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Getting From .NET to HTML5

April 14, 2011 :: 21565 Views :: Download PDF:

HTML5 introduces markup-level functionality for rich graphics, animation and web multimedia. It also supports a richer web application functionality and extends the client capabilities with local storage. Many pundits see it as the next generation web - web 3.0 if you like - and an open standard replacement for propriety plug-ins, Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flash. But, for all its new features, HTML5 is still only the end product. This article looks at HTML5 from the web programmer's point of view, and introduces the only way currently available of developing simple .NET to HTML5 applications.

The Microsoft Web Development Roadmap Hasn't Gone as Far as Planned.

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 is now in question.

HTML5 - A Better Web Application Experience

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.

jQuery and HTML5

But HTML, both in its newest guise and older versions, still involves a complexity for the web developer that puts web development productivity at a disadvantage when compared to desktop application development with the superb tools Microsoft has perfected over the years. Getting a web application to work exactly as you want can be complex, time-consuming and frustrating.

Javascript frameworks have played an important role in abstracting the communication with the browser, and jQuery is currently the most popular of them all. Having won over some 40% of developers, the latest JQuery function library provides developers with functions that dynamically write HTML5 code features. They do the laborious stuff and leave the developer to work with a much simpler command set; they work efficiently too. If there was a way to apply that also to the handling of data - to abstract away the complexities of the Ajax connection and data binding, without the server side data binding complexities - we will pretty much achieve what Microsoft had in mind all along.

VWG, the Realization of the Microsoft Roadmap

Fortunately, such a way now exists, in the form a development platform called Visual WebGui ProStudio .NETHTML5. It is a unique, end-to-end combination of pure Microsoft .NET development, abstraction of Java Script / HTML5 functionality through jQuery and the abstraction of Ajax, database connectivity and data binding. In its release of ProStudio .NETHTML5, Gizmox, the creator of Visual WebGui has enabled the only total development environment in which programmers can develop efficient-running, data-centric HTML5 web apps in Visual Studio.

The 4 Main Benefits of Using Visual WebGUI with jQuery

It empowers jQuery developers to go data centric.
Using its abstraction of data binding and built-in state management, ProStudio. NETHTML5 opens the way for UI developers to create data-driven, line-of-business applications, while staying focused on their core skills of user interface building.
It allows the creation of HTML5 web applications now.
The unification of the Visual WebGui development platform and the latest jQuery animation and rich web interface function library empowers web application developers to take advantage of HTML5's power and build applications having browser compatibility across all mobile, tablet and desktop environments.
It is a .NET framework.
The only simple way to do HTML5 or jQuery development in .NET. That means the look and feel of developing desktop .NET applications, with the ease of deployment of a standard ASP.NET application on IIS, which amounts to no more than copy/pasting a couple of DLLs.
Uncompromised security by design.
VWG with built-in jQuery produces rich ASP.NET, Ajax-based web applications with a high performance interface whose security cannot be compromised.

Visual WebGui ProStudio .NETHTML5 is an innovative solution that, by incorporating virtualization and streaming paradigms, creates a unique HTML5 development environment. This enables stateful applications that are fully scalable and have no client security vulnerabilities whatsoever.

The VWG development framework is integrated into Visual Studio, allowing .NET programming code, Visual WebGui data binding functions and jQuery to achieve a potent combination of technologies that achieves a high degree of abstraction for defining screen behavior and communication between database and browser based applications.

Summing Up ProStudio .NETHTML5

ProStudio .NETHTML5 is the only HTML5 development tool for MS technology.
ProStudio .NETHTML5 is the only way to develop .NET applications that will work on multiple clients – that means every browser on Windows, Android and iOS.
ProStudio .NETHTML5 means pure HTML5 code giving a rich user interface and media without plugins.
ProStudio .NETHTML5 is the fastest way to develop rich and engaging web applications.
ProStudio .NETHTML5 produces highly efficient web applications that are scalable and fast running.
ProStudio .NETHTML5 produces totally secure-by-design web applications.