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 >

Creating Rich Web Applications Gets a Ton Easier (with VWG)

The following analysis was written by Peter Brockmann, President of Brockmann & Company, a high tech marketing consulting company and is featured on their website.

"Faster development of a rich media experience for web applications that are secure in operation has been a particularly elusive goal for many enterprise application developers since the debate about thin client and thick clients a decade ago. Until now.

...Visual WebGui brings the ultimate simplicity to the .NET development framework through an enterprise SDK that plugs into popular development tools such as Windows Forms... The runtime server product acts as a web interface to the application and supports DHTML, Silverlight and other presentation standards.

...There should be no doubt that with the interest in cloud computing services and user preferences for rich media applications running on a wider variety of platforms will only exacerbate the concerns about security of enterprise data and the cost of multiple device support which plays well to the Visual WebGui advantage in the marketplace."

Brockmann and Company researches the business user experience and writes about the business impact of communications technologies.
Click gere to read the full article on the Brockmann & Company website...

A simple Web UI theme customization video tutorial

A new video tutorial of the innovative Visual WebGui Web Design Tool was published.
The Customizing a Visual WebGui theme using the Control & Theme Designer tutorial demonstrates the new cutting edge web development/design patterns introduced by this Control & Theme Designer featured in Visual WebGui Web & Cloud Platform.

The new tool allows to create and edit image resources in Visual WebGui projects and their behaviors by using a visual point and click designer that is integrated into VS and works with most external image editing software. The tool is simple, intuitive and allows to create custom rich Web 2.0 UI's to the already productive Visual WebGui.

Watch the video...

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

First Visual WebGui 6.4 Theme & Control Designer tutorial released

A new "How to" tutorial (The first for 6.4) showing the basic usage of Visual WebGui Rich Internet Applications Platform Theme & Control designer was published on visualwebgui.com.

The Theme & Control designer is the major new web development & design feature that will be introduced in version 6.4. This new visual designer enable developers to create or edit a control skin and make custom themes. The Theme & Control designer consolidates all the resources that build the control into one place.

View the Basic usage of the new Visual WebGui Theme & Control designer tutorial and learn how to edit images that make up a standard button and quickly transform it to Mac styled buttom.

Visual WebGui RIA Platform 6.4 Preview to be released soon

Gizmox announced that Visual WebGui RIA Platform version 6.4 will be released as a preview version in the beginning of May.

Since 6.4 includes many major, all-new features Gizmox decided to release it as a free Express Studio Preview version first, allowing Visual WebGui developers & community the opportunity to try it as soon as possible and experience its remarkable potential and value.

In the meantime, 6.3.x which is now a stabilized version continues to be offered as a pre-release version. This will also give the devoted Visual WebGui developers community the opportunity to benefit from Visual WebGui's pre-release discount for a bit longer. Gizmox is offering a free upgrade to 6.4 for perpetual licenses and will reset the subscription period to start when the 6.4 version is stabilized and offered commercially.

For those who would like a taste of the next version Gizmox will soon release a free preview of 6.4. Visual WebGui 6.4 discovers a leap forward in Visual WebGui's evolution and it will literally change the way you develop and design Rich Internet Applications. The new version combines the ease of Visual WebGui drag-and-drop application development with graphically-engaging visual designers to build Web UI's. The 6.4 preview brings a new dimension of collaboration between development and UI design tasks enabling simple and productive customization and creation of rich, branded, creative customer-facing Web 2.0 like UI's. This is enabled by new Control & Theme Visual Designers that add up to the Form designer and integrate with existing design software such as Photoshop, Expression Blend, Flash CS, and more to enable the most efficient developer and designer collaboration when customizing and creating new themes and controls. Both Theme and Control Designers provide easy management of the entire project's resources and the integrative capability to edit those resources.

Visual WebGui 6.4 also introduces a new scalability server extension allowing multi-users usage scenarios. The Cluster Server also provides important redundancy to Visual WebGui web applications.

Stay tuned for more information, samples and downloads to be released this month...

Live MS Techdays Session: Security is enterprise RIA show stopper

Hi,

You can join Visual WebGui and Itzik Spitzen to a live session during Microsoft Tech-days 2009 which is taking place tomorrow, April 1st at 7:30am GMT

The session, MBL305 Security is enterprise RIA show stopper will discuss the new web 2.0 AJAX, Silverlight and Flash development nature are rapidly puling developers to develop fat clients downloading the entire application to the client. Enterprises cannot live with the huge hidden security compromise they do when using such technologies and this fact becomes a major show stopper for creating RIA in enterprises. Come and see how Visual WebGui and the "Empty Client" paradigm has proven to thoroughly solve the security issue of RIA seamlessly from the developer's aspect and still keep the richness, accessibility and productiveness of the applications. Visual WebGui enhances AJAX and Silverlight making them secured by design.

