Visual WebGui RIA Platform 6.4 Preview with cutting-edge Web Design Tool released

Visual WebGui 6.4 Preview 1 is available to download!

The 6.4 Preview allows to experience the revolutionary web design tool providing ease of designing DHTML or Silverlight UI with no HTML, CSS or XAML coding, while using your design software of choice such as Photoshop and Expression Blend. This cutting-edge Point & Click Web Design Tool provides, for the first time, a complete coding-free cycle for the creation of complex, enterprise-grade web applications. 6.4 also allows to fully customize application themes using the new designer and by downloading and sharing complete VWG Themes.

Go to the new Web Design Tools page...

“Microsoft is pleased to work with Visual WebGui to deliver the best computing experience to our customers,” said Joe Marini, Director, Platform & Tools Ecosystem at Microsoft Corp. “The newly added features in Visual WebGui 6.4 preview offer developers a flexible way to brand and differentiate their UIs for internal and customer-facing applications.”

Read official Press Release...

The 6.4 Preview version is offered for free and available for evaluation in either Express Studio or Professional Studio. In the future the new design tools will be offered in the Express edition for free, under LGPL license, and in the Professional Studio version.

6.4 also presents new scalability extensions for redundancy and mulit-user SaaS/Cloud Computing level with performance enhancement and memory optimization.

Read the entire Change log...

A web based EDP internally developed by a single programmer

A web based EDP was internally developed in a hospital by a single developer. The project used Visual WebGui and took less than three months to implement the graphical user interface. The overall project, including the creation of the database and the .NET-Remoting DataLayer, which receives the patient data from the database and encapsulates it to classes passed to the GUI, took about a year to complete.

The Klinikum Ingolstadt is a hospital in Bavaria, Germany with 1,200 beds and over 3,000 employees. The staff used an EDP based on a MS Access 2003 database which was no longer able to meet the ever-growing demands of the hospital's intensive care units and it was needed to be replaced with an updated solution.

Since an off the shelf alternative doesn’t exist and a specific solution by an external software house would overrun the budget it was decided to enhance the software in-house. After evaluating Visual WebGui the team realized that a single developers could develop the graphical user interface within the shortest time due to the intuitive drag and drop Form design capabilities it allows.

Learn more about the development needs, process and the solution that they have created using Visual WebGui.

Read the full article...

Visual WebGui open source developers community call to joins forces

The Visual WebGui open source community is calling its members to join forces and share their web development knowledge and resources such as VWG frameworks. Each member's individual strength combined together to a whole will create something that has a greater power and will contribute everyone.

The first initiative is the creation of the VWG Community Frameworks website by rdhatch. This website gives the community a platform to share their code & offer downloads for the entire VWG Community to work with.

Anyone can help. Simply sharing eachother's common VWG frameworks / code libraries, no matter how incomplete - is good for the entire VWG Community. Even if you can provide concepts on how to layout navigation & properly place New/Save/Cancel/Search buttons within an application. We just need to get this conversation started.
Let's do it right here!

Good Luck!

Manufacturing activity management system developed with Visual WebGui

"Visual WebGui makes the delivery of sophisticated applications about as simple as it could be… We delivered this application with 1.25 developers part time over 4 months, including the SQL database design" Geoff Sorensen, Viking Consulting.

Read the full article...

The customer needed to move certain paper based 'activity management' processes to an electronic format. The major concerns were:

• Significant changes to regulatory and insurance requirements for activity/incident recording, management and reporting.
• Achieving consistency in input data for dozens of managers, hundreds of providers and thousands of work locations as they all change and evolve over time.
• Automatic sharing of appropriate information between stakeholders.
• Reporting and review functions appropriate to specific users.
• Easy, ‘non-invasive’ deployment to tightly controlled PC desktop

Visual WebGui Rich Internet Applications Platform provided the ideal technical environment to build and deliver the UI solution to staff. Visual WebGui is entirely server based, requiring nothing to be done on the client PC. "The ability to convert code from WinForms to Visual WebGui with a few searches and replace operations is very powerful" Said Geoff Sorensen.

Performance as a database client is excellent, and the UI styling is very familiar to users - the Outlook style navigation tabs, treeviews and lists are both familiar and powerful, and the ability to push various content types, such as PDF, to the client is powerful. "Visual WebGui makes the delivery of sophisticated applications about as simple as it could be" Said Geoff Sorensen.

Read the full case study and learn about the process of developing & deploying this solution with Visual WebGui.

New web design tool simplifies DHTML graphic design

Developing and designing AJAX Web applications have always been a complex process that required many different skills and knowledge of various coding languages. Visual WebGui RIA Platform is targeting simplification of AJAX development process by offering a visual development environment that flattened the traditional multi-layered development into a single layer requiring basic .Net development skill set. As a result, building line of business AJAX Web applications became simpler, faster and most cost-effective.

Previous versions of Visual WebGui tool are very efficient, but still required web knowhow for modifications of default themes and skins. But no more! The new Visual WebGui preview version combines the proven ease of Visual WebGui drag and drop application development with visual web design tool. This cutting-edge Control & Theme Designer enables developers and designers to build DHTML or Microsoft Silverlight user interfaces (UIs) with unmatched simplicity compared to traditional DHTML design or to any other existing controls/UI customization frameworks in the market.

