Ajax framework new releases

Microsoft Developers finally get a .NET Framework for HTML5 Mobile Applications

Webgui — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 13:56:54 GMT

I would like to share with you some exciting news from the Gizmox labs. If you haven't heard by now the Visual WebGui Mobile Team @ Gizmox has been working on a .NET Mobile Framework for a few months now. This mobile dedicated framework continues the Visual WebGui vision towards the mobile development workd by enabling Microsoft core .NET developers to leverage their existing skills for developing cross-platform HTML5-based mobile apps within Visual Studio.

As with its Web Framework, the Visual WebGui Mobile Framework will also allow the .NET development paradigm, but in this case for creating Form Factor and Device aware, browser-based applications that can use local device resources through PhonGap integration. Those browser-based HTML5 mobile apps with inherit the famous Visual WebGui "empty client" security.

A first preview release is due towards the second half of January 2012 which makes Visual WebGui the first framework within the Microsoft camp that allows leveraging existing skillset to develop HTML5 mobile applications. The upcoming preview will be accompanied by a mobile email application demo (iPhone look & feel) developed with the framework’s preview. The preview version will support gestures and animations in transitions and will include the following designated mobile controls:

ListView
TreeView
Toolstrip
TabControl
TextBoxButton
RadioButton
Panel
Label

The next framework version is expected in the beginning of Q2 2012 which will be another phase in fulfilling the Visual WebGui promise of allowing .NET development for cross-platform HTML5 Web, Cloud and Mobile within Visual Studio.

More info is available on visualwebgui.com.

The votes are in and winners chosen for a free Visual WebGui ProStudio License

Webgui — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 12:01:08 GMT

First we would like to thank each and every one of you who have supported Visual WebGui in the nominations for DevProConnections and Windows IT Pro. We appreciate all of our customers and friends of Gizmox for being with us each step of the way in our efforts to bring our unique products to the forefront of code trans-positioning and migration.

Without further ado - Congratulations to our 3 big winners!

Gevorg Horomyan
Marcin Pytel
Ugur Yildirim

Please contact us at your earliest convenience at marketing@gizmox.com to receive your free Visual WebGui ProStudio License! We know you will benefit immensely from the software and please let us know your feedback as well.

Also – keep your eyes and ears open for the winners of the actual Community Choice Awards which will be announced in the December 2011 issues of Windows IT Pro, SQL Server Magazine, and DevProConnections.

Once again, thank you all for your time and effort in voting for Gizmox’s revolutionary Visual WebGui as the best add-in and cloud computing product or service. We hope to see you with us as we continue to bring you better, more improved software.

For anyone interested in other industry awards, there is also a Visual Studio Magazine Readers Choice Awards that can be viewed at the following link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/KFB6YJC

Keep up to date with all the news and coverage of Visual WebGui on their website www.visualwebgui.com, on Twitter @VisualWebGui, or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/VisualWebGui.

3 Buzz-words that every CIO hears but 1 they should listen to.

Webgui — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 16:47:34 GMT

Anyone that’s managing an enterprise IT with aging or outdated client/server systems is starting to feel the heat. Soon, their systems and applications will be obsolete and unsupported. At the same time, the industry as whole is seeking the fastest gateway to the latest .NET, HTML5 and mobile deployments including SaaS models. Right about now, there will be a knock on your door with team members offering their advice as to what you should do to ‘keep up’ with the latest trends and supported architectures. Here are 3 of the buzz-words they will have probably used, and what they actually mean.

Rewrite: Whilst the end result will be a bespoke and modern application, it’s lengthy, costly and risky path using one of the new unproven web frameworks

Technical migration: Sounds great, sure, but where are those automatic tools that will take your legacy client / server apps to the latest and greatest?

Apps Virtualization: Available but expensive. If you have no more than a few dozen users, the economics might not leave you out of pocket. And, if you are OK with using VPN and maintaining outdated, sometimes unsupported code, this might be your solution.

But the express route from c/s to a rich web app is this:
Transposition: A solution that literally transposes your code (moves it from one environment to another) to run as the latest .NET (C#, or VB.NET) in the form of desktop, web, cloud or mobile .NET / HTML or HTML5, at web economics (a few cents per user). This solution allows you to rewrite selected code using your legacy as a starting point so you can reuse valuable business logic. It enables you to achieve your goals at a fraction of the cost of both rewriting and application virtualization.