Languages(s): English
Level: 300
Session Type: Live Session
Speaker(s): Itzik Spitzen

Go to the following website to register for the session - it's free
www.msfttechdays.com

Visual WebGui released its 6.3.6 RIA Platform

Visual WebGui released yesterday its Rich Internet Applications Platform version 6.3.6 which allows simple and fast web development using the VWG SDK, Express Studio and the Professional Studio with the WYSIWYG Form Designer.

This new version includes implemented support for Microsoft Silverlight 3.0 beta presentation layer and is the latest and most stable Visual WebGui 6.3.x version

Visual WebGui downloads are free and available from here.

Debt Collection Management System Web UI developed in less than a month

Torq Software decided to allow web access the internal systems so that they can be accessed by more field agents and clients via the internet with a manageable impact on the processor and bandwidth usage footprint.

The team chose Visual WebGui RIA Platform and soon enough discovered how easy it was to start developing Visual WebGui screens due to the fact that it uses the same GUI designer technology that was already used to develop the Windows Forms version of the application.

It was relatively easy to develop the screens for the application as the existing Windows Forms UI was used as a guide. Even though Visual WebGui was still in a beta form, the overall web development was simple and quicker than expected. "Not having to learn ASP.NET in its entirety meant that we could leverage our existing knowledge for most part to produce an effective application" Said Apolon Ivankovic. Deployment turned out to be relatively easy as well and only required the team to learn the basics of IIS deployment.

To read the etire showcase click on the following link:Debt Collection Management System Web UI developed in less than a month

A Linux Web based deployment tool completed in just 2 weeks

A new Visual WebGui RIA Platform showcase is published:A Linux (Mono) Web based OS Deployment tool completed in just 2 weeks

The company needed to develop a solution which would operate as an OS Deployment tool that is customized for the needs of their Datacenter according the specific design parameters given.
The team decided not to use PHP but to use Mono (mod_mono) with Visual WebGui because of the short timeframe they had for deploying the solution and since Visual WebGui provided the easiest and quickest graphical development possible.

The development process was straight forward. While the final goal was well defined, some of the concepts and functions were being defined while coding the solution. The Visual WebGui unique approach enabling easy integration of UserControls and intuitive graphical development allowed for this unstructured development cycle which led to an extremely shortened process as stated by Axel Westerhold: "Because of the easy graphical development environment and the integration into Visual Studio we were able to roll out the product within 2 weeks."

Go to the full case study.

WinForms over Web - A unique approach to AJAX development

There is a really good article posted on programmers-tech explaining Visual WebGui's Web Development platform uniques approach and benefits for developing web applications.

"Visual WebGui a unique approach to AJAX development Visual WebGui is not just another AJAX framework but rather a different approach to web application development, specially designed to simplify building highly complex applications like Outlook Web Access (OWA). Visual WebGui makes it possible for developers to create applications that were previously developed only by the "big guys". While web development environments such as ASP.NET and JSP have made huge strides in creating a rich environment for developing web applications, they have always targeted a very wide range of applications from content rich sites to OWA like applications. By doing so, they forced a compromise that was very painful for applications developers. Concepts like pages, html, requests and responses, which originated from the historical evolution of web development, are not really suitable for developing applications.

Visual WebGui uses a proven application development toolset that was designed for application development from the outset. Visual WebGui’s methodology – Winforms over Web (WOW) - originates from environments like MFC and the popular Visual Basic environment."

Click here to read the full article.

A full Help Desk Ticketing System completed with 1 developer in only 8 months

Visual WebGui provided the RIA platform/framework to build Help Desk Ticketing System solution that actualized the requirements and met the challenges as a cost effective alternative to other RIA platforms. The drag and drop page development experience was an enormous benefit. This compared to the hours it would take to build the same pages with traditional ASP environments. “Visual WebGui claims of 90% reduction in development time and providing the bridge between desktop and web technologies were substantiated through the design, development, and deployment of our help desk software solution.“ Brian Butterfield

Brian Butterfield added that “There is no other software platform on the market today that can give traditional desktop application developers the ability to transition that knowledge and experience directly to a web development environment – providing an unprecedented development experience.”

Read the full case study.

Visual WebGui RIA platform 6.3.4 released

Gizmox released its Visual WebGui RIA Platform 6.3.4.
This version is released as part of the continuous efforts to stabilize 6.3 web development environments. It is another step towards a stable 6.3.x which is expected to be released in the next couple of weeks.

This is the change log for version 6.3.4

Bugs fix----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
VWG-4142 - Rich Text Editor RibbonBar buttons throw errors
VWG-2913 - When image was larger than the PictureBox if set to Zoom the image was not rendered properly.
VWG-4137 - When session state was active clicks where disabled on main window.
VWG-4129 - "Textcontrols" did not allow edit navigation via arrow, home, end keys etc in FF3.VWG-4136 - Component tray did not display datasets and bindingsources in visible space after realoding form
VWG-4135 - An exception was raised whenclosing a form designer.

All 6.3.4 downloads can be found here.
Professional Studio can be downloaded directly from here.