Guy Peled pointed me today to Visual WebGui, a new approach for developing AJAX applications he created that lets you develop in WinForms like server side API to create a full AJAX enabled application. WebGui is not just another framework but rather a different approach more specific to building highly complex applications like outlook web access and less for the web 2.0 direction.

WinForms Over Web (the WOW model) is a revolutionary development & deployment platform made possible by a unique, patented, server based RIA paradigm. The WOW model enables development of rich web applications with WinForms functionality and interactivity using Visual Studio's rich design, coding and debugging features. The technology extends the .NET object model to incorporate AJAX aware WinForms GUI components that are delivered to the browser via Visual WebGui's Empty Client. Visual WebGui's Empty Client approach is similar to Server Based Computing (SBC) models meaning the AJAX client only handles the rendering of the viewable GUI while the server handles the rest. The result is an extremely secure web application with a bandwidth footprint only 1/100th of comparable AJAX/RIA solutions.