Visual web development & design

This is an Open Letter to the Editor of CIO in response to an article posted on Computer World discussing the five problems that supposedly keep legacy applications out of the Cloud.

Dear Editor,

In light of your recent article about the challenges that legacy application face in migrating to the cloud, below please find a response which provides answers to 4 of the most problematic issues. We believe your readers would greatly benefit from the information, and we regret that we were not directly interviewed about these issues in advance of your article. We recognize your hesitation to publish such a piece because it promotes a product so blatantly, due to the originality and uniqueness of Visual WebGui, currently being the only one in the world that can take .NET desktop applications directly to the cloud with the click of a button.  Your readers were told of the problems with the cloud, and we believe that they will find it useful to know that most of the concerns raised in your article have already been attended to by VWG.  We’re one step ahead of the market with our real world and vision.

1. Just as no 2 clouds in the sky are alike… For those who are not familiar enough with Cloud technology, it’s easy to throw together all cloud platforms into one category.  But that’s like throwing planes, trains and automobiles into one category and making them all equal.  With all due respect, in reality, the advancement of the cloud today means that “cloud platform” can refer to different architectures, capabilities and services, starting from the virtual machines bases clouds (such as the Amazon AWS or the v-Cloud by VMware) to the most abstract deployment form of clouds (such as Windows Azure or Google App Engine), and everything in between. 
    
   It’s not one product but rather a myriad that have a single common denominator: they all provide a dynamic form of web applications/environments hosting.  We can bind them all together but only with a pure web architecture that is cloud aware and can benefit from the various services using the most common approach.
   
   That exists today in solutions such as Visual WebGui, which is a pure (managed) .NET based platform which executes plain web applications; in addition to its ability to connect different clouds, it offers benefits that can save organizations significant funds.  For example, with proper planning, it can be possible to perform migration of apps from one cloud provider to another without having to perform major changes.
    
2. Behind the lock and key…The potential serious security hazards are hindering enterprises from moving to the cloud, as exposing a software application to the public web can potentially result in unauthorized access to data. Furthermore, being able to trust a complete isolation of storage and being able to audit and monitor access, as well as to grant and prevent permissions on those systems, is an open issue.
   
   But here again, there is a solution.  One of Visual WebGui’s primary by design advantages is that the entire application runs on the server using a very organized methodology that makes it possible to audit every move of any user on the system, and grant or prevent access from users at runtime.
   
   And in terms of client (browser or device) safety, VWG ‘empty client’ runtime paradigm offers a complete secured client, making it impossible to disrupt or change the server’s logics by manipulating the client scripts. The ‘empty client’ also means that the client never exposes applicative data that was not supposed to be presented on the screen, a scenario that is often caused by the development method on which developers use applicative data to link between client piece with the server. Furthermore, data is never cached on the browser.
    
3. You don’t know your legacy apps… Line-of-business applications are extremely critical to the business, and demand an expedited means of transferring the current forms, complexities and logics to the cloud, as an alternative of the hundreds of thousands of hours of work that would have to be put in by human effort.  Alternatively, significant experience can be left behind, resulting in much reduced productivity and loses.  Visual WebGui offers full migration path for legacy WinForms and VB 6.0 applications including their entire business logics, forms and complexity to the cloud environment through a low costing and much less painful process.
    
4. Migration is manual and too darn few tools will help… Migration of legacy applications to cloud environments can be costly, especially when it comes to complex highly invested enterprise applications. Using Visual WebGui can cut down the manual labor, and even eradicate it, due to a straight forward path of migration for WinForms and VB 6.0.  Currently, this is the best starting point for migration of any other desktop technology to the cloud.

The security of the cloud, the storage, the ability to migrate apps to the cloud, and all other “problems” that worry the world are merely a walk on the beach with Visual WebGui.  So what’s the downside?  Only that if Google Apps had used Visual WebGui, newspapers would have lost a lot of their headlines over the past few months!

Navot Peled, CEO of Gizmox, challenged the “Green IT trend” with the announcement this week that its product, Visual WebGui, has been successfully providing energy and environmental benefits to enterprises, with its solutions that dually cut costs for hardware and software. 

“Over the past 2 years, enterprises have been successfully using our product – Visual WebGui, and reaping the environmental and energy benefits while saving money,” said Peled.  “To move the industry forward, it’s not the individual success of each Green IT product that must be celebrated. We must collectively recognize that there’s not just one Prius. Rather, every major development in technological applications today can, and must, incorporate the environmental and energy factors.”

Visual WebGui raised its value as a platform that can improve Green IT even more profoundly with the recent Visual WebGui based Verismic Power Manager™ Solution that reduces operational costs, enhances end user experience, and increases efficiency of IT support staff.  With analysts such as Gartner and Forrester claiming that more than 40% of IT costs come from the power consumption of the PC estate, Verismic Power Manager™ Software, which describes itself as “precision engineering for systems management”, sought environmental and economic enhancements in its products.

