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...

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...

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

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

Web enabling data warehouse solution made possible with Visual WebGui

"Visual WebGui Rich Internet Applications Platform reduces the complexity of web development to a minimum. The fact that the developer no longer needs to think like a web developer saves a huge amount of time and allowed the application to be market ready in a very short time." said Joerg Stieg whose company TIP management AG ported its data warehouse solution's configuration and planning tool UI to the web and redesigned the HCe® Web front-end.

"Creating such a feature-rich application in this very short time would have been impossible without Visual WebGui." Joerg Stieg

Go to the full case study.

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.