11/22/2010

AssessmentTool webcast announced

I would like to invite you to join us for a webcast on Thursday, Dec 2nd @ 17:00 GMT+2 which will explain and show how to run the new Visual WebGui AssessmentTool and to understand the report it generates. We will run the AssessmentTool on .NET compiled Assemblies (dlls and exes) and learn how to assess the readiness of the application for Cloud/SaaS in terms of the complexities of the manual adjustments that are required for the migration.

Assessmentool Report


The AssessmentTool webcast is the 1st of a series of sessions presenting the new CloudMove migration tools suite. However, we will also talk about the rest of the CloudMove solution roadmap in this session and mainly the upcoming TranspositionTool that will allow to automatically convert .NET Windows Forms code into a Cloud/SaaS ready code using VWG platform.

You can learn more about the AssessmentTool here.

Free registration link.

11/21/2010

Visual WebGui 6.4 RC1 released

Gizmox R&D team has been working very hard in order to bring this version to the required stability level. During that period, thirteen QA versions have been produced and our QA team and beta-testers group have been testing it for a coupon real-world applications while covering all the possible scenarios we could think of.

The stability added in this version is really across the framework, mostly concentrating in client-side behavior and display matters but also in server-side and fine-tuning infrastructures. All of the Visual WebGui controls were touched somehow and brought to a much higher level of stability and completeness - compatibility with Windows Forms (MS .NET Client/Server).

The Visual WebGui Team is now very close to declaring the Visual WebGui 6.4 final Release version. Users who consider moving to Visual WebGui 6.4, should know that we have already completed 1832 development task-entries in Visual WebGui 6.4 as a total. Each such entry is a change to the framework, very large, very small and everything in between. In Visual WebGui v6.4 RC1 alone, 272 of those task-entries have been completed.

6.4 RC1 free downloads and free trials are available here.

11/14/2010

ASP.NET Ajax will not be left behind the HTML5 rush, Visual WebGui the ASP.NET extension will support HTML5 frontends

It takes a short overview of Microsoft development tools and platforms evolvement in order to demonstrate the importance of supporting Web Forms development for ASP.NET Ajax with HTML5 enhancements. In an article that Todd Anglin publishes in Redmond Developers, under the title "Silverlight: What Web Forms Wanted to Be", Todd says that ASP.NET was supposed to be Web Forms. A framework that meant to duplicate VB6 ease of development or rather its more mature successor Window Forms. Asp.Net was expected to deliver this simple and easy development paradigm for web. But it failed, Microsoft could not reproduce stateful based development paradigm for a stateless environment. Years later Microsoft rolled out Silverlight that is really another trial to come up with Web Forms paradigm for website development. Todd says in his article " Silverlight is what Web Forms wanted to be, a stateful application development model that can be deployed and updated as easily as traditional Web sites. Unencumbered by the limits of stateless pages, developing for Silverlight finally achieves what ViewState could not: It allows traditional desktop application developers to reuse their skills and development patterns for applications that can be deployed with no installation, save for the Silverlight plug-in"

However, Silverlight does not seem to deliver as well, for 3, main reasons: it is propriety plug-in that enterprises hesitate to opt in for. It did not really maintain the classic state full development, and it did present a learning curve for the VB6 and WinForms developers. HTML5 is hitting faster and stronger than expected with its cross browsers, open approach and the support of world leaders: such as Google, Apple and now Microsoft and Adobe.

Todd says "Microsoft envisioned a world in 2002 where developing for the Web and Windows would be indistinguishable. Windows Forms and Web Forms tried to present a uniform approach, but ultimately Web Forms was bound by the limits of the Web and the vision was never fully realized."

Microsoft did make a huge step with Silverlight toward realization of the concept, but HTML5 takes it back to square one and to ASP.NET as a platform that target HTML.

And here is where Visual WebGui presents its value. VWG takes a different approach all together. It virtualizes Dot.Net code atop ASP.NET server, and by doing that, it provides 2 major achievements: In design time it enables the VB6 and WinForms classic development paradigm AS IS for ASP.NET Ajax, as Web Forms based development, with no learning curve for Microsoft core developers. In run time it enables again AS IS desktop richness and experience atop ASP.NET that turns ASP.NET Ajax into Rich Internet Application (RIA), deployed in a plain (plug-in free) cross browser environment and now with HTML5 frontend.

