Contents tagged with windows application
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A Visual Studio tool eliminating the need to rewrite for web and mobile
We have already covered the BYOD requirements that an application developer is faced with, in an earlier blog entry (How to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) to a .NET application). In that entry we emphasized the fact that application developers will need to prepare their applications for serving multiple types of devices on multiple platforms, ranging from the smallest mobile devices up to and beyond the largest desktop devices.
The experts prediction is that in the near future we will see that the majority of all applications developed, will need to be able to service these multiple platforms and devices in one way or the other, in order to survive.
Where does that leave our legacy single-platform targeted desktop applications, in which we have even invested decades of manpower?
We could build a User Interface front-end for those legacy applications, still running the legacy application as a back-end. That does in some cases require considerable effort, and it doesn't change the fact that the back-end is still running the legacy, and potentially obsoleted technology, code. On top of that, we will have two tiers to manage, the back-end and the new front-end.
We could rewrite or convert the legacy application for the new technology. For that there are multiple code conversion tools out there on the market that will assist you and make your conversion process a bit easier than to do it all "by hand". All the current tools in this category have one thing in common though, they do code conversion for you, and some of them even pretty well. You will still need to rewrite or reconstruct the parts of code where there is no corresponding library on the target platform.
We could migrate the legacy application to the new technology using any of the migration solutions available. The currently available solution base their migration on a fixed set of black-box built-in rules with no (or very limited) ability to adapt to your special migration needs. In many cases this will only help with the migration of a portion of your code, still requiring rewriting or reconstruction of considerable percentage of your code.
Taking on such a conversion or migration task means that you will use the code conversion/migration tool of your choice to convert/migrate your code. You will most likely have huge sections of code that need to be rewritten and/or reconstructed because there is no direct correspondence between the libraries used on the legacy application and the ones on your new platform. As soon as you start the conversion process, you will be converting the legacy application version that is current at that time, which can present major additional efforts in both management and coding if you need to continue maintaining the legacy application after you have started the conversion process.
What you really need here is a conversion tool that "knows" more about your legacy source application platform and the target platform and "knows" how to "map" between the two whenever possible. In addition, you often may need to continue development on the legacy application while you are converting/migrating. What you need is to lift that requirement and not freeze the development of the legacy application.
Based on these needs, Gizmox's built its solution and called the action transposition rather than migration or conversion. The Transposition studio is a rule based migration and modernization solution. It comes with built-in rules that will automatically handle about 95% of the conversion right out of the box. In some cases it will be able to migrate all your code. In other cases there will be portions that you need to work on yourself, but the entire work is done within the Transposition studio which is integrated into Visual Studio and offers you wizards and guiding tools to minimize risk and required resources.
What distinguishes the Transposition from other migration solutions are mainly three things:
First, it's migration rules are fully open and adjustable so you can change the default migration at will and thereby gradually adapting it to your own specific needs. It uses a very powerful pattern matching engine along with equally powerful template engine that enables you to make very advanced and complex conversions on small and large code segments, all by defining a set of rules and templates within the Transposition studio itself. The Transposition Studio integrates directly into the Visual Studio development environment and you have the legacy source code right at your fingertips and also allows you to override the defined rules by directly customizing parts of the code according to your needs. The rules and templates are stored in user definable libraries, where you can build multiple sets of related rules, which can then be used for, or shared with, other migration projects.
Second, there is no need to freeze development on the legacy source application, so you can continue developing your old application, while you are transposing. Using traditional migration/conversion procedures, you do a one time migration/conversion of the code, and then you start reconstructing/rewriting the parts of the outcome where necessary. This is completely different in Gizmox's Transposition studio. The majority of the required work is spent on defining migration rules and templates within the Transposition studio itself and then you simply re-run the transposition (migration) process to produce a new set of target code. You re-run the transposition as often as you need/like and it is only at the last stage, when you have migrated everything that can be migrated, that you start working directly on the target platform code.
Third, one of the target platform options is a cloud enabled and mobile enabled ASP.NET application with HTML5 front end (based on the Visual WebGui framework) which will fulfill the BYOD requirement of modern applications perfectly. -
Migration & Modernization: Windows/VB6 Apps to ASP.NET HTML5
I would like to invite you to a webinar we are doing in collaboration with Jeffrey S. Hammond, Principal Analyst serving Application Development & Delivery Professionals at Forrester Research.