Designing Web UI demands graphical skills as well as comprehensive knowhow in HTML & CSS or XAML with Silverlight. With the abundance of popular browsers in the market, there is also a need for cross browsers awareness when styling the UI. Using the new Visual WebGui’s Control & Theme Designer on the other hand, does not require writing HTML or CSS or any technical skills but. The web design tool allows developers and designers to set the styling properties and images for each object and automatically applies those styles to any supported browser or device.

Graphical skills are obviously still needed to edit images but the web design tool provides easy management of all the images that comprise controls or other UI elements and enables editing them in an any existing graphics design software with a point & click ease.

New Visual WebGui web design tool demonstration

Until now…
Using standard web tools the developer / designer has to edit the HTML or an equivalent rendering XSLT and struggle with its complexity to understand which image goes where:

No more…
Using the new web design tool, the developer / designer opens a theme designer within the Visual Studio .NET IDE:

And get to see the whole picture on a friendly view:

And simply point & click the pictures, override only the selected images then edit with any standard graphics designers’ tools such as Photo-Shop or Paint.NET or even provide an alternative image:

Styling

Until now…
The developer/designer had a complicated structure of styling which includes CSS’s of all kinds and local definitions, which always ends in not knowing which property overrides the correct styling. Not to mention each unique browser’s behaviors and CSS properties:



No more…
Using the new web design tool, CSS and the load of properties and definition files become a nightmare history…
The developer/designer can simply edit visual properties of colors & sizes at any desired level, not having to calculate which styling property overrides the other, and it will automatically work well for in any browser:

Behaviors & Extreme lay outing

Until now…
The developer had to find out which JavaScript file and HTML/XSLT files affected which controls layout or behavior… and then struggle with those client side resources in a multi level, multi layers, multi standards environment…

No more…
Using the new web design tool, developers can visually and easily manage any control’s resources, scripts and lay-outs within hierarchical clear environment with clear rules, services, in an intelisense supportive environment (future):

Watch video: Theme Customization with the new Web design tool

Visual WebGui saves LearningRX $100,000 on development of new Application for franchises

"Visual WebGui is second to none when it comes to deployment… the development experience is fast and enjoyable compared to the WYSINWYG (What you see is NOT what you get) in .aspx pages"

LearningRX learning centers are franchises that use the LearningRx HUB application to run their franchise. The application allows those learning center to track & manage client, students, sessions and test scores. The former solution was an ASP.net DNN application and was required to be updated since the database and functionality provided did not meet the needs anymore, due to the company growth.

Visual WebGui provided the platform to build the new HUB application. Visual WebGui allowed the team members which were Windows developers to jump right in with almost no learning curve due to a visual drag & drop designer that is similar to WinForms. "We know the business, and with Visual WebGui were able to get the solution completed in short time window," said Daniel Bardi and added "Other platforms take longer to develop and are not nearly as robust as the Visual WebGui solution."

As a result of developing the new HUB web application with Visual WebGui LearningRX saved more than $100,000 while allowing centers to run more efficiently with the much improved user interface that the customer experiences.

Read the full article:$100,000 saved on developing new Learning Application for franchises

Creating custom controls for web applications with the innovative visual Control & Theme Designer

The visual Control & Theme Designer introduced in version Visual WebGui 6.4 version allows to create cool new designs and themes as well as to create custom controls. The new 'how to' tutorial shows how simple it is to create a Visual WebGui custom control with the new designer tool.

This 'How to' is divided into two parts whereas the first part demonstrates the creation of the programmatic part of the water mark text box control and the second part shows how to add the design time of the control.

You can view the full tutorial here:Design Visual WebGui custom controls with the new Control & Theme Designer

Migrating Desktop Spreadsheet applications to the Web

After evaluating Visual WebGui on a few small projects WorksLink decided to employ it on a major project and upgrad their desktop spreadsheet applications to a user-friendly Web UI. "Not only were we learning how to use Visual WebGui, but we were learning how to write web applications for the first time" Said Andrew McGrath. The WorksLink team took the previous .NET WinForms framework and with minimal changes brought it across to Visual WebGui with the VWG toolset.

Visual WebGui RIA Development Platform was as fast to develop with as standard desktop .NET and it only took a week for the team to get to know Visual WebGui and to find the best strategy for converting our framework. "For many years we looked at ASP.NET and other web technologies, but none of them allowed us the flexibility, speed of development and ease of maintenance that we could deliver with a desktop application. Visual WebGui changed that" Said Andrew McGrath.

Read the full showcase:
Desktop Spreadsheet applications to Web UI

Deploy Visual WebGui web applications with a ASP.NET extension

Learn how you can select any of the 18 defined by default ASP.NET extension that are allready defined and associated with the Aspnet_isapi.dll instead of the standard .WGX extension in the following article written by Páll Björnsson:Deployment of DHTML Visual WebGui application with different extension than the standard .WGX

This tutorial is important since there are various occations when it may be necessary to deploy your DHTML Visual WebGui application with different extension than the standard .WGX extension. One such common scenario is when you are deploying to a web-hosting company (like GoDaddy for instance), which is not willing to add the necessary Application Extension (or Handler mapping in IIS7) for allowing deployment with the standard .WGX extension.