Visual WebGui Showcases

“Visual WebGui turned out to be a magic stick to heal most of our ASP.NET problems and concerns… We want to be rich, so use VWG and give us 10% of the money you will save” Marcin Pytel

Overview
Talex is an information technologies system integrator. The Company offers complex IT integration, data processing and management solutions. Talex helps companies and organizations retrieve, analyze, store and secure information using advanced technologies and IT solutions. Talex also provides service and maintenance services with the help of its own HelpDesk system - Taldesk.

Business needs
Initially developed as a Windows application (Visual Basic 6), Taldesk soon became one of the most important tools used by Talex. In order to follow the rapid growth of the company and offer top quality services for its customers it soon turned out that Taldesk needed to be available from different locations and browsers without the need to install any plugins or other components.

The most natural solution was to build a Web Client. Since the team working on the project was mainly Microsoft-technology oriented, the first version was developed with traditional ASP.NET. However, switching to Web-style thinking and development not only took a lot of time and resources but finally resulted in poor functionality and low acceptance from users. As the functionality of the web frontend was mainly used by servicemen in their daily activities such as accessing service incidents, changing their statuses, automatic generation of documents etc. the user experience became very important and crucial for the quality of services.

As a result a decision was made to re-implement the web client in order to provide a richer, more intuitive and more responsive user interface that could serve about one hundred of concurrent users.

The Solution
The main drawback of the first ASP.NET Web Client was its poor performance, especially in low bandwidth scenarios, mainly caused by many expensive postbacks that were required for validation logic on the server. After the proof of concept phase “Visual WebGui turned out to be a magic stick to heal most of our ASP.NET problems and concerns. It also proved to be like a gift for our developers still longing to classic Windows development style” said Taldesk Project Manager Marcin Pytel.

After spending a few weeks on the first Visual WebGui version a team of 2 developers suddenly discovered that they could go even further and make a nicer and more intuitive user interface than the original Windows application UI. After many hours spent on learning ASP.NET and solving many issues related to managing state of the application and rendering problems with different browsers, the development team was a bit reluctant to switch to another tool, but only few hours were needed to totally change that attitude. "The new tool was soon reviewed as the only tool merging the best of Windows and Web worlds. The only thing to regret was the fact that we came on WebGui so late and wasted a few months on ASP.NET," stated Marcin Pytel.

Benefits
Visual WebGui helped Talex deliver a rich and easy to use interface in a very short time. That was mainly due to the fact that the team could think in the Windows, rather than Web-style oriented way. We were also freed from analyzing and resolving problems with different browsers and low bandwidth scenarios. Thanks to this a lot of time was saved and the development team could finally concentrate on developing functionality instead of solving problems.

In addition, Visual WebGui allowed Talex to develop a solution that looks and works like the Windows client application with all the benefits of web applications while also providing ease of deployment and no network configuration issues to connect from remote locations. On the first presentation some users could hardly believe it was a standard web application and not the windows client hosted within the web browser.

From the project manager point of view the decision to use Visual WebGui was the “most accurate and fruitful one” since it allowed us to extend the functionality that was initially planned keeping the timeframes and costs unchanged due to its time savings. As it comes to the developers, Visual WebGui almost immediately became the most favorite development tool and was given a new name - the “WAOW” which stands for Windows Application on Web. As the project progressed and different technologies were taken into concern, the one and only recommendation from the team was – “We want to be rich, so use VWG and give us 10% of the money you will save.”

Screen shots