Contents tagged with UI
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Security enhancement feature added to Visual WebGui enterprise HTML5 Platform
Access to an enterprises internal web based application poses significant security problems for most organizations. With the expansion of the internet and BYOD, applications that were accessed in the past only from within an organization over an internal intranet network have now expanded to the outside world in the form of mobiles and tablets found at employee’s homes or on the road. As these applications usually contain sensitive data, a developer must consider a whole world of scenarios that need to take effect specifically, the systems firewall which protects from hacking and the authentication and authorization mechanism. Internal enterprise applications usually require authentication and authorization by a logged in user to access certain or all of the information on a given application. Moreover, these applications need to make decisions based on a given logged in user: some pages or actions might be restricted to only logged in users, or to a certain subset of users; other pages might show information specific to the logged in user, or might show more or less information, depending on the user viewing the page.
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Creating a forms security
At Gizmox, we have always focused on how to ease the developers’ transition to secure, native-like, HTML5 web application development so that it as friendly and familiar as possible. For this reason. we have created the Forms Security mechanism in Visual WebGui. This mechanism allows developers to fairly easily and rapidly integrate a filesystem-based permissions mechanism into Visual WebGui applications which run in an Active Directory environment on Windows operating systems. This is done by generating a dummy file for each form in an application, in a dedicated directory under the application root. After this has been generated, a system admin for example, could leverage access to the application’s forms by modifying the appropriate dummy file permissions through a familiar IIS Manager or file system interface..Building secure internal web based applications for enterprises will surely come naturally for Visual WebGui developers, making the look and feel of your Visual WebGui’s application as native to the device as possible with native level security
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Customizing HTML5 enterprise apps with Visual WebGui themes
This is the 5th post in our series highlighting new features of Visual WebGui v7. Here we discuss pre-built Visual WebGui themes that come standard with v7 - we will discuss the themes feature generally and show an example of how to customize your app with a theme.
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Gizmox BlogDesigning an HTML5 enterprise app is not the same as building a website
As enterprise app developers know, there are many differences in designing an HTML5 user interface to an enterprise app versus designing a basic website. While both require a sense of design, managing the look and feel of the many different controls, user input patterns, and screens of an app is different from managing the flat surface of a basic website. While a high end B2C app may warrant bringing in the skills of UI design specialist and the time to customize the look and feel of all of the controls and other application surfaces, many enterprise app developers building B2B and B2E apps are under budget and time pressure to rapidly adapt their existing apps to web and mobile. The themes feature within Visual WebGui7 provide an approach to rapidly designing or re-skinning the look and feel of your app with pre-built themes including Android, iOS, Windows, and more. As an example of how themes work, check out the calendar control in the Visual WebGui CompanionKit. Click "Themes" in the upper right to choose alternate themes and see how it changes the basic look of the calendar control.Using Visual WebGui themes to design a user interface for HTML5 apps
Visual WebGui themes affect the resulting user interface in 2 broad ways:- Themes are responsible for how the client application is rendered on a browser. For example, the theme defines that a TextBox is rendered on the browser as some levels of <div> tags with an <input> tag for the input.
- Themes affect how the the core application code drives client side behavior. For example, the theme also defines that the TextBox input area should be rendered in certain color and font size.
Working with Visual WebGui Themes
A Visual WebGui theme is defined by a set of controls that when applied, are responsible for all appearance and control behavior related properties. The controls in the themes designer are stacked in a TreeView format on the left side of the themes designer screen. When you click on the control level, a properties pane will appear on the right-hand side. Here you are able to customize the properties view of the app’s controls such as its BackColor, its BorderColor, BorderWidth, Font etc. To work on a specific section of a theme, you must work on that section’s family control such as “ButtonBase”, “ComboBox”, “CheckBox”, etc.Creating a new Visual WebGui Theme
Before we provide an example of customizing an existing theme, we will explain the simple detail of how you create a new theme based on another specific theme. You do this by creating a theme in Visual Studio (Add / New Item / Visual WebGui / Theme…) then you edit the source file for the theme and change the inheritance, so your new theme inherits from a specific theme. It may also deserve a mention that, as with all themes used in a VWG application, you need to register your theme in web.config (through the Registration tab in VS integrations).Customizing a HTML5 mobile theme
To simplify the explanation of customizing your very own HTML5 mobile theme, we will work on an existing android theme that looks like this:
We would like to change the default ForeColor for this entire mobile theme to the color fuchsia, the ListView border color to red and edit a specific arrow control’s color.
