Reviews & Opinions

This is an interesting forum post written by one of our community members - Mitch Stephens

Hey Everyone,
I don't usually post things on forums, but after spending a few weeks developing an pretty complex application using VWG I feel there are a few things worth chatting about.

Firstly, I want to say that this tool could be a game-changer. Like a lot of folks who have been around too long in this business, I remember the buzz when Visual Basic hit the market. Back then, to build Windows applications you had to choose between WinSDK+C, or use a 3rd party tools like PowerBuilder or Gupta. Then VB changed everything. The average developer could jump in and build pretty functional Windows apps with a nominal amount of training.

Fast forward 15 years and we are in a similar mess with Web 2.0 development. To build a non-trivial Web application you are faced with one level of complexity over another. There is no shortage of development tools and many of them have great looking demos (See DevExpress for an example). But actually building a real-world business application, with pop-up windows, large data sets, etc, and you waste a huge amount of time dealing with non-functional issues like javascript, html, Visual Studio, browser problems, state managment etc. A simple task like popping up a window, getting some data, and then refreshing the underlying page becomes a surprisingly complex and error-prone task. Even dealing with window management, auto-sizing and auto-docking is a pain in ASP.net. The stateless architecture of web apps means you are constanly having to re-establish your context on every UI interaction.

In short, Web development today feels like Windows development before VB...

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