The bew Visual WebGui ProStudio .NETHTML5 is a gateway for .NET/Silverlight developers to shift into the open standard HTML5 and still avoid the data-binding, session management and Ajax complexities of data-centric graphic-rich HTML5 applications.
ASP.NET Web Forms was Microsoft's first attempt to enable web development with the ease and efficiency of the .NET desktop development environment. However, its failure to satisfactorily maintain session state prevented it from realizing the simple visual desktop development methodology. The problem looked like being solved in 2007 with Silverlight, a completely new framework by Microsoft, which allowed .NET development of stateful applications, in the form of a workaround requiring a plug-in client to communicate with the browser. Silverlight got very close to achieving the same desktop development simplicity even if it didn't quite reach the level of visualization of the desktop application development process.
Now, some 4 years after Silverlight's release, it faces the dilemma of not being supported by operating systems like iOS, whose popularity can no longer be ignored. When you add the promise of HTML5 into the equation, with its cross platform and mobile support included in Internet Explorer 9, the future of Silverlight as originally visioned is now in question.
The emergence of HTML5 as the new W3C standard, in which multimedia, rich graphics, animation and rich web application functionality are supported, brings the promise of a new generation of native cross platform web applications incorporating cool stuff without plug-ins. Its independency of plugins and proprietary run-time and video formats and its widescale adoption by all the leading browsers has brought many observers in the industry to predict the demise not only of Silverlight, but also Flash. Microsoft IE9 supports most HTML5 features, as do Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, and mobile browsers.
HTML5 extends the capabilities of HTML by adding features to improve web applications and enhance the user experience. While it supports all the HTML4 form controls, it introduces important new ones such as the Video tag to embed movies, date pickers, sliders and others.
The new Visual WebGui beta is a combination of pure Microsoft .NET development, abstraction of JavaScript / HTML5 functionality through jQuery and the abstraction of Ajax, database connectivity and data binding.
The new version adds the complete jQuery extension and animation capabilities into Visual WebGui which allows developers to build rich, customer facing HTML5 UIs with animation and media streaming and also provides mobile & tablet support and cross-browser performance. Other benefits include enhanced data management features and more effective debugging capabilities.
Check out the Live HTML5 email application demo developed with the new ProStudio .NETHTML5 beta featuring rich animation HTML5 UIs with interactive carousel.
The free beta downloads are available on the download page.
