Our months of hard work finally paid off. It’s finally here. With excellent craftsmanship and fine attention to detail, we’re very proud to announce the all-new and powerful WebUI 2016. The entire WebUI lineup consisting of highly-advanced 40+ web components now finally receives a truly deserved facelift.

Accessing the New WebUI Live Experience

For so long, customers have enjoyed our live WebUI demos through http://live.intersoftsolutions.com. While this experience is adequate, being redirected to another site for a hands-on experience just won’t cut it anymore. So we decided to integrate the new samples right our website. That’s right, now you can experience the new WebUI samples with the gorgeous unified modern theme, right from our website.

Don’t worry, we’ve put these buttons everywhere, so you can easily access them from various pages in WebUI, although it is very much recommended to access them from /WebUI. Should you miss this experience and open the old live samples, you’ll be greeted with the following dialog box.

Without further ado, let’s get right onto the new WebUI Live Experience.

The Home Screen

Right when you launch the new Live Experience, you’ll be greeted with a nice and modern blurred background, showcasing the flagship products of WebUI. This experience works best on modern desktop browsers supporting HTML5 and CSS3.

If you click on products such as WebDesktop and WebEssentials, you can also find a grid of sub-components in them.

WebGrid

When you launch WebGrid for the first time, you’ll be greeted with the First Experience.

This first experience sample demonstrates many of the top UI features available in WebGrid, combined with some unique features such as column freezing, filter suggestion and more.

Some of the top features demonstrated in this sample are:

• Sleek look and feel with the all-new “Elegant” Default Style. The Default Style feature significantly reduces page output size by eliminating in-line styles. Try to view source and notice there are no styles generated in the page level.
• Improved user interface with a new set of fresh icons, background images and UI elements.
• New context menu engine. Try to right click on the Grid area to experience the new context menu system.
• LiveFreezeâ„¢ column freezing feature. The only column freezing implementation that perfectly simulates Excel® freezing behavior.
• Automatic Filter Suggestion. Try to right click on a cell (eg, “Owner”), then choose one of the available filter options. The suggested filter options are based on selected cell’s data type and value.
• Filter Status Indicator. When one or more columns are filtered, notice that the filter indicator status is changed to “Filtered”. This indicator helps end users to understand the current state of filters without has to display filter bar. You can click on the filter status indicator to toggle the filter state.
• SmartWebResourcesâ„¢. This innovative technology enable this sample to run without dependencies to “physical” client resources. All client resources such as scripts and images are retrieved directly from resource assembly.
• Declarative datasource control binding. Notice that there are no codes required for the data binding operation (see C# and VB tab).

Samples Navigation Experience

To navigate between samples, you can easily use the arrows on the left and right-hand side of the screen, or use the menu button on the top-left corner of the screen. This will open the Menu panel and you can easily jump between samples.

If you wish to go back the controls grid, simply click the Home button. Should you encounter any problems or hassles with the samples, feel free to chat with us directly using the live messenger on the bottom-right corner.

WebCombo

This the First Experience when you launch the WebCombo sample.

This sample demonstrates the unified modern theme of WebCombo and many of its key features such as SmartWebResourcesâ„¢ and declarative datasource control binding.

Notice that there are no code required for the data binding operation (see C# and VB tab). Try experimenting with the WebCombo controls in this page to see some unique features in action. For instance, Reports-To is using multiple selection feature combined with image column type.

WebInput

This is the First Experience when you launch the WebInput sample.

This sample demonstrates the unified modern theme of WebInput and its key features.

Some of the new features demonstrated in this sample are:

• Sleek look and feel with the all-new “Elegant” Default Style. The Default Style feature significantly reduces page output size by eliminating in-line styles. Try to view source and notice there are no styles generated in the page level.
• Ordinary input text and multiline input text features, like demonstrated in FirstName, LastName, Address, City, Country fields.
• Display and edit format features, like demonstrated in Birth Date field.
• Other edit format feature, like demonstrated in First Name, Last Name, Phone, Extension fields.

This sample also demonstrate integration between WebInput and .NET Validator Control such as RequiredValidator and CompareValidator.

WebScheduler

This is the First Experience when you launch the WebScheduler sample.

This sample is designed to model a car-rental tracking scenario – demonstrating how WebScheduler performs in real-world enterprise application. Bound to over 3000 events, WebScheduler delivers responsive user experiences regardless of the data size.

