Review: CyberSpire WebDialogs

CyberSpire WebDialogs, $189
CyberSpire LLC
https://www.cyberspire.com/default.aspx

When you move from doing desktop application development to doing Web application development, even using as rich an environment as ASP.NET, you'll run into some limitations. One of these is the lack of modal dialog boxes. Those of us who are more comfortable on the desktop are used to being able to put up information or questions for the user with some assurance that the message will be responded to before proceeding with the application - and not blocked by a popup blocker, or buried by another window before it's seen. Such things are hard to accomplish in Web forms, though you can get some rudimentary dialog boxes with JavaScript.

CyberSpire's WebDialogs product is almost a slick solution to this problem. It does in fact allow ASP.NET applications to display modal dialog boxes with a variety of icons and buttons. You can get message boxes, input boxes, or modal dialogs with listboxes or combo boxes easily; it only takes dropping a control on your ASP.NET form, setting a few properties, and calling the control's Open() method in your code. You can even design your own custom modal dialog boxes as HTML and use the WebDialogs toolkit to display them. Modal dialog boxes can pass results back in the form of response codes, just like native Windows message boxes or input boxes. While a WebDialog is open, it steals the focus from the underlying Web form and insists on being on top.

So where does the "almost" come into it? This is an Internet Explorer only product (they don't make any secret of that; it's mentioned on the first screen of their help file). Try to open a WebDialog in Firefox and nothing happens. That makes this pretty well unsuitable for any application that needs to be deployed on the open Internet, unless you want to go through the bother of sensing the user's browser and using different application logic depending on which browser they're using (and even there you have potential trouble due to spoofed user agent strings). If you're working on an intranet in an organization that's standardized on IE, and you're sure that isn't going to change, then this functionality is worth investigating.

The product worked as advertised in my testing with IE, though there were some rough edges on the install: I told it to install to the E: drive rather than the standard C:, and it ended up littering parts of itself on both drives. It also managed to not properly set up the supplied examples as Web applications on my IIS server, so they wouldn't run directly after the install. If you just want to try it out, you can play with WebDialogs online at the CyberSpire site, or you can download a trial version to your own PC.

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Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.

Published September 5, 2005