Israeli developer Gizmox has announced that its flagship product Visual WebGui now enables customers to build and deploy applications for Microsoft’s cloud computing environment, Windows Azure.

Gizmox's Visual WebGui is a tool for building rich AJAX or Microsoft Silverlight user interfaces on top of the .NET framework for web applications using control, theme and form designers. The software has been gaining rapid traction, particularly in Europe where major players like SAP, IBM and Visa have been using it to develop web apps, partly because the tool feels familiar to Visual Basic and C# programmers.

Visual WebGui now creates native applications with Windows Azure that can run on the cloud and enables the migration of on-premises line-of-business applications to the cloud without a rewrite. Gizmox says that Visual WebGui applications running on Windows Azure look, feel, and behave like their on-premises counterparts. 

Michael Maggs, senior director of partner strategy & business development for Microsoft Windows Azure says: "We see a tremendous value in working together with Gizmox on the Visual WebGui offering for Windows Azure customers. Enabling line-of-business applications for customers is a strategic direction for us, and is well aligned with the Windows Azure long-term strategy."

Another reason for Visual WebGui's popularity seems to be that it provides serious levels of in-built security provided by what it calls its "empty client" model. Gizmox is so confident in its product’s security that it launched a contest in November, 2008, offering $10,000 to anyone who could hack it.  To this day, the offer still remains on the table.