The powerful JSON technology and smart client paging rendering significantly improved the overall WebScheduler performance to a new level not possible before. This sample combines both the ViewPortâ„¢ and EventPageSizeâ„¢ Client Paging rendering enabling WebScheduler to load in a flash.

Try to play around with the scheduler. Use the upper right vehicle locator for a quick jump. Click on the visual indicator on the resources area to populate the car information.

WebDesktop

This is the First Experience when you launch the WebDesktop sample.

This reference sample demonstrates the beautiful modern theme and many groundbreaking features in WebDesktopManager such as shortcuts and comprehensive window management. It also showcases the integration of various WebDesktop components to create full-fledge and immersive web applications, which include WebPaneManager, WebToolBar, WebTab, WebDialogBox, WebNotification and more. Try to double click each icon to see the WebDesktop components in action.

WebEssentials

This is the First Experience when you launch the WebEssentials sample.

This reference sample perfectly demonstrates WebEssentials component suite which comprised of 8 innovative controls, ranging from accordion, calendar, slider, to rating. WebEssentials enables you to create interactive and visually engaging modern web applications.

In this Online Resume scenario, WebAccordion is used as the main container, dividing this lengthy form into three sections. WebProgressBar is used to indicate the section completion process. The bar will be filled as users click on next. WebCalendar is used for date input and WebSlider for selecting a specific range. WebSlidingMenu is used on the right FAQ section. Click on a question and the answer is shown in a swift and smooth sliding animation.

Additionally, WebFlyPostBackManager is used to populate the section’s content on demand as users click the next button. In Section 1, WebFileUploader is used for image uploading, demonstrating its seamless AJAX upload experience.

WebTextEditor

This is the First Experience when you launch the WebTextEditor sample.

WebTextEditor is the industry’s first text editor that integrates intuitive writing tools, in-line spelling checker, and sophisticated uploading capability in a single interface – enabling you to rapidly build rich CMS application that delivers breakthrough, unique editing experience to your end users.

This sample demonstrates tight integration with Desktop Manager, Spell Checker, File Uploader and many UI components from WebDesktop to produce sophisticated, state-of-the-art CMS application that ultimately feels like a desktop word processing application.

WebTreeView

This is the First Experience when you launch the WebTreeView sample.

WebTreeView provides rich features that lets you easily create hierarchical data presentation. This powerful control incorporates numerous unique features such as:

• Data Binding
• Tristate checkbox
• Add, edit, and delete node
• Drag and Drop node(s)
• Keyboard Navigation
• Load On Demand
• Layout Manager and Structure Manager
• Auto Postback
• Flexible and highly customizable to meet your design needs
• client-side API – WebTreeView Designer

The above sample utilizes Enable Tristate CheckBox and Keyboard Navigation features.

Explore the Samples

We hope that you liked our new samples. To start taking advantage of our best WebUI release yet, feel free to download the new Premier Studio 2016 here. Happy exploring!

The web development trend recently revolves around providing great look and feel for the users of World Wide Web. Nowadays, we see lots of beautifully-designed web components along with the rise of CSS frameworks such as Bootstrap and even Material Design. These frameworks provide a way for developers to universally theme their web apps, making it consistent and beautiful for their users, across the entire site.

WebUI Studio. Undoubtedly, this is our best-selling suite ever. With impressive range of versatile, ready-to-use components, WebUI Studio has become the industry’s benchmark for suite of web components. More than just simple controls, WebUI components are designed to be functionality-rich, making developers’ lives much easier whilst bringing high-performance web components to their ASP.NET web applications.

Just, what if, you can incorporate these beautifully-designed elements to WebUI? At Intersoft Solutions, we take pride in our meticulously-designed user experiences. In our next biggest release ever, we’re going to bring a whole new look and feel of your web apps. Embrace the next evolution of web apps with WebUI. First-class web components meets first-class design.

Advanced Functionality Meets Beautiful Design

Before diving further, can you take a guess at some of these WebUI controls below?

From the top: WebCombo, WebInput with DateTime Picker, WebToolBar, and WebInput with Calculator Editor. Gorgeous, aren’t they? And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Goodbye old-fashioned looking web applications. It’s all thanks to the new technology we’re building for the next release, called Unified Theming.

