Introduction

Visual WebGui basically leverages the WinForms object model giving the developer a new development experience developing rich internet applications like outlook web access. This object model by say covers 90% of what you need in order to create an outlook web access application. So how do we bridge the WinForms object model and web development? Through the concept of Gateways.

Background

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 a method that gets an 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. This means that you can actually provide embedded ASPX pages that are hosted by the WinForms object model and can interact with that model 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.

Visual WebGui is completely free to use and deploy for non-commercial purposes and is also available as an open source project in SourceForge.net. The Visual WebGui site has multiple free licenses that you can apply to in order to use it freely in your production site

This article creates a file list that can be previewed by selecting the file.

Using the code

In order to start developing Visual WebGui you need to download the SDK from the Visual WebGui download page. The installation will install a couple of assemblies to you GAC adding the Visual WebGui capabilities to your development enviroment. Installing the Visual WebGui SDK will add a two new projects to your Visual Studio (WebGui Application and WebGui Control Library). The WebGui Application project will create you a ASP.NET new project that one class named Form1.cs instead of the WebForm1.aspx file usualy created by the ASP.NET project template. Inheriting from the Gizmox.WebGUI.Forms.Form class the Form1.cs automaticly causes this file to have a WinForms like design time behavior. When you enter the design surface of the Form1.cs class you will have an aditional WebGUI toolbox available in the toolbox pane. These components can be draged to the design surface and be used exactly as WinForms components are used on a WinForms design surface. In the properties pane of any givven component you can change the component attributes including layout properties such as Dock and Anchoring which are WinForms way of layouting components and are fully supported by Visual WebGui.

Before you can run your application you need to have your form registerd in Visual WebGui web.config configuration section to a virtual page and have Visual Studio start page set to this virtual page. Visual WebGui uses a ".wgx" IIS script map extension that needs to be added to the IIS with the same definitions as the ".aspx" script map extension but without the check file exist check box as Visual WebGui uses virtual pages mapped to Gizmox.WebGUI.Forms.Form inherited classed. After setting these configurations you can start debugging your application exactly as you debug a WinForms application.