Visual WebGui was its platform of choice for a solution that would address the needs of increased efficiency by optimizing PC power consumption while delivering savings of $75 per PC and ROI within 6 months. In addition to the savings achievable by the applicative product as a resources manager, Visual WebGui contributes to savings on hardware equipment and even power resources, as its platform consumes 50% less CPU and 90% less bandwidth. 

“Visual WebGui has provided the excellent user experience that our customers now expect from Verismic Software” said Mark McGinn, Managing Director, Verismic.  “In such a critical area as PC Power Management where cost and carbon reduction are equally important to business, Visual WebGui has enabled us to provide a solution that does not increase resource requirements or administration overhead.”

Verismic also recognized simpler development and expedited production, which translates into great benefits for Verismic’s environmentally-preferred Power Manager.
        
Visual WebGui’s platform has offered native environmental benefits since the company’s inception, and its effects are being felt by companies around the world, like Verismic Software (which provides software to UK, Mainland Europe, US and Asia Pacific).

Read the Verismic Case Study...

Daniel Bardi, a Visual WebGui user shared his experience with the Umbraco community as he wrote in his post "...The UI is amazing and works in all known webbrowsers... it's the reason I had decided on the platform for the project (and by reading the many, many reviews).  The framework allows non-web developers (or winform developers) to build web applications using a WinForms development environment.  No more worries about session and state.

The web applications runs on the server and is "projected" into the clients browsers (no client overhead).  They call this "Empty Client" technology.

There is no installation on the client side, but they get a full Windows application experience.  The best part is that it's open-source (with a commercial license available for a mere $1500).  I personally use the it for projects and have had nothing but positive feedback..."

Click here to read the complete post.

A new Visual WebGui legacy application migration to Web case study is available.

Taldesk, Talex HelpDesk solution, which was initially developed as a Windows application (Visual Basic 6) needed to be available from different locations and browsers without the need to install any plugins or other components. The company tried building a Web client solution in ASP.NET but encountered many problems and difficulties so it looked for an alternative solution.

After a proof of concept “Visual WebGui turned out to be a magic stick to heal most of our ASP.NET problems and concerns. It also proved to be like a gift for our developers still longing to classic Windows development style” said project manager Marcin Pytel and added "We want to be rich, so use VWG and give us 10% of the money you will save”

Read the complete case study >

Save your Visual Basic 6.0 applications with the new ArtinSoft/Visual WebGui VB 6.0 to Web & Cloud migration solution. ArtinSoft and Gizmox have joined forces to provide a comprehensive solution to migrate legacy Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 applications to a Web-based DHTML or Microsoft Silverlight.

The new joint offering provides a complete solution for taking current Visual Basic 6.0 or Microsoft Windows Forms applications and moving them to a Web-based environment, saving deployment, remote access licenses, and infrastructure costs, while at the same time adding flexibility by allowing the choice between DHTML, Silverlight, or cloud-based user interfaces at the switch of a button.

Read Press Release >
Learn more >

The latest Visual WebGui version was released today providing further stablization to 6.3.x. The new version is available to download for free in VWG SDK and Express Studio versions and with a 30-day free trial with the Professional Studio.

View Change log >
Download now >

Check out the new set of How To tutorials that show how you can leverage any 3rd party asp.net controls within Visual WebGui projects. The articles demonstrate and walk through the wrapping process of a few common controls created by companies like Infragistics, ComponentOne and Telerik into Visual WebGui.

Visual WebGui allows simple & fast development & deployment of Web/Cloud applications while providing full flexibility & extensibility of other ASP.NET components.

These are the articles:

• How To Wrap ASP.NET Controls (Walkthrough) - Telerik RadListBox
• How To Wrap ASP.NET Controls (Walkthrough) – ComponentOne C1Calendar
• How To Wrap ASP.NET Controls (Walkthrough) – Infragistics UltraWebGrid

The Visual WebGui Web/Cloud development & deployment platform community continues to initiate with some more cool projects. We are proud to present the Genius Code project.

GeniusCode.net is the spontaneous idea of Ryan Hatch and Jeremiah Redekop - the blog includes anything from screencasts to code articles while the idea is that Anyone can be a genius.  "We've discovered some tools that developers can use in order to implement their ideas quickly and effectively," said Ryan and added that "the blog focuses on LLBLGen and Visual WebGui in order to generate some code demos and routine software, but hopefully it will spark your imagination to do some really cool things.”

The Code Genius just finished recording a new screencast on using custom Urls within Visual WebGui.

Previous screencasts introducing the basic CRUD data operations using LLBLGen Pro, the O/R mapper and the first screencast: Advanced Text Formatting in Visual WebGui.

Visit Genius Code...

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...