Introducing WebUI Unified Theming

In the current release, you can already style WebUI controls through Layout Manager or via API at runtime. However, you need to do the styling on each WebUI control individually which could be tedious and repetitive for dozens of controls. This is going to change in WebUI vNext. Meet our brand-new Unified Theming framework.

The new Unified Theming allows you to apply consistent look and feel across your entire web applications just by using a single theme definition, similar to the ones found in popular CSS frameworks. Bigger buttons, more rounded buttons, gradient-styled buttons, flat buttons, anything. You now have total control over your app’s look and feel.

For example, you wish to change the corner radius of a popup panel. Just configure it once, and all of the WebUI controls in your application that use the popup element will automatically apply the same look and feel. To achieve this, it requires delicate, yet rigorous engineering to ensure all 30+ components work as expected using the new unified theming feature. Not only that, the combination of settings provided with each control makes it even tougher to achieve a consistent look with whatever settings you throw at it. And yes, there’s that cross-browser support as well.

When we designed the unified theme, we make sure that each control works in concert with native features and behaviors of the control itself. For example, here’s how it looks when the WebCallOut Bootstrap theme is applied with various types of settings. Here’s a shot with WebCallOut’s PointingPosition set to PointingBottomRight and PointingTopLeft.

And here’s another with PointingPosition set to PointingTopRight and PointingBottomLeft.

And the best of all, the Unified Theming framework leverages the industry’s most popular CSS extension language today, SASS. Written entirely in SCSS syntax, we’re able to streamline all styles across 30 components, creating variables and mixin that you can easily customize. This also means that you don’t have to learn a new language to customize the styles. Instead, you can use any SASS compatible editors such as Visual Studio 2015 or Sublime.

Bootstrap-themed WebUI

Along with the unified theming framework, we will also ship a new Bootstrap theme for the entire WebUI components. Let’s take a look at some of the WebUI controls restyled with Bootstrap theme.

WebButton

The rounded corners and vibrant pastel colors for the WebButtons are inspired from Bootstrap. All color schemes from mouse-over, default, disabled, and selected states are taken from Bootstrap.

WebProgressBar

These Bootstrap-themed WebProgressBar have arrived to captivate your users with vibrant, animated colors. The wide range of colors are also taken from Bootstrap. Also pay attention to the nicely shaped rounded corners of the progress bars.

WebTab

Each tab in WebTab is now more spacious with generous padding on all its sides. We’ve also added various Bootstrap styles such as Frame, Frameless, Pill and Line tabs. And to make everything look really great even in hi-res display, we’ve replaced all common icons with font-based icons, all comes pre-built in the WebUI Bootstrap theme.

Coming in 2015 R2

What you see in this post is just a small glimpse of what’s next to come. We can’t wait to show it live to you in the next 2015 R2 release. It’s going to be the biggest release ever! Refreshing the entire WebUI lineup, a major release for Crosslight, and the launch for ClientUI Reporting for WPF with charting will be the main dish for this release. Stay tuned for more exciting updates!

Cheers,
Nicholas Lie

The upcoming WebUI Studio 2011 volume release will include a host of new controls across all .NET development platforms, including Silverlight, WPF, and ASP.NET. In the past few months, I’ve been actively blogging about the upcoming new controls for the Silverlight and WPF development. In this post, I’ll unveil the new controls and key enhancements for ASP.NET platform that we will deliver in the 2011 volume release.

WebCombo 5 Features Client-side Binding and Web Services Support

The 2011 volume release will include a new version of our flagship ASP.NET WebCombo control. WebCombo 5 is now built upon the rock-solid Client Data Object Framework (CDOF), the same framework that powers WebGrid Enterprise 7 to provide rich client binding functionality. As the results, you can now use WebCombo to bind data to web services such as web services, WCF services, ADO data services, Azure or other cloud-based data services.

Client-side binding has a number of benefits such as producing smaller data output size between callbacks which greatly improve application’s performance in overall. Our test with various binding configuration show impressive results for client binding mode. See the following comparison chart.

Notice that the WebCombo with any client-binding mode will reduce the data output size by 40 – 50%.

Another great feature that is made possible with the client-binding in WebCombo 5 is the pure client data source support. This means that you can create your own data source and bind it in the client-side, in the similar fashion as in server-side.

Interestingly, the client data source also enables you to retrieve data from RESTful services and bind the results to the WebCombo directly in the client-side. And the beauty of the client-binding framework is that all WebCombo features continue to work as expected, including multiple columns, auto-complete entry mode, link settings, multiple selection, and more.

