Web Design

Visual .NET Development Power finally meets Web 2.0

Webgui — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 19:28:20 GMT

I’d like to invite you to a set of 2 webinars targeted for Visual WebGui newbies and beginners as part of the new completely free evaluation program for the Visual WebGui Experience.

Visual WebGui (VWG) has gained its fame for its simplicity that lets core Microsoft developers, develop rich ASP.NET Ajax based Web, Cloud or Mobile applications just the way they are used to developing desktop .NET apps. With over 200,000 .NET developers that have adopted Visual WebGui to write over 35,000 VWG applications you can be sure that VWG opens the new cross-browsers HTML5 horizons for developers.

The first session "Develop data-centric Ajax-enhanced, secured-by-design application with 50 screens in 30 days" is available at your choice of the following: March 29, March 31 and April 5.

The second sessions is also available at 3 different occasions at your convenient (April 7, 12 and 14) and it will focus on the graphic design aspect when creating a Web 2.0 UIs with VWG.

In addition to the webinars the program also includes the 30 day free trial downloads and prioritized support @ Gizmox’s evaluation forums for 30 days.

I am looking forward to your participation – please register by clicking here:
http://www.visualwebgui.com/Gizmox/Landing/tabid/674/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/911/Free-Fully-Supported-Evaluation.aspx

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

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.

Two giants are fighting and the third might win, Visual WebGui might be one of the winners of the RIA wars

Webgui — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 08:25:25 GMT

Latest announcements by Microsoft executives leave no doubt. Microsoft is shifting its support to HTML 5 and by doing so gives up on its RIA platform Silverlight which it repurposes for mobile. Adobe releases a Beta of a new HTML5 supporting tool kit, and by doing so also embraces the HTML5 option. It does look as if both give in to the market preferences for standard, no-plug-in and non-propriety option of HTML5 (see "Microsoft favoring HTML5 over Silverlight: reports" ).

If we follow Microsoft's early announcements when launching Silverlight, Microsoft pointed out the value of Silverlight in two aspects: The first was the graphics and media richness it enables while the second was the .Net developer's quest for a simpler, .Net based RIA development.

In a new world where HTML 5 replaces Silverlight and Flash in providing a solution for the quest for standard rich internet, the second quest for simple .Net based development of rich Internet application is left unattended (now that Silverlight is off the shelf and no longer serves as RIA, developed the .NET way). Reading developers' reaction following Microsoft PDC in October 2010 is probably the best way to learn about the impact of this announcement:

"Silverlight is dead, quite a surprise they have for us in PDC this year. I think most devs arround the world were expecting just the opposite, the Silverlight 5 announce. I think Microsoft should had been more honest and recognize the big mistake they made, wasting so much time and resources in a technology that is never going to be used massively. I assume my mistake as a developer for the resources I invested in Silverlight. The most sad thing is there aren’t any tools for HTML 5 in .NET, those four years of Silverlight left us with the hands empty. I think is time to move to GTW, every evidence is screaming that Google is the future." (Quoted from this blog)

I must express my humble opinion here and say that there might be more to the Silverlight twist (and Flash) than meets the eye. It might also be a result of slow adoption rate in the business sector that pays for its applications (vs. the consumer that does not). Being in the business RIA market for some odd years, I have been hearing quite too often enterprise CIOs saying that they will not allow plug-in RIA solution for security reasons, no matter if it is Microsoft's or Adobe's. I have been also hearing enterprise CIOs complaining about the stiff learning curve and lack of productivity that the new RIA solutions impose. I have been hearing them complaining about the hardship of data binding and I have been hearing them complaining about slow response time of applications written with the new Ajax based RIA solution.

Visual WebGui does support HTML development the .NET way, and naturally supports HTML5

We have been there for the last 3 years, betting on HTML by boosting ASP.NET Ajax development and runtime and indeed, being highly rewarded by market opinion leaders, adoption and traction. We have been enabling the classic VB6-like desktop development paradigms for HTML based front-ends. And now more than ever it seems like we are here to collect the big prize. Visual WebGui enables the best of .NET simple and structured development paradigms for HTML5. Exactly where Microsoft has been aiming with Silverlight, but we target open standards non-propriety platform. And that is a big difference.

So dear developer, Silverlight might be dying but it is not necessarily Google GWT that you must migrate to. If you are a .NET developer, I do believe that it is Visual WebGui you are looking for. You will have the best, well entrenched .Net development practices only this time targeting the RIA winner HTML5 and JavaScript.

Building awesome apps is now a simpler task due to the new KB

Webgui — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 07:54:04 GMT

Visual WebGui revealed yesterday its new resource center called KB (Knowledge Base). The new Knowledge Base presents a big step forward in terms of the online support Visual WebGui provides for their developers community. The new developers oriented system dramatically improves the accessibility and availability of all the VWG resources required for supporting VWG development. The new KB incorporates all of the Visual WebGui resources in one place with an advanced interface to ease on finding the relevant information and to encorage community contribution.

