Visual WebGui basically leverages the WinForms object module to give you a new development experience developing rich internet applications like outlook web access. This object module by say covers 90% of what you need in order to create a outlook web access application. So how do we bridge the WinForms object module and web development ? through the concept of Gatways.
Every WebGui component can declare it self as a WebGui gateway using the IGatewayControl interface, this allow controls to declare virtual URLs that are handles by the control by declaring actions. The IGatewayControl contains on method that gets a action name and should return a gateway handler. The gateway handler processes the request in the exact same way as an HTTP handler does which actually means that you can also use HTTP handlers (By this you can actually provide embedded ASPX pages that are hosted by the WinForms object module and can interact with that module making the interoperability between WebGui and legacy applications easy.
Other places you can use gateways:
- Providing HTML based content to IFRAMES.
- Providing a printable version of the current view.
- Interacting with applets,flash,activeX and so on.
- Using ASP.NET ready controls such as Janus grid.
- Downloading files.
I will upload a video showing the use of gateways soon.