deploy the solution

The Web Forms Designer is used to create a Web page that is compatible with a standard HTML 3.2 browser.  On the server, the Web Forms code calls an XML Web service to retrieve data that contains Authors information from the database.  The Windows application communicates with this same XML Web service to retrieve a dataset containing Authors information.   Communication with the XML Web service is handled using HTTP and XML.