Visual WebGui Case Studies

"Developing the web part with Visual WebGui saved us a lot of user interface development and allowed us more effort to be put into the actual application. …all at the speed of light!" Jeff Proctor

Overview
Redcastle was founded in 1995. The company sells and supports Business Management Solutions usually based around an established CRM product. The solutions offered by Redcastle are modular, covering the areas of Salesforce Automation, Sales Order Processing and Service Management.

Business needs
The traditional approach to Business Management via an ERP system was believed by Redcastle to be restrictive due to the inflexibility of most ERP systems. As a result, Redcastle's approach is to develop the solution within the CRM system. This approach gives much more flexibility up to the point an Invoice is raised. At this point, the nominal activity is transferred into an Accounts package, such as Sage 50, this system is then responsible for the auditable accounts.

Most of Redcastle's development has been for a Windows client CRM system while the method of extending the system was by adding Tabs in the various archives which are effectively a browser. This worked well for Redcastle as their developments appeared to be well integrated into the host CRM system.

However, Redcastle struggled to make a Web Application with the same user experience as the Windows client. As a result, Redcastle looked for a solution in that area that would allow them to develop web modules that better fit the user experience of their Windows client CRM system.

The Solution
Redcastle used standard Visual Studio for developing their Web Applications before moving to Visual WebGui. "Having moved from Windows based development to web based development a few years ago, I had been striving ever since to design a listing/table that would have the appearance and control of a standard ListView," said Lead Developer James Carter who encountered Visual WebGui for the first time via a web advertisement which promised a rapid conversion of VB6 applications. Carter was a bit skeptical but decided to give Visual WebGui a try and see how "they would handle controls such as ListViews, which in the past I had used extensively in VB\Windows Applications." Carter downloaded Visual WebGui and found that "they did have a web based ListView control that did everything that the Windows control was capable of and much, much more!"

The evaluation of Visual WebGui proved that it was exactly what they were after; a platform that allowed building and running of Windows based applications in a pure web environment.

"Using Visual WebGui our development times have been vastly reduced," said Lead Developer James Carter who continued that "adding a new list to a page/form is as simple as dragging a new control from the toolbox, and with only a few lines of code you have a list/table that supports row selection (no code required), column-click sorting (amazingly absolutely no code at all to achieve this), pagination, column repositioning via drag-drop (again totally free, no coding required), allowing the user to decide which columns to see and which to hide - all at the speed of light!. Using standard ASPX this would have taken much longer."

Benefits
Using Visual WebGui allowed Redcastle to develop and offer the same kind of Controls as traditional Windows development environments. "Developing the web part with Visual WebGui saved us a lot of user interface development and allowed us more effort to be put into the actual application," said Jeff Proctor.

Visual WebGui found to be the perfect fit for Redcastle to extending their Windows client CRM system. "In addition to the development benefits," said Jeff Proctor "with Visual WebGui the interface appears much more robust since there is no post backs as in traditional web pages that result in constant screen refresh and resizing. This is a huge user experience improvement." Due to Visual WebGui Redcastle can offer a more robust system with no apparent differences in appearance and behavior between the Windows client and the web parts.

To date Redcastle has embarked on converting 2 of their modules to Visual WebGui. The first is a small application to show site and telephone details of a parent company while the second is a Service Management system which is a much larger application still under work.

Screenshots
The main application in the screenshot below is a Windows based CRM System, the content of the Tab in the Company archive named ‘Sites’ is our module written in Visual WebGui.

Service Management

Again within a Windows client, this time our Tab (SM7), is within the main browser area.