by Don Burnett
The nice folks at Netikatech who are doing the product that implements WinForms projects (and WinForms controls) into Silverlight projects are doing a great job of moving forward with the product, in only a few days they have brought together a full WinForms end-to-end application solution. What's really cool about this is it works on the Mac and the PC and now with the Silverlight RC it works great in Firefox Browser environments. The idea of a full database driven WinForms application running cross-platform on the web, is just phenomenal and it shows the power of Silverlight and GOA WinForms Pro. If you are working on projects in an enterprise development and you are thinking about making your applications work in the browser to lower overall deployment costs and give you better ROI, this product is for you.
Here's are some test screens just to show you the "wow" factor and the complexity of the interfacing that is possible. Literally a full fledged interface is available.
The performance is much faster than one would expect from a browser application including anything done with Ajax.. All the WinForms interfacing functionality that you expect is there, and .Net's performance. Of course this looks like an old style Windows application, but that's just fine for corporate and enterprise applications. Developers will appreciate the speed and the UI standards that have been a hallmark in windows enterprise applications for many years, and frankly it makes it an easy port.
Here's an example screen with a modal dialog box enabled (yes the message box windows are draggable).
And here finally is some time scheduling UI, showing some great project management and visualization..
Considering you can take a regular Windows Platform application and port it now to the web as a viable program that works anywhere, this product has more than great potential. As designers we talk about new UI, I can only hope that the final product lets me extend these applications with my own XAML (wait it can! I forgot about the XAMLCanvas control). Even if it doesn't it has great Enterprise potential.
There is also a Flash version to this, but the Flash folks don't seem to be talking about this, as it would be a great boon to their RIA efforts as well. Many people have complained about Rich Internet Applications in Flash and AIR still being a little light in functionality. This product zooms ahead in terms of functionality and bringing REAL applications to life with all the complexities we expect from an application that runs from the OS, not the browser.
COMPANY BLOG
I'd like to thank Jean Gab for keeping me up to date with what's going on with this product, it's a mind blower that they could do all of this in such a short amount of time. This makes ports of windows platform applications so easy and to make them cross-platform. You should be checking this out if you are into enterprise development..
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