Gizmox’s Instant CloudMove will also enable you to improve your legacy code (whether it’s 'spaghetti', outdated functionality, antique-looking UIs, or the need for new layers or to make it object oriented) and is the shortest time to market by far.

Managers take note. Transpositioning is the way forward.

Bringing the .NET power and HTML5 richness together

Webgui — Mon, 30 May 2011 11:51:36 GMT

As you probably already know Visual WebGui has recently released an HTML5 supported (beta) version of its platform. Needless to say this new .NETHTML5 version generated a lot of buzz and interest which were followed by many inquiries so I want to share more information and the Gizmox vision for the HTML5 version.

I would like to start and state that at this point in time (May 2011) .NETHTML5 is functionally equivalent to the classic Visual WebGui WINWEB version.

The main current difference is at the client rendering engine, which was replaced from the XSLT engine to a JQT engine (based on jQuery templates). This new client core lays the foundation for the upcoming .NETHTML5 as it allows better cross-platform performance and brings support for mobile device browsers, such as iOS and Android, while adding support for HTML5.

At this opportunity I would like to invite you to watch on-demand a recent webinar we presented on the .NETHTML5 version and how Visual WebGui bridges between the power of .NET and the richness of HTML5 to form the best platform for creating rich enterprise-level HTML5 applications.

The webinar is available on our website:
http://www.visualwebgui.com/Developers/KB/tabid/654/article/develop_html5_web_and_mobile_applications_using_visual_net_and_jquery/Default.aspx

In the near future .NETHTML5 will break away from WINWEB, and become much more web-oriented while adopting HTML5 as the future web and mobile standard, thus adding web functionalities, controls and further support for HTML5 capabilities. This means that .NETHTML5 will be moving away from the desktop look and feel to provide a more web-native experience.
At this point in time, WINWEB will continue to add compatibility to the MS .NET desktop application framework.

At a later phase we are planning to add a mobile designated framework to .NETHTML5. This will allow designated development, controls and form factor support for mobile devices and mobile device presentation of Visual WebGui standard browser applications. It will allow you to quickly and easily create an application with .NET Visual WebGui Form Designer and come up with a fully featured mobile application with support for all common mobile browsers and environments. The UI elements will also be revised compatible with the mobile application look and feel.

.NETHTML5 will bring data centric application development directly to you, with the visual richness capabilities of HTML5 in client and power of .NET code on the server, combined with the ease of use, the built-in multi-browser compatibility, the unmatched performance, the security, the scalability, the extensibility and many more benefits that Visual WebGui brings with it. At the end of the day, you will be able to create your HTML5 rich web applications, writing .NET code only.

A more detailed roadmap will be published shortly, so stay tuned.

Getting from .NET to HTML5

Webgui — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 07:43:03 GMT

HTML5 introduces markup-level functionality for rich graphics, animation and web multimedia. It also supports a richer web application functionality and extends the client capabilities with local storage. Many pundits see it as the next generation web - web 3.0 if you like - and an open standard replacement for propriety plug-ins, Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flash. But, for all its new features, HTML5 is still only the end product. This article looks at HTML5 from the web programmer's point of view, and introduces the only way currently available of developing simple .NET to HTML5 applications.

ASP.NET Web Forms was Microsoft's first attempt to enable web development with the ease and efficiency of the.NET desktop development environment. However, its failure to satisfactorily maintain session state prevented it from realizing the simple visual desktop development methodology. The problem looked like being solved in 2007 with Silverlight, a completely new framework by Microsoft, which allowed .NET development of stateful applications, in the form of a workaround requiring a plug-in client to communicate with the browser. Silverlight got very close to achieving the same desktop development simplicity even if it didn't quite reach the level of visualization of the desktop application development process. Now, some 4 years after Silverlight's release, it faces the dilemma of not being supported by operating systems like iOS, whose popularity can no longer be ignored. When you add the promise of HTML5 into the equation, with its cross platform and mobile support included in Internet Explorer 9, the future of Silverlight is now in question.

The emergence of HTML5 as the new W3C standard, in which multimedia, rich graphics, animation and rich web application functionality are supported, brings the promise of a new generation of native cross platform web applications incorporating cool stuff without plug-ins. Its independency of plugins and proprietary run-time and video formats and its widescale adoption by all the leading browsers has brought many observers in the industry to predict the demise not only of Silverlight, but also Flash. Microsoft IE9 supports most HTML5 features, as do Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, and mobile browsers.

