We're evaluating DevForce to develop a web-based point-of-sale, line-of-business application from scratch.  We need it to work on all the major browsers, and be HTML based.  It will not use Silverlight or WPF.

In our application, many of the pages follow a CUD model: search for a record, edit that record, save the record.  Or add a new record and save it.  We're looking for a tool/framework that makes creating these pages, along with the data access code, simple.

We've looking for a tool that will speed the development of the user interface, especially page layout (positioning the fields exactly where we want them) and validation of fields.  We'd like to develop validation logic in the business layer and have the UI automatically respect it. 

We'd also like to have look up fields.  For example, the user must select a customer for a form.  They click a look up button and dialog box pops up with a list of customers.  They can then filter the list based on criteria entered directly, such as country, or state.  Finally, they click on a customer name and it's inserted back into the page.

We've looked at Microsoft MVC 3 with EF4 and are impressed.  However, the problem is that it takes a long time to develop the actual UI, since you have to develop the HTML/CSS/Jquery code by hand (for the most part)

The universal client would seem to meet our needs, but I can't find much in the tutorials relating to its use.

Is there a sample project for a complete business application, like a CMS system, that uses the universal client? The BigShelf seems closest to what we're looking for, but it appears to be out of date.

Are there any tutorials for building a complete application, from start to finish?  Something with a number of real-world pages, that load and save data with validation?  We're interested in the speed of creating the user-interface.