What is Razor?

Razor is a development tool and Web control for creating and deploying rich user interfaces in a Web browser. It solves the developers dilemma of how to preserve all the capabilities users know and love in Windows apps while delivering a think UI that has all the administrative advantages of Web-based applications.

Razor has two main parts: the Razor Developer’s Studio and the Razor Run-Time. The Developer’s Studio is a forms-driven IDE that allows developers or designers to quickly create screens with the same controls and options as Windows. Those forms are compiled into secure Razor forms and streamed down to the desktop.

The Run-Time Environment is a plug-in for Internet Explorer that renders the Razor forms. A secure and signed control, it is downloaded to the client on the first use of a page with Razor content.

Who should use Razor?

There are two main audiences for Razor:
     • Developers charged with creating a thin UI for new or existing applications
       that requires the same usability and richness as Windows applications.
     • Webmasters and Web site developers who need to offer powerful data
       manipulation tools for customer portals or Intranets.

Both groups face similar challenges of building rich content that is easy to maintain and will run under many different levels of bandwidth. Razor is the only tool that can deliver on the promise of Web-based apps that have a lower administration cost and yet are still highly useable.

What is the client footprint of Razor?

The Razor run-time is small (<120K) control that is downloaded on time to the client. The implementation is analogous to that used by the Flash or QuickTime players. Razor forms are typically between 10K to 20K in size.

What web servers does Razor support?

Razor is Web server agnostic so it will work with everything from Microsoft’s IIS Server under Windows to Apache under Linux.

I already have Visual InterDev or Visual Studio.NET. Will Razor coexist with those tools?

Razor can ‘plug in’ to these tools and work in conjunction with your current IDE, allowing you to create rich user interfaces in Razor and still have the quick access to the rest of your code.

Can’t I do everything that Razor does through scripting?

While it is possible to do some of the things that Razor does by creating JavaScript or VBScript, Razor still gives the developer much more control and many more options over scripting:

Function	Scripting	Razor
UI code and settings easy to maintain and change?	NO	YES
For mask controls, works like Windows equivalents.	NO	YES
User can size columns in a ListView at runtime.	NO	YES
Dynamically populate ListView and combo boxes at runtime.	NO	YES
Support for real numeric controls like the Windows equivalents.	NO	YES
Update content dynamically without refreshing the page.	NO	YES

One of the biggest benefits of Razor is its maintainability. Writing huge amounts of JavaScript or VBScript is a throwback to the days when we didn’t have visual UI design tools, when all UI was hand-coded. Defects are hard to find and fix and the learning curve for a new developer is steep. There’s also nothing RAD about developing Web UIs with scripting and DHTML. If you want a rich UI that is easy to update and quick to develop, you need Razor.

Can’t I do everything that Razor does through ActiveX controls?

It is possible to replicate Razor’s rich functionality using ActiveX controls or other Windows binaries on a Web page. The drawbacks, of course, are the massive footprints of such an implementation and the potential security problems with signing and registering each control. Razor delivers all of this power in a single, lightweight, container object, one that is highly safe and needs only to be installed one time.

What about security?

Razor’s Run-Time Environment is a single, signed control. All of the UI code for Razor forms executes in this sandbox and access to the system resources is configurable by the network administrator.