The outcome is the Web Form experience that Microsoft was trying to deliver with ASP.NET and later with Silverlight BUT IN A PLAIN HTML5 BASED BROWSER, with Silverlight-like rich user experience. This makes ASP.NET extension, Visual WebGui the first Microsoft shop solution to support stateful Web Form experience for HTML5. Very soon, developers will use the same drag & drop, stateful and event driven development paradigms of VWG to build perfect ASP.NET based data centric apps using HTML5 frontend for both desktop browsers and mobile browsers.

And what HTML5 features Visual WebGui is going to support? Among HTML5’s features and capabilities which VWG is about to support are further UI and behaviors flexibilities, Canvas, SVG and additional boost utilizing the local-storage
Some examples:

  • Utilizing a HTML5’s Canvas element which enables client side manipulation on images and client drawing simply by dragging the Canvas control onto the form and hooking-up to its events. Streamlined according to VWG’s concepts, you will of course be able to choose whether to handle events on the client side or on the server. Providing full jQuery support for those client scripting
  • VWG will enable the usage of the events bound scalable vector graphics (SVG) by dragging an SVG element to the Form and manipulating it through Object Oriented code or direct HTML5 tags & attributes. Events will be handled either by the server or by the client according to the developer’s choice.
  • Native HTML5 Audio, Video and media elements will be drag-able to the Form, controlled through Object Oriented code and events or directly customized using standard HTML5 tags & attributes, jQuery and JavaScript.

  • HTML5 new form field types such as Required Text, Email, Range, Date, Search, Tel, Meter etc will be added to the list of available controls. Those controls will inherit VWG efficiency at runtime and at the same time they will enrich and enhance the interactivity of the application.

  • Full complementing support for CSS 3 such as Border Radiuses, HSLA, Opacity and others will be present through the theme designer. Transitions and Animations will be controllable through Object Oriented code or direct HTML5 tags & attributes.

  • Improved drag & drop experience utilizing the newest HTML5 drag & drop concepts.

11/07/2010

I want to introduce a new simple tool that can bring a huge change to your .NET (Windows Forms) applications. The new free AssessmentTool (as we call it) provides a quick assessment report about your Client/Server (Windows Forms at the moment and soon VB6 and other Client/Server technologies) application readiness to be moved to Web and Cloud using the Visual WebGui CloudMove solution.

The AssessmentTool is a simple, downloadable standalone EXE application that can be executed on the runtime assemblies of a WinForms application, from which it extracts detailed information regarding your project (technology statistics and usages). This information is by no mean a risk to your intellectual property as it collects technological information and statistics and not business logic analysis or algorithms capturing.

This tool is based on a wide database which is created progressively during the assessment process. After creating this database we run some queries on it, searching for patterns and usages that are risky or requiring manual adjustments when running as VWG Web or Cloud. The results are aggregated as a readable report which indicates the relative portion of the application that can be reused automatically (as-is). In addition it provides more specific information on the parts that will require adjustments and manual intervention.

Assessmentool Report

This report assists you further to decide and assess the efforts require to upgrade the application to the Web, based on the level of the automatic transposition vs. the manual intervention required. We expect that the majority of Window Form applications will show 80% - 90% portion readiness for transposition and will not require manual adjustment.

More info and the free download is available here.

11/02/2010

Two giants are fighting and the third might win, Visual WebGui might be one of the winners of the RIA wars

Latest announcements by Microsoft executives leave no doubt. Microsoft is shifting its support to HTML 5 and by doing so gives up on its RIA platform Silverlight which it repurposes for mobile. Adobe releases a Beta of a new HTML5 supporting tool kit, and by doing so also embraces the HTML5 option. It does look as if both give in to the market preferences for standard, no-plug-in and non-propriety option of HTML5 (see "Microsoft favoring HTML5 over Silverlight: reports" ).

If we follow Microsoft's early announcements when launching Silverlight, Microsoft pointed out the value of Silverlight in two aspects: The first was the graphics and media richness it enables while the second was the .Net developer's quest for a simpler, .Net based RIA development.