The webinar is free and it will will introduce the substantial changes brought on by the move to Web Applications and Open Web architectures, and the challenges it places on application development shops. We’ll also introduce how we at Gizmox are helping client navigate this mobile shift and evolve existing Windows applications with a new set of Transposition tools called Instant CloudMove. We will discuss the alternatives in the market to evolve your existing applications and focus on our transposition tools that reduce migration risk, minimize costs, and accelerate your time to market. -
Cast your vote for 2011 Community Choice Awards
DevProConnections and WindowsITPro are now accepting nominations for the 2011 Community Choice Awards. These awards allow you to nominate developer products and services for special recognition.
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Academy Webcast: Moving C/S applications to Windows Azure
The Cloud and SaaS models are changing the face of enterprise IT in terms of economics, scalability and accessibility. As I wrote before Visual WebGui Instant CloudMove transforms your Client / Server application code to run natively as .NET on Windows Azure and enables your Azure Client / Server application to have a secured-by-design plain Web or Mobile browser based accessibility.
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How Visual WebGui helps ASP.NET Cloud-based apps
Everyone is talking about Cloud computing and moving to the cloud (public or private), but very few have actually done it so far. The reason is that the process of migrating existing applications to the cloud is a lot more complicated than one might think which is exactly where the Visual WebGui technology comes in for a rescue.
In the past year the Visual WebGui R&D Team have been intensively working on a tool-based solution that gives Microsoft application developers and enterprises a simpler way to migrate Client-Server applications to the Cloud based on ASP.NET. And now we are proud to present the Visual WebGui Instant CloudMove, which is the only solution that transforms desktop applications’ code to the cloud, in addition to web and mobile deployments.
To learn more, you can check out our announcement or read this White Paper. -
ASP.NET Ajax will not be left behind the HTML5 rush
It takes a short overview of Microsoft development tools and platforms evolvement in order to demonstrate the importance of supporting Web Forms development for ASP.NET Ajax with HTML5 enhancements. In an article that Todd Anglin publishes in Redmond Developers, under the title "Silverlight: What Web Forms Wanted to Be", Todd says that ASP.NET was supposed to be Web Forms. A framework that meant to duplicate VB6 ease of development or rather its more mature successor Window Forms. Asp.Net was expected to deliver this simple and easy development paradigm for web. But it failed, Microsoft could not reproduce stateful based development paradigm for a stateless environment. Years later Microsoft rolled out Silverlight that is really another trial to come up with Web Forms paradigm for website development. Todd says in his article " Silverlight is what Web Forms wanted to be, a stateful application development model that can be deployed and updated as easily as traditional Web sites. Unencumbered by the limits of stateless pages, developing for Silverlight finally achieves what ViewState could not: It allows traditional desktop application developers to reuse their skills and development patterns for applications that can be deployed with no installation, save for the Silverlight plug-in"
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New tool helps modernizing Client/Server apps to VWG ASP.NET
Upgrading a Client/Server desktop based application to ASP.NET Web or Cloud based environment is thought to be a very complex and risky process. Most of us are intimidated only by the thought of taking one of our large, business applications; one that we have been working on for quite a while now, not to say mission critical and migratie it to a differernt technology. Most of us will follow the good old saying: If it ain't broken why fix it, right?! Which means that we will eventually find our selves with a very large and old system which the only possible solution for modernizing it would be the costly rewrite that we probably cannot afford or don't have the tme to wait for.
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Visual WebGui 6.4 beta 1 released w/ jQuery integration and further enhancements
The new version of the VWG web/cloud applications framework offers upgraded performance, scalability and complete developer and designer freedom to design and customize Web 2.0 UIs. Visual WebGui 6.4 beta 1 incorporates about 1,000 complete features either added or fixed from 6.3, including increased customizability with the new control level designer, theme designer and jQuery integration. The new version also includes 4 out-of-the-box skins for simple personalization of the UI look and feel. The new version improves WinForms compatibility and provides a much comprehensive set of events with upgrades to the DataGrid and ListView.
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Visual WebGui adopts jQuery framework as its app client engine
We are excited to announce that Visual WebGui 6.4 client is going to adopt jQuery as its client engine in order to provide better support for cross browsers, enhanced UI behaviors and most important provide a familiar API to write Visual WebGui extensions such as custom controls and utilizing different protocols such as JSON and REST.
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Are Enterprise AJAX Applications Doomed…Or Are We?
Sometimes, it seems that the world is all about man vs. technology, and one has to lose. This seems to be the question raised about AJAX; from the general challenges of AJAX, including cost and expertise needed, to its security issues, will the technological good prevail or will we humans be seeking an alternative? Navot Peled explains that it doesn’t have to be only one or the other; there are solutions that offer a win-win situation.