That said, we’ve created several interesting new examples that demonstrate the power of the client-side data source. One of the examples is to retrieve photos from the Flickr through jQuery, and bind the results to the WebCombo in the client-side. See the screenshot below.

Full WCF Service Support in WebGrid Enterprise 7

Due to high demands, WebUI Studio 2011 will also ship with an enhanced WebGrid control for ASP.NET which includes full support for WCF data service. The WebGrid LINQ data provider has been enhanced as well to fully support data query and contract serialization in the WCF service.

You can now elegantly retrieve the select arguments and other passed parameters in the WCF service, which was one of the unsupported features in the existing release. With the updated WebGrid LINQ data provider, querying data requires only a few line of code, see the code example below.

[OperationContract]
[ServiceKnownType(typeof(List))]
public object GetCustomers(WcfDataSourceSelectArguments selectArguments)
{
    NorthwindDataContext context = new NorthwindDataContext();
    context.DeferredLoadingEnabled = false;
    context.ObjectTrackingEnabled = false;

    WebGridDataProvider provider = 
                   new WebGridDataProvider(context.Customers);

    return provider.Select(selectArguments);
}

The client-binding, data services, LINQ providers and cloud support are significant milestones in our ASP.NET development roadmap. They are the precursor to the modern, RESTful web development that is server-pages agnostic.

I hope this post gives you some ideas on the new capabilities that you can add to your web applications using the client-binding and WCF support in the new WebCombo and WebGrid. As usual, comments and feedback are open.

Best,

Jimmy

Unlike Webform style that most developers used in ASP.NET web development, ASP.NET MVC  doesn’t use view state and server-based form. Put simply, it doesn’t support event life-cycle model because the interactions between the model, view and controller in MVC use a different life-cycle model. That said, ASP.NET server-side controls that rely on postback and state management will not be able to work in ASP.NET MVC application.

Luckily you can continue to use Intersoft WebUI Studio for ASP.NET lineups in your ASP.NET MVC application. Thanks to our advanced view state storage framework, you can set where the view state of a page should be stored. It supports server-side storage such as Session, PageCache or File Storage in addition to ASP.NET default client-side view state.

To proof our Webform components in ASP.NET MVC project, I create a new MVC project, open the default page and then add some databound controls into the page such as WebGrid and WebCombo. To see how it looks like in Visual Studio, please refer to the screenshot below.

Using WebUI Studio components in ASP.NET MVC project

Another key ingredient to enable Webform controls to run flawlessly in ASP.NET MVC is by adding <form runat=”server”> tag in the beginning of the view page. All built-in page features and nice AJAX operations will then continue to work as expected. To proof it, I enabled some built-in features in WebGrid that trigger AJAX such as grouping, sorting, filtering and paging.

Run the page in browser and we can see that both WebGrid and WebCombo show up as expected. Next, try to interact with the controls such as by clicking on the column header, drag the slider to navigate between pages, or type some keyword into the WebCombo. All worked perfectly as shown in the following.

WebUI Studio works flawlessly in ASP.NET MVC application

Although the above experiment is pretty straightforward and simple, it does show the basic proof-of-concept of using Webform components such as WebUI Studio ASP.NET lineups in MVC page. This also means that you no longer have to worry on your existing Webform investment and to decide which application model that you prefer to develop on. I’ll be surely checking out more advanced scenarios based on your feedback and request.

The latest WebUI Studio continues to support growing Microsoft platform adoption such as ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight, Sharepoint 2007, and more — as well as cutting-edge technologies such as client binding, “cloud” support, and other Web 2.0 trends. Please visit http://www.intersoftpt.com/2009 to learn more.

All the best,
Jimmy.

Check the updated tutorial videos for WebDesktop.NET and WebCombo.NET from the following link respectively:

WebDesktop
http://support.intersoftpt.com/default.aspx?pid=93&type=Videos

WebCombo
http://support.intersoftpt.com/default.aspx?pid=109&type=Videos

Please feel free to submit any feedback or request for future tutorial videos in this post. Maybe we can go further to create a more advanced videos for intermediate users. Thanks.

For instance, there are several videos demo in WebGrid such as how easy to display data using smart tag, then create the DataSource and retrieve the data structure, and finally run to your browser. This task can be quickly done without having to write any code.

All these videos are now available in Intersoft Solutions – Support Center.