In a new world where HTML 5 replaces Silverlight and Flash in providing a solution for the quest for standard rich internet, the second quest for simple .Net based development of rich Internet application is left unattended (now that Silverlight is off the shelf and no longer serves as RIA, developed the .NET way). Reading developers' reaction following Microsoft PDC in October 2010 is probably the best way to learn about the impact of this announcement:

"Silverlight is dead, quite a surprise they have for us in PDC this year. I think most devs arround the world were expecting just the opposite, the Silverlight 5 announce. I think Microsoft should had been more honest and recognize the big mistake they made, wasting so much time and resources in a technology that is never going to be used massively. I assume my mistake as a developer for the resources I invested in Silverlight. The most sad thing is there aren’t any tools for HTML 5 in .NET, those four years of Silverlight left us with the hands empty. I think is time to move to GTW, every evidence is screaming that Google is the future." (Quoted from this blog)

I must express my humble opinion here and say that there might be more to the Silverlight twist (and Flash) than meets the eye. It might also be a result of slow adoption rate in the business sector that pays for its applications (vs. the consumer that does not). Being in the business RIA market for some odd years, I have been hearing quite too often enterprise CIOs saying that they will not allow plug-in RIA solution for security reasons, no matter if it is Microsoft's or Adobe's. I have been also hearing enterprise CIOs complaining about the stiff learning curve and lack of productivity that the new RIA solutions impose. I have been hearing them complaining about the hardship of data binding and I have been hearing them complaining about slow response time of applications written with the new Ajax based RIA solution.

Visual WebGui does support HTML development the .NET way, and naturally supports HTML5
We have been there for the last 3 years, betting on HTML by boosting ASP.NET Ajax development and runtime and indeed, being highly rewarded by market opinion leaders, adoption and traction. We have been enabling the classic VB6-like desktop development paradigms for HTML based front-ends. And now more than ever it seems like we are here to collect the big prize. Visual WebGui enables the best of .NET simple and structured development paradigms for HTML5. Exactly where Microsoft has been aiming with Silverlight, but we target open standards non-propriety platform. And that is a big difference.

So dear developer, Silverlight might be dying but it is not necessarily Google GWT that you must migrate to. If you are a .NET developer, I do believe that it is Visual WebGui you are looking for. You will have the best, well entrenched .Net development practices only this time targeting the RIA winner HTML5 and JavaScript.

9/15/2010

Airline Maintenance Logistics System Moved to Web

"Developers who were intimidated by the move to the world of web development immediately turned enthusiastic with the new project in Visual WebGui because they could feel useful again." Toni Garcias, WinForms developer at OA6 whose team had to find a solution that would allow them to enable local and remote users to use enterprise information and give feedback and centralize and normalize information. The team evaluated Visual WebGui for building the integrated extranet/intranet tools for their system.

"We were trying different Asp.Net solutions with third party frameworks, but the learning curves were excessive for our needs", said Project Manager Toni Garcias and added that "We finally chose Visual WebGui because also VB6/Windows Forms developers without Asp.Net experience where capable of building VWG Forms and give it functionality in a very short time. Developers who were intimidated by the move to the world of web development immediately turned enthusiastic with the new project in Visual WebGui because they could feel useful again." Web designers and illustrators also found the way to integrate themselves into the VWG framework.

The OA6 team who worked with Visual WebGui stated that performance was fully satisfactory and since security is by design there was no need to work on additional solutions for securing the end points. They also admired the possibility to show homogenous information to extranet/intranet users, from very different local resources as MS Access databases, SQL Server databases, Excel files, digitalized files, etc.

If you are a desktop developer who is looking to build some web applications you might find that article very interesting and useful.
Click here to read how Airline Maintenance Logistics System Moved to Web by OA6

8/16/2010

New Knowledge Base launched

Visual WebGui revealed yesterday its allnew resource center. The new Knowledge Base seems like a huge leap forward in terms of the user experience for supporting developers and a much easier access to relevant resources as the new system incorporates all of the Visual WebGui resources in one place back up by an advanced interface (search and filter mechanism) to ease on finding relevant information.

The new KB system presents some important new features and capabilities such as:

* Better and more diversed categorization and filtering options
* Easy search
* On the fly filtering for search results
* Contributors recognition
* and more

Visual WebGui also promises to continuously improve the Knowledge Base by adding more features and upgrading the overall user experience and allow developers to find all the essential information needed for creating VWG apps according to best practices.

The new Knowledge Base is located here:

8/10/2010

I would like to present a showcase where there was a need for an enhanced web based solution with a user interface (UI) similar to the previous desktop solution UI. The new solution was needed as a replacement of the desktop client-based solution of a Software Vendor.

The developer, Luca Morelli, evaluated various Ajax frameworks for this project such as the ASP.NET Ajax Control Toolkit and Gaia Ajax for ASP.NET but decided to go with Visual WebGui because it could provide a desktop-like user experience and allowed to implementing additional functionalities over the original solution with ease and reduce the learning time for the user.

