Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007
Visual WebGui: Develop with WinForms and Dual Deploy
Category: .NET
, Framework, Toolkit
Visual WebGui provides developers with WinForms like GUI components all accessible from the design time framework of Visual Studio .Net. The design time components look, act and interface like they do in their WinForm format since they inherit their object model from the existing WinForms components. Visual WebGui’s components become a de-coupled version of the well-known WinForms components allowing for transparent Ajax communication with our patent pending Ajax client. The Visual WebGui client employs javascript, XSL and CSS to deliver application like GUI components that look, feel and behave like their desktop counterparts. Visual WebGui provides extensibility by enabling developers to develop additional GUI components that can be used in both runtime and design time. Furthermore, the platform enables simple interfacing of existing web controls, browser client controls ( e.g. Java applets, Flash, ActiveX) and provides a themes schema enabling extensive customization.
The latest feature is dual-mode, which means that you can deploy to the web, or as a standalone WinForms application.
There’s hardly a bigger turn-off than saying “patent pending” anywhere in description.
When will people learn that bringing the desktop to the Web does not mean lugging along the desktop UI?
the library barely works in firefox and generates errors. I don’t forsee this being a very big deal
and like cody said, why lug around the horrible OS UI? it’s the web, there are no boundrys to what you can do on it anymore. stop thinking inside the box.
I am disappointed this library does not work in Firefox. Using an OS UI on the web for public websites should not happen, web as a platform offers us many more ways to be creative.
What I like about this product is that it finally offers a good set of AJAX controls for the .NET platform and I would personally use it for developing intranet applications that are traditionally IE only.
This is not an answer to Google’s GWT library, not even close.
As soon as my patent for text files comes through I’ll make damn sure no one ever types another paragraph with as many hollow statements or buzz-words again. I’m not even going to get into my web vs desktop design principles debate again. But you know what I’m thinking …
actaully your patent on text files wouldn’t dictate the text here because chances are, it’s stored in a database file, not a text file.. sorry ;)
Hold your horses, I am a visual webgui user, the library has its downsides (who hasn’t?), but licensing is not one of them, it is an open source tool, with a very polite licensing policy
Previously solved by XUL and, ahem, XAML, right? Is this wheel rounder?
Well I downloaded the Visual WebGUI SDK over the weekend and played around with it on my notebook. Not bad, I’m kinda impressed with this SDK. It shows promise and may be something that I might want to use for creating intranet/intranet web applications for customers.
However I’m a little worried about 2 things with this here: 1) Firefox compatibility 2) Grids. Someone already mentioned about Firefox but with grids, I was having some issues with using datasets holding multiple tables containing DataRelations. In some cases data didn’t show up properly. This might be due to my lack of understanding (as I mentioned I just started looking at this).
As for bringing the desktop OS to the web? From what I’ve seen so far it looks like you can customize the look and feel of the app you create with Visual WebGUI with themes. I think there’s a tutorial on their site that demonstrates this.
Check it out again. Its pretty cool. Sure, why bring the desktop to the web, but a lot of companies are going it (Tibco for one).
I’ve had a brief but enlightening play with this and is cuts out a lot of the heavy lifting in order to get a nice, comfortable application running.
If you’re a staid old VB6 programmer (like me) then it promises to be a career lengthener!
Gentlemen,
I have VisualWeb GUI running in Standalone Desktop - without Windows.Forms - mode using the Cassini Desktop Adapter.
I’ve included a working demo. Please feel free to download and use. I have desktop users running my full-blown VisualWebGUI application in ASP.NET mode. Flash & Crystal Reports in all their glory.
http://www.visualwebgui.com/Default.aspx?tabid=53&forumid=-1&scope=posts&threadid=4837
Best of luck to you. God bless,
Ryan D. Hatch