Visual WebGui Case Studies

"We were astounded at the performance and Ajax-like behavior we were able to achieve... we definitely saved at least 50% in time required for the UI design." Luis Alonso Ramos 

Overview
Centro Chihuahuense para la Calidad y Productividad, A. C. (CChCP) is a non-profit organization which, among other things, focuses on improving quality processes in public education. It currently works with around 800 public schools in the state of Chihuahua, in the north of Mexico.

Intelectix is a custom solution provider in Chihuahua, Mexico, founded in 2004. Intelectix specializes in desktop and web applications with .NET technologies. Since learning about Visual WebGui, the complexity and development time for web applications has been reduced significantly.

Business needs
In the summer, the number of schools with which CChCP worked was growing to become too high to be able to track their progress manually. As a result, it was decided to invest in an improved system that would meet the new emerged needs.

The new system should keep a list of schools with records of each project and appointment associated with it. It should also allow, like a CRM the management and monitoring of that information and provide reports with all imaginable filters as well as to keep track of consultants’ appointments and their grading by the schools to facilitate performance reviews

In addition, the new system was required to be a web based application that could be used anywhere, so consultants could log in from home and at the same time achieve the performance and responsiveness levels as if they were working locally.

The Solution
Intelectix developed the application using Visual WebGui and a simple navigation framework which was developed in house.

The learning curve for Intelectix team was relatively simple, since they already had a lot of experience with Windows Forms. "We had no problems getting used to the framework," said CEO Luis Alonso Ramos whose team were able to achieve the full functionality required for the system in about half the time due to the productivity advantages of the Visual WebGui WYSIWYG designer and the simplicity gains of programming in WinForms over traditional ASP.NET methods which can be implied by the following statement by Ramos: "One of the best things is the ability to maintain state implicitly which is a very difficult task in regular ASP.NET."

In terms of performance, the team found that the response time experienced over the web with a fast internet connection was really good without the need to put any additional work into optimizing the pipeline. "We were astounded at the performance and Ajax-like behavior we were able to achieve without having to dive into the complexities of ASP.NET Ajax," said Ramos who added that "only with slower connections it sometimes took a bit longer than expected."

Benefits
The benefits of using Visual WebGui for this application can be directly translated to the speed of development and the overall time and resources that Intelectix invested in this project. "I am not sure we had a 90% reduction in web application development time, but we definitely saved at least 50% in time required for the UI design," stated Ramos. The Windows-Forms-like designer is much easier for web applications that are meant to be functional (as opposed to web sites that are meant to be beautiful). And Windows Forms programming is easier than ASP.NET.

Due to Visual WebGui Intelectix was able to create a web application using mature development paradigm that enables clarity and ease of maintenance. "Once we had our little navigation framework, each page's functionality was self-contained," said Luis Alonso Ramos.

In addition, Visual WebGui allowed Intelectix to deliver a web application with Ajax-like behavior and improved responses without having to do any additional work and saving around 50% in budget.

Screenshots
List of all existing organizations

Details about one school and its participation in the program
 

The appointment book showing appointments for multiple consultants
 

An evaluation form for an appointment
 

A table report
 

A graph report