The solution needed to be migrated to web was a VB content management with parametric document layout and workflow definition for small medium companies that need to organize the approval of internal documents.
The application should provide each customer with a customized type of documents, types of data, fields (with data coming generally from external programs) and set of rules. It should also allow configuring roles and workflows that are not very complex but unique for each of them, so there was a need for a solution that would allow configuration capabilities of the system to create and import documents based on their need and approve with their rules.

Read full article >

7/26/2010

With Visual WebGui 6.4 RC0 version, Gizmox brings its vision of solving data-intensive Ajax web development & deployment pains, to completion

Visual WebGui which was designed to solve the most painful issues for enterprise IT is now with its new 6.4 RC0 version fullfiling its promise to reproduce client/server richness and user experience on Web and Cloud, in a simple cost effective way.

Since its inception in 2007, Gizmox has been working towards the release of its fully featured Visual WebGui (VWG) version. Up until this release of 6.4 Gizmox has released 6 major versions and with this version Gizmox is delivering on the VWG promise to enable a full cycle of rapid development of enterprise level data-intensive Ajax application.

"VWG was designed to solve what might be the most painful issues for enterprise IT; reproducing client/server richness and user experience on Web and Cloud, in a simple cost effective way and with standard Web, no-plug-in accessibility and absolutely secured end point. We took upon ourselves one of the most ambitious missions, one that the big software players could not solve," says Navot Peled, Gizmox CEO and adds "The goal was to create an end-to-end Web and Cloud solution that simplifies enterprise Ajax development experience to a VB6 level using Ajax methodologies to reproduce client/server richness and user experience on Web while enabling absolutely unhackable Ajax UI and one that also enables creative UI designs without the need to struggle with complex HTML, JavaScript and CSS styling. We wanted to make developers really feel at home, so we decided to expose 2 basic development experiences: one that leverages desktop developers' skills, providing Form based VB6-like development experience and one that leverages web developers' skills, with declarative XAML experience. The first one we call VWG application and the second is VWG sites. Visual WebGui 6.4 is the first version to fully deliver on that promise."

VWG has been collecting awards on its innovative approach and achievements, as well as rewarded with developers and enterprises responses and feedbacks. Its SDK has been downloaded more than 700,000 times within 2 years and there are over 35,000 VWG applications that were developed with its pre-release, partly featured SDK.

The innovative technology of Visual WebGui has been recognized by many individuals and organizations altogether approving the company's innovation, solid reputation and thought leadership it brings to the industry. In 2010 Visual WebGui was awarded with a couple of technological prizes such as the inclusion in 2010 SD Times 100 which recognizes "a noble gathering of leaders" in various software areas. Visual WebGui was also listed as one of the "Coolest Cloud Platform Vendors" by UBM's Channel Web magazine stating that the Visual WebGui platform is a way to enable enterprises to create rich and responsive Web applications with solid performance and security.

The new version's free & free trial downloads are available visualwebgui.com.

7/21/2010

Infospectrum goes Green with automated recruitment & interview HR system

Recruitment and interview process usually becomes complicated and very hard to follow with massive exchange of emails, bulky attachments and several people involved. So it was decided to develop a system that would simplify that process by allowing to find required information at a touch of a key - a web-based workflow-based application to automate the process without any need to install software on the client.

The solution also needed to provide automated workflow to route tasks to the relevant performers and notify them by e-mail. It also needed to capture the important data in the process so that some intelligent reports could be generated from it. And last but not least, an appealing user interface goes a long way towards application acceptability. The users needed a user interface which was intuitive and easy to use.

"The rich user interface, powerful features and high performance of the tool impressed us and it was an easy decision to use VWG as a development framework instead of the traditional ASP.NET approach," said Project Manager Vijay Phulwadhawa.

The learning curve for the development team was minimal since they were mostly desktop application experts and as such were familiar with the concepts and ptactices allowed by the Visual WebGui solution that they chose as their framework.. "The ease of development of the UI with Visual WebGui is just amazing! During the project execution, we have seen desktop developers who never worked in web applications learn the framework and be productive in record time. The hassles of JavaScript, Ajax, and HTML are absent which increases productivity many folds," added Phulwadhawa.

VWG Based Integrated Recruitment & Interview System

Read more

7/07/2010

Redcastle specializes in Business Management Solutions usually based around an established CRM product. The company struggled to make a Web Application with the same user experience as the Windows client.

As a result, Redcastle looked for a solution that would allow the development of web modules that fit the user experience of their Windows client CRM system. Redcastle lead developer James Carter encountered Visual WebGui for the first time via a web advertisement which promised a rapid conversion of VB6 applications. Carter who was a bit skeptical at first decided to give Visual WebGui a try. Carter then downloaded Visual WebGui and found that "they did have a web based ListView control that did everything that the Windows control was capable of and much, much more!"

