The demonstrations and screencasts I have seen on Visual WebGui are pretty intriguing. Visual WebGui's tagline is “bringing AJAX and Silverlight to enterprises”. It looks to be bringing drag-and-drop desktop development to web applications, and apparently the performance is pretty awesome.
According to the site:
“Visual WebGui (VWG) is an open source rapid application development (RAD) framework for Line-Of-Bussines AJAX & Silverlight GUIs. VWG cuts down development time (proven up to 90%) , without compromising on extensibility, scalability, performance, security or complexity.
Visual WebGui is the only framework that provides seamless integration to Visual Studio and the .NET framework and extends ASP.NET. VWG is unique and not more of the same (200 AJAX frameworks)! Visual WebGui replaces all of the ASP.NET methodologies which were designed for developing sites, with WinForms methodologies, which were designed for developing applications.”
Joe Stagner of Microsoft seems to think somewhat highly of Visual WebGui as he put together a webcast on it:
“It is all about simplicity: Simplicity in programming next generation complex AJAX application that makes the productivity difference. In this Webcast we will dismystify Visual WebGui. We will build a fully blown application in less then 20 minutes, and strip off the covers, showing you how you can cut your development cycle by as much as 90% . Visual WebGui is open source, so you can dive into the code. Throughout the webcast we will demonstrate that while VWG enables rapid application development (RAD) , the developer is free to create custom controls, wrap third party controls , invoke HTML resources and interop with standard ASP.NET applicarions like DNN and others, all in a matter of minutues.”
Check out Visual WebGui here.