Visual WebGui News & Announcements

Hi All,

The recent changes in the Visual WebGui SDK and the uncertainty in the development directions of Gizmox  and the business model, has raised a lot of concerns and questions. I would like to try and clarify exactly what are our intentions and where is Visual WebGui going to be in the near future.

The first thing I would like to clarify is that Visual WebGui will maintain its open source / LGPL strategy. The recent migration of a few components into the extensions libraries was made in order to separate between the standard WinForms controls and the non standard WinForms control. The standard WinForms controls will be forever available under the open source / LGPL license, while as the non standard controls will be offered under a commercial license within the different Visual WebGui extensions. That might come as a contradiction to the first sentence of this paragraph, but to avoid this contradiction we will offer the migrated controls (ie. The controls that previously were in the standard library) free of charge to community members which had been using Visual WebGui up until the moment they will be commercialized.

The current business model which had been published in our commercial site is changing dramatically based on feedbacks we got from you guys (we will update the commercial site in the next few weeks). Instead of offering an expensive premium product we are going to offer a set of reasonably priced extensions. This will enable developers to choose their extensions and to pay only for the features they would reallylike to use andwhich are not included in the standard library. All the extensions will be available in the standard installation and they will be fully functional for development testing. Their deployment will require a license which will be available for purchasing automatically within our site. Currently we see the extensions pricing from 100$ to 500$ based on the complexity and functionality.

We also got a lot of community members asking us to productize and stabilizeour existing offering instead of adding new features. This is also something that we are adopting and already started working on. We are currently looking into our issue history and soft spots in order to complete the productization and stabilization of Visual WebGui. We hope that the next release and the clarification regarding our directions will provide you guys confidence regarding the use of Visual WebGui for your projects.

Our partners at Microsoft are providing us with allot of tips and help, and we are working together providing Visual WebGui integrated into Visual Studio seamlessly. This will enable us to provide dedicated  project property pages that will simplify the process of configuring your Visual WebGui application. This will enable us to integrate into Visual Studio wizards that will help wrap existing ASP.NET controls and much more.

We are also revising our entire publication process in terms of installation, documentation, and nightly builds and we are again, with the help of our partners in Microsoft adopting Microsoft's best practices. We have already started to integrate WiX (Windows installer XML) as our installation platform, which will enable us to install samples on-demand, documentation and much more. We are integrating Sandcastle as our documentation aggregator and Innovasys HelpStudio as our documentation writer. Eyal Albert our developer experience manager is currently working with his team, night and days to provide the documentation you would expect from a framework like Visual WebGui.