After a short evaluation it proved to be exactly what the people at Redcastle were after; a platform that allowed building and running of Windows based applications in a pure web environment.

"Using Visual WebGui our development times have been vastly reduced," said Lead Developer James Carter who continued that "adding a new list to a page/form is as simple as dragging a new control from the toolbox, and with only a few lines of code you have a list/table that supports row selection (no code required), column-click sorting (amazingly absolutely no code at all to achieve this), pagination, column repositioning via drag-drop (again totally free, no coding required), allowing the user to decide which columns to see and which to hide - all at the speed of light!. Using standard ASPX this would have taken much longer."

Read more...

6/28/2010

Brinks Bolivia saves 40% on developing the Web GUI for its Billing System

Brink Bolivia needed to track their services in order to send customers reliable invoices and to generate parameterized reports about the status of each service which is a key for administrative decision-making.

So the company decided to build a billing system that would allow access via the web according to user's roles and permissions so each user gets only the options relevant for them and should be connected with other modules of the main system and offer a user-friendly user interface.

For creating this application Brinks used Visual WebGui. "Our developers were able to find a new world of user-friendly tools and very comfortable for the web environment without having to worry about HTML, CSS or AJAX. It was very quick to create all the interfaces and also connect them with our database," said Alexander Cuellar, Applications Analyst Manager who added "custom tables helped us a lot displaying visual information to the user, which goes beyond just numbers, now the information is highlighted by colors, letters and positions within each screen."

You can read the full success story and take a look at the application's UI on visualwebgui.com

6/20/2010

Creating a fully scalable and redundant application with VWG version 6.4 on Vimeo

The webcast explores the ability to create a light weighted application, no matter how large or complex with unlimited scalability and redundancy support with VWG. It will explore the new tools and concepts which are making this capability possible.

Creating a fully scalable and redundant application with VWG version 6.4 on Vimeo

6/17/2010

Brinks Bolivia Customer Service System - the eSAC System allows registration and management of contacts for a customer and in addition to maintaining an updated status of each service or customer request, to have accurate information and perform the appropriate procedures for all applications.

The system was originally developed in VB6 and since web access was essential it was offered via Citrix. Since the application's performance was a critical issue as well as the need to offer the system without specific installations the company looked for a solution that would solve those drawbacks of using Citrix.

Searching for a solution that would allow it to offer the eSAC system over the web without the need for specific client installations and provide sufficient performance levels even when there is limited bandwidth lead Brinks to a decision to migrate their VB6 Customer Service system to the Visual WebGui Web/Cloud Platform.

"Developing on Visual WebGui we were able to migrate the system to web environment and even add new features in less time which allows us to offer it over a standard web browser with better performance and no installations as was required with Citrix," concluded Alexander Cuellar.

Go to the Visual WebGui website to read to full article >

6/13/2010

While ASP.NET provides an event base approach it is completely dismissed when working with AJAX and the richness of the server is lost and replaced with JavaScript programming and couple with a very high security risk.

Visual WebGui reinstates the power of the server to AJAX development and provides a statefull yet scalable, server centric architecture that provides the benefits and user productivity of AJAX with the security and developer productivity we had before AJAX stormed into our lives.

"When I first came up with the concept of Visual WebGui, I was frustrated by the fragile and complex nature of developing web applications. The contrast in productivity between working in a fully OOP compiled environment vs. scripting even today, with JQuery, Dojo and such, is still huge. Even today the greatest sponsor of JavaScript programming, Google, is offering a framework to avoid JavaScript using Java that compiles to JavaScript (GWT). So I decided to find a way to abstract the complexity or rather delegate the complex job to enable developers to concentrate on the “What” instead of the “How” and embraced the Form based approach," said Guy Peled the inventor of Visual WebGui.

Although traditional OOP development still rules the enterprise, the differences between web sites and web applications have blurred and so did the differences between classic developers and web developers. As a result, we now see declarative languages in desktop / backend development environments (WPF / WF) and we see OOP, gaining more and more power in web development (ASP.NET MVC / ASP.NET DOM). However, what has not changed is enterprise need for security, development ROI, reach, highly responsive and interactive UIs and scalability.