Following are the videos’ URL of each component:

• ISDataSource
  http://support.intersoftpt.com/default.aspx?pid=125&type=Videos
• WebGrid
  http://support.intersoftpt.com/default.aspx?pid=101&type=Videos
• WebCombo
  http://support.intersoftpt.com/default.aspx?pid=109&type=Videos
• WebInput
  http://support.intersoftpt.com/default.aspx?pid=117&type=Videos
• WebDesktop
  http://support.intersoftpt.com/default.aspx?pid=93&type=Videos

These are all videos we can produce so far. However, we will still enhance and add more tutorial videos for each component.

Therefore, if you guys have any feedback or any request for the future tutorial videos, please feel free to give a comment on this post. Thank you.

Ok let’s just go to the points. In the following, you can find the list of top 5 cool things that you won’t want to miss in our 2007 R1 release.

1. Enable SmartWebResources and deploy with confidence.
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   We have received tremendous praises from developers that they loved this feature very much. Why? This feature saved their valuable time by enabling them to perform deployment with just xcopy — no more scripts and images folder copying or IIS headaches. Unbelievable, but true!
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   Here are some useful links to get you started with SmartWebResources:
   How-to: Configure SmartWebResources in a web application
   Features and benefits introduced by SmartWebResourcesâ„¢
   How does SmartWebResourcesâ„¢ work
    
2. Loved our new UI and styles? Then try our new DefaultStyle.
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   DefaultStyle is a new feature in WebGrid, WebCombo and WebInput. It enables these components to use modern UI styles automatically – without the need to load layout. You can enable them by simply setting a property.
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   Here are some useful links to get you started with DefaultStyle:
   How-to: Enable Default Style for existing instance of WebGrid
   Cleaner and reduced page output through built-in default style
   UseDefaultStyle property (server-side reference)
    
3. Data binding made easy with our new-born ISDataSource control.
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   It’s inevitable that many developers missed the DataSet binding feature in VS2005 since Microsoft decided to introduce datasource control in ASP.NET 2 and hence remove the ability to bind to DataSet in designtime. While the new datasource control concept is better (since it offers higher reusability and easier implementation through declarative markup), ASP.NET Team did not manage to come up with multi-table datasource control and hence causing databinding a bit more complex in VS2005.
   Â
   ISDataSource brings back the good old days DataSet databinding ability to VS2005 in the form of datasource control. So you got the best of both worlds — ability to bind to DataSet and still have the power and benefits of datasource control.
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   Here are some useful links to get you started with ISDataSource:
   Walkthrough: Binding to data using ISDataSource.NET
   ISDataSource Architecture
   Walkthrough: Binding to Hierarchical data using ISDataSource.NET
    
4. Want to keep important information visible in your Grid view? Then freeze it.
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   Column freezing is always the most wanted feature in every data presentation application. Our experiences with column freezing has started since the DOS era where we used Clipper to build column freezing Grid. We absolutely understand how users expect the column freezing behavior in today’s Web era. The implementation is truly complicated, but we have made it very easy for you to enable it. With some property changes, you can now enjoy column freezing using WebGrid.NET Enterprise 5.0.
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   Here are some useful links to get you started with Column Freezing feature:
   How-to: Enable column freezing and configure initial settings
   How-to: Allow user to freeze/unfreeze at runtime
   Column Freezing Overview
   LiveFreezeâ„¢ behaviors and other notes
    
5. Keep your web user interface stylish with our pixel-perfect Office 2007 styles for WebDesktop components.
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   Many vendors claimed that they supported Office 2007 styles, and yet many developers told us that they were not satisfied with the components they were using before, because the Office 2007 styles that the other vendors provided are still far away from the real Office 2007 styles.
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   Our Office 2007 UI and styles are different. We have the closest styles and UI implementation to the real Office 2007 styles, because we take care on every single pixel of the appearance — even the smallest factors like padding, margin and border width. The good news is our 2007 styles rendered perfectly and consistently in both IE and Mozilla browsers.
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   Here are some useful links to get you started with our new Office 2007 styles:
   WebDesktopManager Office 2007 Style
   The complete WebUI Studio.NET® 2007 components in the fashion of Office 2007 Style
   WebTab Office 2007 Style
   Using Component Designer 2.0 to apply predefined style

Have a nice day and happy developing with WebUI Studio.NET 2007 R1! Enjoy!