I would like to provide you guys with the full technological overview and slightly commercial of what happened. As some of you might read in our CEO's letter here. We have made some changes in our business model and we have consulted with lots of community members about the different alternatives we checked. And the one we took was considered to be the best, in terms of providing developers with a reasonable royalty free way to develop Visual WebGui applications.
It is true that we have taken away something that was in the community SDK, though it was never regarded as open-source and as such was candidate in the past to be our commercial differentiator. That said we did provide you guys with a way to keep working with the designer for small or non commercial use through the express edition, which is fully functional in Visual Studio Express edition.
As addition to express our appreciation to the community we are offering you guys a 75% percent discount to in moving to the commercial version.
I ensure you that the new change will change Visual WebGui in a very short time and will enable us to provide you guys with commercial support and a solid stable product for your projects. In the very near future you guys are going to see lots of exciting developments including support for chrome, safari and more, a very comprehensive skin designer that will enable you to fully customize the Visual WebGui presentation layer to the level that you will be able to take Visual WebGui to your external rich looking projects as well as the windows style applications.
I ensure you guys that I personally considered all the alternatives and this is the best alternative I saw. Visual WebGui is developing in a rate that the previous step by step approach, did not supply the answer to. One of the changes that you guys are going to see with this move is a rapid development in stabilization and customization which will really answer your needs. While we did take away something that was previously provided with the community SDK, we kept the runtime in tact and open-source to provide you a migration path and to keep those applications out there working and advancing with the technology. By the way, Eyal released (or is going to release) a "how to", talking about how to use the WinForms designer for designing UIs when the editor is not available and that might provide you guys a partial solution to the challenge.
The express edition has limitations on professional style development. For example source control integration is not supported but that said using SVN (which we do), is still supported because you are managing the version control in the explorer.
In terms of other features, in most cases you can find alternatives. As I see it working with the express edition does have its challenges but it provides an reasonable alternative to buying and a way to keep on working freely using Visual WebGui.
Here is a link to Microsoft comparison of the different Visual Studio editions:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/zcbsd3cz(VS.80).aspx
Hope that shed some light on the changes...
Cheers,
Guy