Another Visit to the Bleeding Edge

I guess I was just in the mood for some pain again.  That’s the only reason that I can think of that I spent time again on Visual WebGui.  This is one of the most promising technologies I’ve seen for developing web applications (and I mean web applications, not sites).  I tried it about a year ago and gave up since I felt like there were too many annoying little things to fight through.  They’ve come a long way, but it is still beta.  I had to remind myself of that every 5 minutes, since the Silverlight SDK didn’t install correctly, the Silverlight app did nothing but spin and tell me I was at 100%, and none of the GUIs would show the MainMenu.  These are all logged in their forum, but they are bugs.  Unfortunately, I need to have something to show soon, and I don’t have the patience to get 90% done only to find that there is some critical issue that will kill the whole concept.  But, keep your eyes on it, because it (for the most part) does what it is supposed to and does it really well.

But one of the most ironic things was that I remember back in 2000 when I worked for a company that built a browser-based ActiveX control that used SOAP for the communication with the COM+ server using ISAPI on IIS.  Now, that was bleeding edge.   And the funny thing is that people wanted web sites to look like applications.  Somehow, this is now a negative in almost all cases — people want the thing in the browser to look like it is supposed to be in the browser.  Ok, so I can have context menus using this framework.  That’s awesome, but users don’t expect them.  How many times have you accidentally right-clicked in Google app and gone ‘wait–that’s not the normal context menu.  nice!’ only to wonder how many users ever bothered to right click?

Well, I guess I’ll keep watching from the sidelines until the right application comes along (and the framework matures).

P.S. VWG guys — if you happen to read this, please clarify what the licensing model is.  Incredibly confusing right now, and no one wants to get excited about something if they can’t figure out if it is free or has a cost per server.  I don’t bother going to the Ferrari dealer, because I know I’ll just want something I can’t have.