Visual WebGui Blog

This is the second of a series of posts that discuss the major pains of rich data-centric internet applications development. This time I would like to discuss the data-binding task which becomes more and more complex as more data oriented and business applications make their way to the web.

The transition of business applications from client-server to web based applications has brought significant improvement in terms of accessibility, deployment and maintenance but the typical data intensiveness and richness of those applications also brought many challenges in the development process.

The economics of IT is changing rapidly, and organizations are searching to widen and secure availability of their systems and at the same time lower costs. The cloud concept was introduced to allow an IT consumption model where there is always as much computing power as needed when needed ('on-demand') and without having to invest in connectivity, servers, database access, storage space, CPU power and other infrastructure needs, just as we consume electricity.

The Cloud and SaaS models are changing the face of enterprise IT in terms of economics, scalability and accessibility. As I wrote before Visual WebGui Instant CloudMove transforms your Client / Server application code to run natively as .NET on Windows Azure and enables your Azure Client / Server application to have a secured-by-design plain Web or Mobile browser based accessibility.

Everyone is talking about Cloud computing and moving to the cloud (public or private), but very few have actually done it so far. The reason is that the process of migrating existing applications to the cloud is a lot more complicated than one might think which is exactly where the Visual WebGui technology comes in for a rescue.

In the past year the Visual WebGui R&D Team have been intensively working on a tool-based solution that gives Microsoft application developers and enterprises a simpler way to migrate Client-Server applications to the Cloud based on ASP.NET. And now we are proud to present the Visual WebGui Instant CloudMove, which is the only solution that transforms desktop applications’ code to the cloud, in addition to web and mobile deployments.

To learn more, you can check out our announcement or read this White Paper.

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"

Upgrading a Client/Server desktop based application to ASP.NET Web or Cloud based environment is thought to be a very complex and risky process. Most of us are intimidated only by the thought of taking one of our large, business applications; one that we have been working on for quite a while now, not to say mission critical and migratie it to a differernt technology. Most of us will follow the good old saying: If it ain't broken why fix it, right?! Which means that we will eventually find our selves with a very large and old system which the only possible solution for modernizing it would be the costly rewrite that we probably cannot afford or don't have the tme to wait for.

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.