White Papers

What is Visual WebGui with Silverlight?

Visual WebGui combined with Silverlight is a platform to develop & deploy server based rich Silverlight applications. Leveraging an extremely graphically rich Silverlight as a presentation layer, maintaining the customizability using the same XAML editing tools (Expression Blend, Cider etc) only controlled by the server on runtime.

Visual WebGui Silverlight	Plain Silverlight

Why Visual WebGui with Silverlight?

Visual WebGui RIA platform is the natural choice for development & migration of rich Silverlight data centric & business centric applications. Visual WebGui applications unique benefits:

• Highly secured due to the ‘Empty Client’ paradigm shift!
• Using minimal bandwidth maintaining optimized AJAX/Silverlight responsiveness!
• One time download of a minimal client footprint.
• Saves 50% time and more of the classic Silverlight development time developing data & business centric apps.
• Enables maintaining a single layered, server .NET code using basic skilled developers.
• Provide an easy migration path of desktop applications to Silverlight (WinForms, VB 6.0 and any desktop technologies).
• Gain DHTML plain browsers fallback for non Silverlight devices with no extra code.
• Built-in integration with DHTML and other web technologies (such as: Plain HTML, ASP.NET, Flash etc.).

Myth busting

1. Visual WebGui won’t take any of Silverlight’s extraordinary benefits from you.
   • Use Expression Blend to design and add animations and graphics to your application.
   • Create and migrate in new Silverlight controls.
   • Enable client actions – no need to go to the server on each client event.
2. Visual WebGui maintains very low traffic with the server.
3. Being a state full application Visual WebGui lowers the server CPU usage.

Visual WebGui Silverlight vs. Plain Silverlight

Security:  Server Controlled Application vs. Client Controlled Application
Visual WebGui applications are highly secured due to the ‘Empty Client’ runtime paradigm which means that nothing is exposed on the client except for a tiny static kernel of native Silverlight code.

The client contains:

• No business logics!
• No UI logics!
• No Data!

Plain Silverlight applications move a large portion of the application, including UI Logics, Business Logics and Data to the client, creating vulnerable and much less controllable clients.

Light Client Footprint:  ‘Empty Client’ vs. Fat Client
Visual WebGui applications are not executed on the client and except for a static tiny kernel; nothing is downloaded to the clients so that the client remains light weight (at a constant size of ~250kb) no matter how large and complex the application is. Application updates do not result in re-downloading the xap files to the clients as they are constant and contains everything needed for every application.

Plain Silverlight applications are almost entirely downloaded to the client and the download size is highly dependent on the size and complexity of the applications. Any application update results in entirely downloading the updated module.
Client weight

Development & Maintenance Complexity: 1 Layer .NET Code vs. 2 Layers .NET codes
Visual WebGui applications development is identical to desktop application development, representing one layer of code which executes on the server and the application is virtualized to the clients using a highly optimized UI Virtualization protocol. Visual WebGui code is always using the much richer server .NET version (as opposed to the lesser .NET framework on the client). In this respect Visual WebGui takes the good of Silverlight and the good of the rich .NET framework and combines the two together creating the best development environment.

Plain Silverlight applications are developed in 2 layers of code: client code using the lesser .NET framework on the browser and server code using the full version of .NET.

Interaction & Interoperability: Fully Interoperable vs. Isolated Environment
Visual WebGui applications can interact and interoperate with any other web technology due to the simple fact that Silverlight is used as a rich presentation layer and not an application execution environment. Any interoperability with other web technology can be performed on the UI level.

Plain Silverlight applications are mostly isolated from the web browser and have a very limited interaction and interoperation capabilities with other web technologies (such as AJAX, ASP.NET or any plain browser components and applications).

Cloud Optimizations: Highly Optimized for the Cloud vs. Application Specific Optimization
Visual WebGui applications are executed under the Visual WebGui new pipeline which highly lowers the server CPU consumption and minimizes the amount of received/sent data to and from the server. Furthermore, due to the fact that the server is always plain ASP.NET based underlying infrastructure, it is natively built for cloud deployment.

Plain Silverlight applications should be engineered to support cloud scenarios and even more important the application’s optimization level is entirely handed to the developer who has the ability to optimize it but can hardly achieve Visual WebGui’s optimization level.

Enable DHTML Fallback: Native, Fully Functional Fallback vs. No Fallback
Visual WebGui applications can be accessed from any plain browses in addition to Silverlight browsers. This feature of multiple presentation layers enables native and fully functional fallback for browsers/devices with no Silverlight support.

Plain Silverlight applications can be executed on Silverlight supportive browsers only (or as plain text without any client functionality on text browsers). 

Related Links

Visual WebGui Silverlight section
Visual WebGui Silverlight SDK

Download PDF