Some of the new features and capabilities introduced by the new Knowledge Base are:

One stop shop for VWG resources
Enhanced UI
Better and more diversed categorization and filtering options
Easy search
On the fly filtering for search results
Contributors recognition

Visual WebGui promise to continuously improving the Knowledge Base by adding more features and upgrading the overall user experience and allow developers to find all the essential information needed for creating awesome apps.

The new Knowledge Base is located here. Check it out if you are .NET or Web developers; It is a cool system and the VWG team will also appreciate its community feedback in order to present the best experience for their developers.

Visual WebGui's XAML based programming for web developers

Webgui — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 11:08:11 GMT

While ASP.NET provides an event base approach it is completely dismissed when working with AJAX and the richness of the server is lost and replaced with JavaScript programming and couple with a very high security risk. Visual WebGui reinstates the power of the server to AJAX development and provides a statefull yet scalable, server centric architecture that provides the benefits and user productivity of AJAX with the security and developer productivity we had before AJAX stormed into our lives.

"When I first came up with the concept of Visual WebGui , I was frustrated by the fragile and complex nature of developing web applications. The contrast in productivity between working in a fully OOP compiled environment vs. scripting even today, with JQuery, Dojo and such, is still huge. Even today the greatest sponsor of JavaScript programming, Google, is offering a framework to avoid JavaScript using Java that compiles to JavaScript (GWT). So I decided to find a way to abstract the complexity or rather delegate the complex job to enable developers to concentrate on the “What” instead of the “How” and embraced the Form based approach," said Guy Peled the inventor of Visual WebGui.

Although traditional OOP development still rules the enterprise, the differences between web sites and web applications have blurred and so did the differences between classic developers and web developers. As a result, we now see declarative languages in desktop / backend development environments (WPF / WF) and we see OOP, gaining more and more power in web development (ASP.NET MVC / ASP.NET DOM). However, what has not changed is enterprise need for security, development ROI, reach, highly responsive and interactive UIs and scalability.

The advantages that declarative languages and 'on demand' compilation provide over classic development are mostly the flexibility and a more readable initialize component it offers which is what Gizmox is aspiring to do by replacing the designer initialize component with XAML code. The code in this new project template will be compiled on demand using the build provider mechanism ASP.NET has. This means that the performance hit is only on the first request and after that the performance is the same as a prebuilt solution. This will allow the flexibility of a dynamically updated sites and the power of fully blown enterprise applications over web. You can also use prebuilt features available in ASP.NET to enjoy both worlds in production.

VWG XAML implementation (VWG Sites) will be the first truly compliable XAML implementation as Microsoft implemented Silverlight and WPF as a runtime markup interpretation opposed to the ASP.NET markup implementation which is compiled to CLR code once. We have chosen to implement the VWG Sites parser as a different way to create CLR code that provides greater performance over the reflection alternative. VWG Sites will also be the first server side XAML UI engine which, while giving the power of XAML, it will not require any plug-ins or installations on the client side.

Short demo video of VWG Sites markup.

There is also a live sample available here.

Do your own design jobs and make it look professional

Webgui — Wed, 26 May 2010 08:41:25 GMT

Looks and design is becoming more and more important for customers and organizations event when we deal with internal enterprise applications. However, many web developers who work on business apps end up not investing resources on the design. The reason may be that they ran out of time so with their client's pressure there was no choice but to skip past the design process.

In some cases, especially in sall software houses, there are no trained professional designers and the developers have to do both jobs. Since designing web applications can be very complex and requires mastering several languages and concepts, unless a big budget was allocated to the project it is very hard to produce a professional custom design.

For that exact reasons, Visual WebGui integrated Point & Click Design Tools within its Web/Cloud Development Platform. Those tools allow developers to customize the UI look of the applications they build in a visual way that is fairly simple and doesn't require coding or mastering HTML, CSS and JavaScript in order to design. The development tools also allow professional designers easier work interface with the developers and quicly create new skins.

So if you are interested in getting your design job done much easier, you should probably tune in for about an hour and find out how.

Click here to watch:
http://vimeo.com/12075891

Extended ListView Control for VWG Web Apps

Webgui — Tue, 18 May 2010 10:29:49 GMT

Visual WebGui's extended ListView control is in many cases the best option to implement the most complex data entry and views.

The following webcast explains the difference between the extended controls and the standard "flat list" ListView control and of course what can be done with it.

Simply apply engaging, modern web 2.0 UI to VWG apps

Webgui — Tue, 11 May 2010 08:02:15 GMT

Gizmox is conducting an interesting webcast this Wenesday (May 12 10am PST). The upcoming webcast, titled Applying engaging, modern web 2.0 look & feel to your VWG application with version 6.4 will show how the new developer-designer interface allowed by the VWG framework simplifies the process of creating new Web application themes in VWG and define each one's responsibilities (making usage of Adobe Photoshop) in the process.

The presenters will walk you through the process, starting from a default theme, understanding the needs and implementing those design needs accordingly.

The webcast which is taking place on May 12 is open to everyone for free.
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/601138081