The advantages that declarative languages and 'on demand' compilation provide over classic development are mostly the flexibility and a more readable initialize component it offers which is what Gizmox is aspiring to do by replacing the designer initialize component with XAML code. The code in this new project template will be compiled on demand using the build provider mechanism ASP.NET has. This means that the performance hit is only on the first request and after that the performance is the same as a prebuilt solution. This will allow the flexibility of a dynamically updated sites and the power of fully blown enterprise applications over web. You can also use prebuilt features available in ASP.NET to enjoy both worlds in production.

VWG XAML implementation (VWG Sites) will be the first truly compliable XAML implementation as Microsoft implemented Silverlight and WPF as a runtime markup interpretation opposed to the ASP.NET markup implementation which is compiled to CLR code once. We have chosen to implement the VWG Sites parser as a different way to create CLR code that provides greater performance over the reflection alternative. VWG Sites will also be the first server side XAML UI engine which, while giving the power of XAML, it will not require any plug-ins or installations on the client side.

Here is a short video demonstrating VWG Sites markup.


There is also a live sample available here.

6/01/2010

Explore the new extended ListView and Win Prizes

Gizmox is announcing a ListView Challenge where developers can participate by creating and submitting their own implementations of the new extended ListView. "its quite amazing what you can do with it. It opens a lot of new ways to present data in a better and more userfriendly way," says one of the VWG community members who built a three level hierarchal ListView.

Watch the hierarchal ListView demo by Visualizer

Those ListView implementations will be reviewed and rated and the winner will win a free Professional Studio w/ 1 year subscription. The 5 top rated codes will entitle their developers for a cool new T-shirt.

The new v6.4 introduces new capabilities with its extended ListView Control. The Collapsible Panel enhancement of the ListView Control, along with the Column Type Control, open up the possibilities for potential usage of the ListView control for data display, data entry and as the Collapsible Panel can contain whatever control you like, it can as well contain other ListView controls, thus making it possible to create Hierarchial ListView display of unlimited number of levels.

The first enhancement is the introduction of a new column type Control which opens up the possibility for a ListView cell to contain controls like CheckBox, ComboBox, ListBox or even TabControl, Form or another ListView as the contents of that particular cell. This means that the ListView is no longer a display-only control, but has the full potential of being a full blown data entry control as well.

The second major enhancement is the introduction of ListViewPanelItem. The ListViewPanelItem behaves exactly the same as it‘s predecessor, the ListViewItem, and in additon it has a Panel Control attached to it, seperate panel for each row in the ListView. This new Panel can be either expanded (visible) or not (hidden) and when expanded, will fill the full width of the ListView, but has adjustable height.

Join the Challenge

Enter the Challenge

5/26/2010

On May 26 @ 9am PST Visual WebGui is conducting a free Webcast that should walks developers/designers through the process of customizing a VWG Web/Cloud applications using the 'Import-Export' features of the NEW Theme Designer.

The Visual WebGui Platform and tools allows simple development & design patterns that's proven to save on costs and resource.
So if you are interested in getting your design job done much easier, you should probably tune in for about an hour and find out how.

Click here to register:
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/740450625

5/18/2010

Visual WebGui's extended ListView control is in many cases the best option to implement the most complex data entry and views.

The following webcast explains the difference between the extended controls and the standard "flat list" ListView control and of course what can be done with it.

5/10/2010

May 12: Applying engaging, modern web 2.0 look & feel to your VWG application with version 6.4

I would like to present an upcoming webcast demonstrating Visual WebGui's unique process of creating new Web application themes. VWG tools allow a new interface between the developer and the graphic designer and defining each one's responsibilities (making usage of Adobe Photoshop) in the process. Starting from a default theme, understanding the needs and implementing accordingly.

The webcast which is taking place on May 12 is open to everyone for free.
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/601138081

4/26/2010

HR TMS provides enterprise talent management solutions for healthcare, retail and corporate customers, focusing on performance management, compensation management and succession planning.

“The Visual WebGui development process was extremely productive and eliminated much of the complexity required to deliver a highly functional UI using ASP.Net” Mitch Stephens HR TMS Product Architect

Middlesex Hospital needed to automate their review process, pull in the position information from those spreadsheets and be able to deliver reviews online. Users needed to have online access to those reviews from a standard browser. Although the manual system had its issues, it did have the advantage of being very comprehensive and familiar to users.

The decision was made to provide a web-based solution that leveraged the look and feel of those spreadsheets in order to insure user acceptance of the system and minimize the training needed.
Visual WebGui was chosen as the Platform for that project. Read the full article.

4/22/2010

New 6.3.15 & 6.4 beta 2 versions released

Visual WebGui released two new versions today.

