As we head into 2010, technological companies and experts are making their predictions as to what the New Year can expect to bring while reviewing the best of 2009. Navot Peled, CEO of Gizmox, has three personal resolutions to share with developers and the IT community, focusing on commitments that he is making.

1.Ensure that developers have more tools that they really need
Desktop power on the web, with its enormous economic impact, is a long set goal. Yet as technologies get closer, they get much more complicated. Although Ajax, Silverlight and Flash all introduce complexities that challenge developers, there many tools that try to reduce complexities. My first New Year’s resolution is to reintroduce simplicity to the ever growing complex technological world.

Sometimes it seems that on a daily basis there are new technologies, and it is difficult for developers to try everything and figure out what is really ideal. In fact, it often seems that new technologies are released just for the sake of it, as they do not bring any real breakthrough or even progress in functionality or productivity when compared to their predecessors. I resolve this year to work harder to encourage both developers and technological companies to create tools that really make a change, and which allow us to be more productive or achieve what was not possible in the past without the need to learn new skills each time a new tool is released.

Part of this effort means that getting up to par with the trends in the field should be more reachable and cost-effective, such as the latest trends of offering users more accessibility and web 2.0 user experiences. Moving your organization to being web or cloud based not only increases productivity but also can lower costs in the long run - both on infrastructure and maintenance. But before you do so, you need to take in consideration the emerging battle between the Google thin client model and the fat client approach of Microsoft. Google's approach leads towards an organization which consumes everything from the web (or Google) while Microsoft advocates in client installations which requires stronger client computers. There is a gradual boost in available tools following each of the approaches and 2010 might finally be the year when you make the move and modernize your software assets…or at least consider it more seriously!

2.Ensure that information is better secured
It seems that the more we improve technology, the more vulnerable it gets. Each year introduces more problems for the end user, which poorly reflects on developers. Knowing that there are solutions to most security problems, my resolution is to utilize this year to make sure that developers are protecting their assets and the information in their organization but still doing it in a transparent way that is not a burden on their users.

Some technologies are more vulnerable than others and companies’ practices can unintentionally create many security holes. I’m committed to making a stronger effort to ensure that developers know where and how to look for solutions that provide them with a better starting point when designing the security system.

3.Work to ensure that information is centralized rather than scattered
While developers work to expand their services, enhance their products, and make improvements for end users, often they overlook the need to make an effort to consolidate as much aspects of their IT as possible. My resolution is to help developers look for overall solutions that allow them to centrally manage their system or to be focused on their business needs without having to worry too much about multiple languages, skills binding components together and compatibility issues. This will greatly simplify development, deployment & maintenance in your organization. And those benefits do not have to be stated here – they are definitely understood!

New Social Networking blogging concept created with Visual WebGui

MyTimelineOnline is a unique blogging website featuring advanced controls that allows users to document their life, or the life of a loved one and to share their collective experiences within their social network and with the world. MyTimelineOnline features a control originally designed by MIT and converted to .NET by Rob Chartier. The timeline view allows users to quickly navigate several years' worth of postings to explore what events occurred in their own life or the lives of others.

The site was developed by a single individual and originally technologies such as Telerik were considered and discarded due to the complexity and cost. As a result, the entire site was rewritten by a single part time developer in Visual WebGui which provided a significant increase in the usability of the site as well as the visual style. Visual WebGui was chosen since it was extremely easy to use & develop with and it also allowed rewriting pages written in other Ajax solutions very quickly. Additionally, Visual WebGui allowed focusing on usability since the Visual WebGui themes took care of the rest.

Prior to upgrading the site to Visual WebGui the user experience was lacking, including repeating unnecessary page refreshes. "With VWG I was able to create a fully ajax’ed site quickly without worrying about the typical issues," founder John Ruf.

Read the full Case Study...

Patch Theme download for Visual WebGui 6.3.9

A Patch Theme that fixes some renedering issues for version 6.3.9 was released.
Fixes for these issues have already been implemented in the upcoming version 6.3.10 and will also be relased with that version.

