VWG is a superb toolkit - it makes visually very impressive apps very quickly
Microsoft vs Google
I've been considering which of two platforms to experiment with for my next project.
On the Microsoft front there's some .NET code I quite like the look of - Visual WebGui - it build on lots of Microsoft stuff I already know, it produces very cool looking AJAX applications very quickly, it hides lots of nasty javascript and D/XHTML complexities from you...
And on the Google front there's the Google App Engine - http://code.google.com/appengine/ - and there's a whole load more besides (they have more APIs available every day...). This is still quite new, it's only available using Python which I haven't used for a couple of years and if you want to develop websites then you'll get to get your hands dirty with text editors and simple code.
Here's some background I've done so far...
Visual WebGui - The download and install went super quick and I got my first app up and running in no time - real impressive - easy to create a form, add a treeview, add a splitter, add some more UI elements, hook up some events in C# - then hit F5 and it just worked - no problems. Lovely.
Then I took a look through some of the samples (code snippets) here - all seemed to work OK, although a few relatively simple tasks did take ages - e.g. I couldn't add my own user control - eventually I discovered this was down to needing to add my Control to the
<controls>
<control type="WebGUIApplication1.MyScripts, WebGUIApplication1">
<control type="WebGUIApplication1.CustomControl1, WebGUIApplication1"/>
</controls>
I then played around some more of the code snippets - especially the Google Maps integration - trying to copy this one to do my own thing proved nasty - there just seemed to be magic instructions to follow everywhere - things like that
Overall, my impressions were:
If you want to use the toolkit as is to build an explorer-like UI in a web page, then this is a superb toolkit - it makes visually very impressive apps very quickly.
You may, however, discover lots of nuances and quirks if you start doing more advanced things - such as adding your own controls... and often these are very frustrating to solve.