The first is a revision to 6.4 beta 2 and the second release is the latest 6.3.x version (6.3.15) which includes the following changes:

Breaking Changes [1]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
VWG-6132 - [v6.3.15] Deploy language resource assemblies next to the Gizmox.WebGUI.Forms assembly location Installation puts the resources in the assemblies folder rather thatn the GAC. That way they are copied to the output folder of the app, thus enabling their deployment to the server.

Bugs fixes [7]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
VWG-5714 - Help.ShowHelp of .CHM file with images should show the images
VWG-6132 - [v6.3.15] Deploy language resource assemblies next to the Gizmox.WebGUI.Forms assembly location
VWG-6401 - Radiobutton: The DoubleClick event should fire.
VWG-6409 - The Hourglass (white/blue) Spinner icon should not display to the left on LTR cultures
VWG-6452 - Calling/Causing an update on a scrollable container should not reset the scroll position.
VWG-6463 - Redrawing a scrollable container does not preserve last scrolling position.
VWG-6867 - Listbox: The Items selection in run time should be work correctly

Enhancements [1]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
VWG-6610 - Visifire - Add a click event handler on the graph

Both versions are available to download here

4/21/2010

Rouen Business School builds its entire back office UI with Visual WebGui

Two years ago, Rouen Business School (AMBA accredited institution located in Rouen, Normandy, France) decided to develop and implement a proprietary information system in-house. The objective was to administer all the data encompassed by a classic 3500 Students business school.

The development team at Rouen Business School chose Visual WebGui for the UI. "When we tested the Visual WebGui solution we were really amazed and enthusiastic. It was exactly the kind of solution we were looking for... The great performance of the solution allows us to manage a large amount of information with no delay with a very positive feedback at the user end," said Stéphane Henry the IT Project Manager of the school.

As a result of the fast development, easy deployment, performance, and professional design that the team experienced with Visual WebGui, the entire back office of Rouen Business School information system was chosen to be developed with the Visual WebGui framework "and after two years we do not see any reason to change this," commented Stéphane Henry who added that "all the original requirements were satisfied using Visual WebGui."

Read the full Case study >

4/18/2010

http://chevyfleischman-weiss.ulitzer.com/node/1356570

Migration to the Cloud...
Everybody's talking about putting their apps on the Cloud these days. But what do they really need to know when considering such a project?!

Chevy (Fleischman) Weiss & Itzik Spitzen of Visual WebGui have put together a list of the 10 most important things you need to know and check before you start migrating your apps to the Cloud.

Read the list >

4/15/2010

Check out the new Control Customization video tutorial and learn how to change the design of controls in a Visual WebGui Ajax Web or Cloud application using a cutting-edge theme designer that will easily provide the UI with a desired design.















Customizing Controls in Visual WebGui >

4/08/2010

Enhanced developer experience with new CompanionKit

Visual WebGui launched a new feature on its website demonstrating the platform's concepts, features and controls and the code behind them. The new Developer CompanionKit is a huge step forward in the developer experience VWG is offering by allowing developers to explore Visual WebGui via a live interface. This should provide better understanding of the system and the ability to utilize the great advantages of Visual WebGui in order to develop better performing rich web applications.

The CompanionKit is available online at companionkit.visualwebgui.com/main.wgx
We invite you to Explore Visual WebGui via the new CompanionKit and to watch the CompanionKit Intro video.

Below is a screenshot taken from the live CompanionKit which allows developers to see how applying an alternate style to the appearance of a DataGridView is done and how it looks running live and its code (C# or VB.NET).

Developer CompanionKit

In addition, the New Developer CompanionKit which was built with Visual WebGui showcases the enhanced UI design capabilities of building more engaing, modern Web 2.0 applications. The CompanionKit will also be available for download in the next few days as part of the media for 6.4 beta 2 SDK (.NET 2.0 or .NET 3.5) under "Help and Documentation".

4/06/2010

Fully functional 6.4 beta 2 version released

The Visual WebGui team is very excited to announce the new Visual WebGui version 6.4 beta 2.

Except from the fact that around 1800 issues were handled in version 6.4 of which hundreds of capabilities have been implemented and completed and above 800 bugs were fixed, this version would be the first Visual WebGui version which will reach to a release level.