The patch is a VWG v6.3 Theme. There is no installation required for using it.All you need to do to use it is:

1. Either add the project or the assembly to there references of your Visual WebGui Application project

2. Register the Theme with the name "PatchTheme" and select it as the default theme, either by using the VWG VS integration, or by going to the Web.config of your application and adding the following XML element in the 'Themes section:

3. Change the Themes section opener to look like this:

When VWG v6.3.10 is released with these fixes, you can simply remove the registration of this theme, set the Default theme as Selected and remove the reference to that theme from the VWG Application project.

You can get the patch theme from this location here.

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 Visual WebGui Web Design Tool Webcast on MSDN

After a short break we are back to present a live Webcast on MSDN this Tuesday, June 16th at 9:30 AM PST.

The upcoming webcast: Designing Creative DHTML, Silverlight UIs: Simple, Visualized & Intuitive will show off the new point and click Visual WebGui Control & Theme Web Design Tool and demonstrate its fastest, most intuitive way of developing and designing without Javascript, HTML, CSS, or XAML.

Join us tomorrow for a short hour that can potentially save you a lot of time!

Click here to get more information and to register online...

Visual WebGui 6.3.7 Platform for Rich AJAX applications released

Gizmox released today a new version of the Visual WebGui Platform for Rich .NET AJAX applications. Visual WebGui 6.3.7 is a further stabilization to the 6.3 pre-release version which adds support for wrapping of AJAX based controls into the Visual WebGui framework as well as support for additional languages.

The platform is available in free open source and free trial (commercial Professional Studio) versions.

All downloads are available for free here!

To view the Change log for 6.3.7 click here.

Go to Downloads page...

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.

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

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

TYCON developed a Telemedicine application on Web with 1 developer in 1 month

Gizmox published a new case study showcasing TYCON's reasons for choosing Visual WebGui RIA Development Platform as the core platform for the Web UI in their.

Click to Read showcase...

Using Visual WebGui allowed TYCON South America to deliver the new Telemdicine Second Opinion solution faster than expected saving time and resources due to the easy and quick implementation process of the existing WinForms code. The original plan to convert the WinForms generated code to web was a 5 month/man effort. With Visual WebGui TYCON completed the job using only 1 developer for 1 month.

"With Visual WebGui we were able to build an agile and secure web user interface that meets the requirements of our customer in terms of functionality and time-to-market Interface" Ariel Schwindt CEO of Tycon S.A.

Read the full showcase: A Telemedicine Second Opinion application developed on Web with 1 developer in 1 month

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.

Sneak Peek video of Visual WebGui 6.4 released

A preview version of Visual WebGui Rich Internet Applications Platform 6.4 will become available in a couple of weeks, but Visual WebGui released a short video as a sneak peek to the new version and its major new features - the Theme & Control Designers.

The new designers which will be available with the upcoming 6.4 Preview version enable simple and quick customization of controls and themes thus enabling developers/designers to create rich, branded, and engaging customer-facing UI's.

Click to watch the Theme Customization with the new Designer video.

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...

Putting a trading desk application on the cloud in a few weeks with Visual WebGui

I would like to share with you the following story showcasing how Visual WebGui Rich & Cloud Applications Platform enabled MBI to replace the old VB 6.0 with a modern web application that presents an enhanced user experience for the trading desk system. With the old VB 6.0 based system the trading job took a whole day to complete, but with Visual WebGui the process takes only a few hours and is nearly automatic.

Using Visual WebGui for this project contributed to delivering an application that is easy to use, intuitive and responsive in a short period of time. "Developing an application with Visual WebGui is a charm. UI design is done in a snap and coding is as easy as building a Windows application."

MBI had a VB 6.0 application that didn't meet the requirements anymore as the trading process was too long and complicated. As a result, it was decided to create a new trading desk application which would be simple, easy to use and reliable. It should be used by the Money Market traders and must allow them to get the trading job done in a few hours instead of the whole day with a nearly automated process.

This intriguing showcase is available here:Trading Desk application's UI completed in a couple of weeks

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.