Designing Web-based User Interfaces - ASP.NET versus IntraWeb
Presented by Craig Murphy of CraigMurphy.com

The WYSIWYG paradigm that we use to design our desktop user interfaces has long been the envy of those developers building web-based user interfaces.

The advent of Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) promoted the continued development of web applications, however ASP did little to help tackle the entanglement of the code required to handle the user interface. Microsoft's key design goal for ASP's successor was to make designing and building web applications as easy as it is to design and build traditional desktop applications. ASP.NET is that successor - it offers a near WYSIWYG user interface design environment, making it possible to "see" a web-based user-interface without the need for a web browser.

Third parties, such as AtoZSoftware, stepped in and managed to produce viable mechanisms that give developers a means of designing web user interfaces using traditional tried and tested form designers. AtoZSoftware built IntraWeb for use with Borland Delphi - IntraWeb boasts a drag'n'drop user interface design environment for web-based user interfaces. IntraWeb has proven so successful, Borland bought the technology and it is now an integral part of the Delphi IDE.

Fundamentally, both ASP.NET and IntraWeb make designing web-based user interfaces significantly easier, thus letting developers concentrate on the task of "solving the real problem" rather than dealing with user interface spaghetti.

In this 60 minute session, Craig compared and contrasted Microsoft's ASP.NET and Borland's IntraWeb as a means of creating web applications.

Demonstrations were provided using Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and Borland Delphi.

The download zip file contains presentation slides, code samples and supplementary files required to replicate the code demos.