VWG is heading towards a better developer / designer experience with the new designer. The Form Designer frees the developer from the burden of AJAX hand coding, and now the new Web Design Tool frees the designer from HTML, CSS and JavaScript or XAML for Silverlight hand coding. With this VWG is offering the complete cycle that it had been aiming for.

Simply provide your applications exciting new looks with the new VWG themes and the cutting-edge new Web Design Tool. The new Web Design Tool introduces a revolutionary new development/design experience by allowing to use a visual designer within the Visual Studio .NET IDE and to get a friendly view of the entire project resources, images, styling, formatting and properties.

With the designer you can simply point & click the pictures, override only the selected images and then edit with any standard graphics designers’ tools such as Photoshop or Paint.NET or even provide an alternative image. The new designer also allows you to simply edit visual properties of colors & sizes at any desired level without the need to calculate which styling property overrides the other, or have to worry about browser compatibility.

When we laid down the goals for 6.4, scalability was definitely one of the highlights alongside with customization it provides the ability to take Visual WebGui projects to the next level. At the base of Visual WebGui scalability, lays the ability to have the application state ported from one machine to another. This enables a non sticky scalability grid which with the addition of a state machines, also provide for redundancy.

From version 6.4 preview 1 the scalability is integrated into the SDK so you can simply define a state server in the system.web configuration section and test it. By default we will provide it free for LGPL licensed projects with a waver and as a commercial license for non LGPL projects. This will enable developers to test and see how it fits before committing.

Visual WebGui enables the heaviest organization’s desktop applications on the cloud with no UI compromises and at no-cost. Being a highly optimized server centric architecture; Visual WebGui has high value and support the model of cloud computing scenarios in terms of compatibility and optimizations considerations.

Read in the Technology section why Visual WebGui matches the cloud and what makes it such an optimized platform for cloud computing.

The Visual WebGui open source community is calling its members to join forces and share their web development knowledge and resources such as VWG frameworks. Each member's individual strength combined together to a whole will create something that has a greater power and will contribute everyone.

The first initiative is the creation of the VWG Community Frameworks website by rdhatch. This website gives the community a platform to share their code & offer downloads for the entire VWG Community to work with. Anyone can help by simply sharing their common VWG frameworks / code libraries.

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Gizmox partner programs are offered for partners who specialize in the Visual WebGui Platform. We offer 3 dedicated programs: for ISVs who develop and offer Visual WebGui optimized components, extension and software product atop the VWG platform; for VARs who wish to resale VWG products; and for Integrators who offer services and custom development with the VWG platform.

VWG Partners benefit from Visual WebGui's Co-marketing program and on-line promotion, inclusion in VWG partners directory, priority partners support, sales leads and of course certification depending on the program.

Gizmox will hold a Theme Competition for community members who create their own themes with the new Theme & Control Designer. Download 6.4 Preview, use the new Theme & Control Designer to create new themes, submit them on visualwebgui.com and have a chance to win some valuable prizes.

Stay Tuned...

Gizmox created new project to present the new themes and design tools to the open source community on SourceForge and Coldplex. Community members can find information and access to direct downloads of the themes from those projects.

Gizmox is creating a Wiki contributed documentation site where users would be able to contribute Visual WebGui related content such as hints, tips and documentation about specific controls, how to use them and examples. The Wiki site is expected to be launched in the next couple of weeks.

Stay tuned...

Read Guy Peled's personal thoughts on 6.4 Preview version and learn about the benefits of the new features in 6.4 from his own angel.

"The general idea of the theme designer is to provide an easy way to edit what was once considered to be internal resources. A Visual WebGui presentation layer is built of a collection of resources and properties which are used to generate the resources needed by the client to work as a Visual WebGui presentation layer."

If full-featured commercial CMSs don't meet your organization's needs, find out how to build your own. Build an AJAX-Enabled Content Management System with Visual WebGui: Creating a Prototype is an article written by Visual WebGui MVP Bogdan Zamfir for DevX.com.

In this article, Bogdan explains why he chose Visual WebGui and demonstrates how to build and deploy the CMS using Visual WebGui.

"Visual WebGui is second to none when it comes to deployment… the development experience is fast and enjoyable compared to the WYSINWYG (What you see is NOT what you get) in .aspx pages" Daniel Bardi

"For many years we looked at ASP.NET and other web technologies, but none of them allowed us the flexibility, speed of development and ease of maintenance that we could deliver with a desktop application. Visual WebGui changed that." Andrew McGrath

"With Visual WebGui we were able to build an agile and secure web user interface that meets the requirements of our customer in terms of functionality and time-to-market Interface" Ariel Schwindt CEO of Tycon S.A