Technical Articles

Taking the World by Storm with simplifying complex development

Just a decade and a half ago, the process of building a simple Windows – based application could have been described as a nightmare. This very same task that today we take for granted—was anything but trivial before the introduction of Visual Basic.

With Visual Basic (VB), developers could for the first time implement Windows applications in an intuitive, graphical environment by dragging controls onto a form. By enabling both professional and casual developers to maximize their productivity, Visual Basic ushered in a renaissance of Windows-based application development.

Visual Basic community has grown to a majority share of the total worldwide developer population in a very short time.

How did it happen? Simplicity, simplicity simplicity! The simplified development of Windows applications was fundamental components in the realization of Microsoft's vision for Windows-based computing. From this rather inauspicious beginning came an equally unfathomable outcome: an impact on the computing industry so profound that it forever changed the face of software development and created an explosion in the Windows applications market.  A decade and a half later, it seems so obvious—but at the time, when only a small, select group of developers were even capable of building Windows applications, Visual Basic represented a monumental shift in application design and a great leap of faith for the development community.

Then the .NET languages were introduced with the Windows Forms development paradigm according to which developers were empowered with even further levels of control and productivity. Through first-class object-oriented constructs, such as inheritance, structured exception handling, and parameterized constructors, .NET programming became more elegant, simplified, and maintainable.

The web and cloud era
The web revolution is here and now. Web had become very quickly the platform of choice for all kind of applications. The demand for web applications is ever growing and cloud computing is expected to bring along another jump in demand and usage of web. Ajax and RIA solutions which are web enhancement methodologies have added complexity to a much complicated as is, web development. There are a handful of solutions that target Ajax development but none has really brought with it the Visual Basic kind of simplification that had revolutionized the software industry. Web and now cloud is complex to develop with multi languages, require mastering of diversified skills, time consuming and risky. Much like what the desktop development used to be back before the Visual Basic revolution.

The Visual WebGui WOW revolution
With Visual WebGui enablement of the well known VB6 (or WinForms) development paradigm for web and cloud, with obvious updated additional capabilities, there is not much that should be added. Visual WebGui enables VB like drag & drop, object oriented, WYSIWYG development methodologies but adds extension and customization capabilities. It offers the basic Window look and feel but also enables customization and web 2.0 kind of user interface designing. It is interesting to note Mr. Ballmer Microsoft CEO in last TechEd Australia on the user interface of choice: "Users will come to expect web-ready interfaces that are both familiar and as responsive as their desktop counterparts. People expect consistency in interfaces," he said.

Visual WebGui is extending VB6 development simplicity into the up dated web and cloud user interface. It is transforming web development much like Visual Basic did with desktop. Its penetration can only be compared to that of VB back in the days. Since its introduction only couple of years ago, Visual WebGui had been adopted by hundreds of thousands of developers who had built more than 35,000 Visual WebGui applications to date.

 
Visual WebGui VB.NET like drag & drop designer for web

 
Visual WebGui point & Click UI customization editor 

 
Visual WebGui ASP.NET third party control wrapper
 

Drill down for developers

The new enhanced VB-like development experience VS. traditional Ajax >

Windows to web or cloud migration >

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