HTML5 extends the capabilities of HTML by adding features to improve web applications and enhance the user experience. While it supports all the HTML4 form controls, it introduces important new ones such as the Video tag to embed movies, date pickers, sliders and others.

But HTML, both in its newest guise and older versions, still involves a complexity for the web developer that puts web development productivity at a disadvantage when compared to desktop application development with the superb tools Microsoft has perfected over the years. Getting a web application to work exactly as you want can be complex, time-consuming and frustrating.

Javascript frameworks have played an important role in abstracting the communication with the browser, and jQuery is currently the most popular of them all. Having won over some 40% of developers, the latest JQuery function library provides developers with functions that dynamically write HTML5 code features. They do the laborious stuff and leave the developer to work with a much simpler command set; they work efficiently too. If there was a way to apply that also to the handling of data - to abstract away the complexities of the Ajax connection and data binding, without the server side data binding complexities - we will pretty much achieve what Microsoft had in mind all along.

The new Visual WebGui beta, the ProStudio .NETHTML5. It is a unique, end-to-end combination of pure Microsoft .NET development, abstraction of JavaScript / HTML5 functionality through jQuery and the abstraction of Ajax, database connectivity and data binding. In its release of ProStudio .NETHTML5, Gizmox, the creator of Visual WebGui has enabled the only total development environment in which programmers can develop efficient-running, data-centric web HTML5 apps in Visual Studio.

The 4 Main Benefits of Using Visual WebGui with jQuery

It empowers jQuery developers to go data centric
It allows the creation of HTML5 web applications now
It is a .NET framework
Uncompromised security by design

Visual WebGui ProStudio .NETHTML5 is an innovative solution that, by incorporating virtualization and streaming paradigms, creates a unique HTML5 development environment. This enables stateful applications that are fully scalable and have no client security vulnerabilities whatsoever.

The VWG development framework is integrated into Visual Studio allowing .NET programming code, Visual WebGui data binding functions and JQuery, a potent combination of technologies that achieves a high degree of abstraction for defining screen behavior and communication between database and browser based applications.

For more information:

See the HTML5 email app live! Developed with ProStudio .NETHTML5
Download ProStudio .NETHTML5 from the Download page now.

How We’re Staying Ahead of the Cloud Curve

Webgui — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 08:38:51 GMT

You don’t need us to tell you that cloud computing is a hot market. According to Distinguished Analyst John Bittman and a recent Search CIO article, Private cloud computing is more than a virtualized environment, sixty-six of attendees at a Gartner Data Center Conference plan to pursue the private cloud by 2014.

And while everyone is talking about moving to the cloud (public or private), very few are actually doing so. Here’s why: The process of migrating resources to the cloud is a lot more complicated than you may think. This is where we come in.

Recognizing this gap, we created a tool-based solution that gives application developers and enterprises a simpler way to migrate to the cloud. We’re proud to present Instant CloudMove, the only platform that transforms desktop apps’ code to the cloud, in addition to web and mobile deployments.

To learn more, you can check out our press release and watch the video below. And if you have any feedback, we’d love to hear about it.

New Office 2010 theme added for creating current UIs

Webgui — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 11:50:02 GMT

Visual WebGui offers its developers a set of out-of-the-box themes which they can easily apply to their applications. This allows developers to focus on the development and business logic rather than dealing with UI design missions. However, design tools and customization freedom are available for those who need to customize current themes or create their own custom theme.

As part of the constant updates and enhancements to Visual WebGui and its developer CompanionKit a new available theme was added last week. The new theme applies the latest Microsoft UI - Office 2010 to Visual WebGui and allows developers and/or end users (of 6.4.0 and above) to switch their Web applications UI to the successful design of Office 2010.

After the latest update the new theme is integrated into the Visual WebGui Developers CompanionKit which now matches Visual WebGui 6.4.0 Release version's infrastructure. The update also includes several enhancements to existing controls and features and the addition of some new ones.

Go to the CompanionKit

AssessmentTool webcast for .NET application migration to ASP.NET Web or Cloud

Webgui — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 14:13:28 GMT

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.

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.

Visual WebGui is one (small) step far from its first ever official release

Webgui — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 12:29:17 GMT

Gizmox R&D team has been working very hard in order to bring our 6.4 version of Visual WebGui to the required stability level. During that period, 13 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.

ASP.NET Ajax will not be left behind the HTML5 rush

Webgui — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 07:38:20 GMT

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.