Let’s first customize the ForeColor of this Andriod mobile theme. Select the control level from the TreeView on the Left pane and edit the ForeColor on the properties grid on the right pane as shown below:
The resulting change will appear as follows in the given mobile web application:
As you can see, the ForeColor has changed across the entire app to the color fuchsia. Next, we would like to customize the bottom arrow image in this Android theme. The arrow is part of the ListView family so we would need to select the ListView family control on the left pane. The images associated with this family appear in the middle resources pane. In this example, we will customize the top “ArrowArrowLTR” arrow image. As we can see that it has been inherited to this theme (the small arrow on the bottom left is the sign that it is inherited), we need to save the image to our current theme before we could edit it and therefore we will right click on the image and select “override”.
Now that the image has been copied to our current theme (and is no longer inherited) we can go ahead and edit the image. Simply double click on the image and it will open in your graphic design software. Go ahead and edit it as you wish, change its color or texture if you like. Don’t forget to save it to the theme when you’re done!
Next, we would like to customize the BackColor of the theme from its current default color to red. We do not wish to apply the change to the entire app rather, only to the ListView level, we will choose the ListView family control in the TreeView pane and customize the “BackColor” under the properties pane as shown below:
Once we’re finished, we will be able to view our app with the changes to the theme that we made.
We have our new ForeColor text, ListView BackColor and arrow color and we’re all set!
Considerations when changing pre-built themes
While it is relatively easy and safe to change the simple attributes of a control in a theme(in the property grid, and even override an image), it is important to be aware of the consequences regarding later upgrades once you start overriding any of the xslt, html, js and css resources:- If you override such a resource (say an xslt or js), this resource will keep on being overridden and will contain the data/code it had at the time it was overridden.
- If you decide to upgrade your Visual WebGui version in a later stage, this overridden resource will keep on containing the data at the time of the original overriding of that resource. This means that updates/fixes/enhancements Gizmox is making to that particular resource will not be included in your theme, unless you delete the overridden resource, re-override it and re-apply your customizations to that resource.
Go ahead and start customizing your mobile web app’s look and feel!
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Introducing Visual WebGui's XAML programming model extension for web developers
While ASP.NET provides an event base approach it is completely dismissed when working with AJAX and the richness of the server is lost and replaced with JavaScript programming and couple with a very high security risk.
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VWG extended ListView control
We would like to share with you the cool capabilities that the VWG extended ListView control allows over Asp.Net.
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Channel Web 20 Coolest Cloud Platform Vendors
Visual WebGui was chosen by Channel Web within 20 Coolest Cloud Platform Vendors among the list you can also find Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, Microsoft's Windows Azure and AT&T.
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Web & cloud development simplicity Webcast
Have you asked yourself why Web development tasks are so complex? Why must you master so many different coding languages and moving-target standards to develop a single line-of-business Web application?
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How to make your ASP.NET third party control run faster
You can learn more on implementing ASP.NET third party controls with the Empty Client approach and by that enhancing its performance and making it secured by design in this article.
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A new document management web solution was developed in Visual WebGui over ASP.NET
e-grou is an online document management and workflow collaboration service that was developed using Visual WebGui after the company gave a good effort to build that web application with ASP.NET but found that it was too time consuming and that performance also was an issue in certain cases. “...With Visual WebGui we ported our previous web client in just a couple of months with additional functionality, better performance, and looking much better from the graphical point of view... Choosing VWG reduced significantly the development effort and skills required to create a windows-like web user interface.” José Santos
The full case is available here which explains the reasons for haltering the ASP.NET development and how "...choosing VWG reduced significantly the development effort and skills required to create a windows-like web user interface,” -
Should Visual WebGui be used for the Umbraco Back office UI
Daniel Bardi, a Visual WebGui user shared his experience with the Umbraco community as he wrote in his post "...The UI is amazing and works in all known webbrowsers... it's the reason I had decided on the platform for the project (and by reading the many, many reviews). The framework allows non-web developers (or winform developers) to build web applications using a WinForms development environment. No more worries about session and state.
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The Geeks are back on a role with a new episode
The Visual WebGui Geeks are back after a short break with a new episode that is available on the Geeks on a role blog.