The major Capabilities that are included in this version:

  1. Full support for dynamic scalability and redundancy
    As a part of Visual WebGui promise to provide fully scalable environment, 6.4 presents a set of infrastructures which are all about optimizing the scenarios of centralized state management and memory consumption. In addition a set of rendering improvements and browser specific adjustments were implemented.
  2. Theme designer
    Enables full UI customization and modern Web 2.0 UIs + out-of-the-box themes. From now on, Visual WebGui provide simple and productive tools in the form of a point & click designer to customize the look & feel and create the most eye catching web UIs. Developers can now export the entire look & feel to a Grapgic Designer friendly format (in use in Photoshop) and get back a whole new look & feel.
    Furthermore, a set of 4 themes is available out of the box of which Web 2.0 and Desktop ones.
  3. Control level designer
    Enables custom control creating, extending and wrapping. The ability to customize, extend and wrap controls in VWG has extremely empowered especially in the field of controls resources management (i.e. images, scripts and layouts).
  4. Lowest memory consumption on the server per active user (smart state-full app)
    The per user state memory consumption has reduced dramatically by leveraging advanced data-structures and mechanisms to store only the minimal amount of necessary state data on the server at every point in time.
  5. Flexible and highly customizable ListView with support for Hierarchies and Custom Columns
    ListView has now became a highly flexible control and enables fully customization which turn it into an extended form of DataGridView only light weighted.
  6. Lighter and fully functional DataGridView
    One of the important missing features in previous 6.3 was the lack of functionality and capabilities of the DataGridView which were now accomplished and highly optimized in terms of client footprint.
  7. Full support for Chrome, Firefox 2.0-3.5, IE v6.0-8.0, Safari and Netscape (coming soon support for Opera browsers)
    All of the system functionality is now tested against each of the browsers above to ensure that the release version will support all of the different browsers.
  8. Support for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 (will be available in the near future)
    Visual WebGui is already integrated into Visual Studio 2010, the first media of 2010
    will be available a bit after beta 2 is released.

Free downloads of 6.4 beta 2 >

4/03/2010

Swiss company found swiss knife for web development of business apps

"As opposed to ASP.NET with Visual WebGui you don't have to master all the languages and toggle between the different layers… This is really rapid application development so you can focus on your business logic." Joachim Rönn

Swiss company found swiss knife for web development of business apps

3/04/2010

ProSysPlus Blog: The Empty Client and The Cloud

"...I read about the cloud being used for complex data-based applications, that latency could well be an issue... This is the issue that Visual WebGui solves: what is essentially a Windows Forms application runs on the Visual WebGui server, and only the image of the application is transmitted to the client, and only the users actions are transmitted back to the Visual WebGui server. They call this the Empty Client model..."

Read more on ProSysPlus Blog

3/02/2010

Visual WebGui based web applications automated IDE built with $300,000 savings

Visual WebGui based web applications automated IDE built with $300,000 savings


Automato is an automated environment (IDE) solution for developing web systems using the methodology DDD (Domain-Driven Development) which was built around the Visual WebGui platform.

"Before Visual WebGui we have tried many others AJAX technologies but only Visual WebGui turned out to enable the creation of complex applications with a zero learning curve. If you know Windows Forms, you know how to develop with Visual WebGui," said Alexnaldo Santos.

Read more >

2/24/2010

Desktop Publishing Work Order Scheduling Application exceeds client expectations

“Development assumed productivity would be equal to the speed of developing WinForms applications, and this proved to be a correct assumption… the application performs very well and… has exceeded expectations,” Mike Bennett.

Due to pressures in their busy DTP studio, the client desired to automate and control the submission of requests for DTP services with the end result being a measurable and improved service delivery.

In order to do so it was needed to create a means to manage the submission of DTP requests across the organization. The envisaged solution would also provide email notification mechanisms to keep the DTP department and their internal customers up to date with the progress of jobs…

Read article >

2/13/2010

New Visual WebGui versions are out

New Visual WebGui Rich Ajax Applications Platform version released.
6.3.14 includes some additional stabilization fixes for the on-going support for 6.3.

A new beta1 version c of the cutting-edge Visual WebGui 6.4 was also released with a large set of features and a much more complete set of compatibility with the WinForms API and the enhanced developer/designer interfaces and new customization capabilities such as jQuery support.

All downloads are free via this link

1/25/2010

Registration for Wednesday's Webcast continues

Registration for Wednesday's Webcast continues

This Wednesday, 1/27/2010 10:00am Pacific Time (US)

Discover the right combination between greatest Web benefits and the most mature development framework on our upcoming Live MSDN Webcast: Visual Basic 6 Simplicity and Intensive AJAX Richness for the Web and Cloud.

Click here to secure your spot if you haven't so far!