Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Funding Company Revamps Web Application for Scalability and Faster Performance
Overview
Country or Region:New Zealand
Industry: Financial services
Customer Profile
Bexhill Funding Group, based in Wellington, New Zealand, is a financial services and premium funding provider with clients worldwide.
Business Situation
Bexhill wanted to ensure that its Premium Funding Management System could meet the challenges of changing government regulations and expanding data stores to better serve customers.
Solution
Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Intergen used Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 to transform Bexhill's system into a more responsive, forward-looking product for Bexhill’s customers.
Benefits
Improved reporting performance: 40 percent
Improved developer productivity
Support for service-oriented architecture / “Because of [Microsoft] ASP.NET 2.0 features like Master Pages, coding before and after ASP.NET 2.0 is really… night and day. Our developers basically don’t want to code with anything else.”
Wayne Forgesson, Director, Business Development, Intergen
Bexhill Funding Group, a New Zealand-based financial services company, is committed to serving customers worldwide through its Web-based financial and accounting application. With ever-expanding client data, customers experienced slower query responses on the classic ASP site. In addition, Bexhill need to accommodate changing regulations and prepare for future growth. Bexhill turned to Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Intergen for assistance. Intergen redesigned the application and developed the new version by using the beta edition of Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 and Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 technologies. In less than six months, Intergen developers delivered a solution that improves performance by 40 percent and positions Bexhill for flexible growth.
Situation
Developer HighlightsDesign time / Six weeks
Development time / Four months
Number of Developers / 7
Language / C#
Key tools / Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0
Bexhill Funding Group, an international financial services company based in Wellington, New Zealand, provides structures to insurance brokers for funding premiums. The Bexhill Premium Funding Management System, a line-of-business financial and accounting application, is Bexhill’s client-facing application for providing services. While the ASP-based version of the application worked well, necessary changes to functionality had been updated over the years. Finally, as Jeremy Boyd, Lead Developer at Intergen explains, “The Funding Management System had become unwieldy. Pieces of the system didn’t work as intended because the features had been modified without the opportunity for a proper analysis and design.”
Bexhill initiated a redesign of the system to meet two challenges:
New government compliance regulations, which the old system could not accommodate.
Slowed reporting and query-response performance caused by growth in clients and in the size of client data. Some client databases were as large as 5 gigabytes (GB), containing tables with 10 million rows. As a result, certain reports could take 70 seconds to complete.
Bexhill chose long-time partner Intergen, a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner in New Zealand, to upgrade its Funding Management System.
Solution
At Intergen, seven developers used the beta edition of the Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 development system to redesign the new system in six weeks. They used Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0, a set of technologies in the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 for building Web applications and Web services. By doing so, Intergen re-created the Funding Management System as a Web-based, three-tier application (for the user interface, see Figure 1) in only four months. The system can run on a variable number of databases and database servers and, so, can accommodate various sizes of customer databases and future growth.
The Intergen development team found that specific features in the Microsoft Visual C#® 2.0 development tool, the Microsoft Visual Studio® development system, and Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 facilitate faster and easier
development and help produce a more error-free product:
ASP.NET Master Pages help ensure consistency of the design; these Master Pages saved development time.
New controls in ASP.NET supply advanced functionality, such as GridView. The controls saved developers from needing to write code that they had to write in an earlier version. Simplifying such user interface (UI) tasks allowed developers to focus more time on delivering the core functionality of the system.
Visual C# generics and partial classes are two new capabilities of Visual C# 2.0 that help realize even greater productivity around code generation. Developers could generate the basis of the product from the design model and focus on delivering the business-value code.
The variable-renaming functionality in Visual C# checks the code for all uses of a variable when a developer renames the variable, and fixes any references to the variable and other items in the code that could be broken by the change of the variable’s name. “You just right-click and rename the variable,” says Boyd, “and it’s done. You don’t have to worry about whether you might have forgotten to change it somewhere else. That’s a huge benefit; it just saves so much time.”
Wayne Forgesson, Director, Business Development at Intergen, says, “Because of ASP.NET 2.0 features like Master Pages, coding before ASP.NET 2.0 and after is really the difference between night and day. Our developers basically don’t want to code with anything else.”
Benefits
Both Bexhill and Intergen enjoy benefits from this project: Bexhill with performance gains and flexibility; Intergen with greater developer productivity due to an improved development environment and better tools.
Paul Reiher, General Manager at Bexhill, is focused on customer satisfaction. Paul says, “Not only can the Funding Management System’s redesign grow with Bexhill and change in response to conditions, but it gives our customers the confidence in our product that comes with instant response.”
Improved Reporting Performance by 40 Percent
The move to Visual Studio 2005 with the Visual C# programming language and the ASP.NET 2.0 technologies contributed significantly to the Web page and reporting performance gains.
Because Visual C# is a compiled programming language rather than a language that builds Web pages with scripts,
the time required to interpret script on the server is reduced each time a client requests a page.
Boyd notes, “The benefits of moving to ASP.NET 2.0 were immediate—we were able to introduce greater performance, reliability, and scalability to the product.”
The scale of performance improvements increases with the size of the client. The redesigned system shows significant improvements in speed, as demonstrated in Figure 2.
“The transition to ASP.NET [2.0] provides a massive boost to a solution’s performance, especially around how efficiently Web pages are delivered,” Boyd adds.
Increased Developer Productivity
Boyd says that new features—for example, support for generics and Master Pages—that are part of Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 have allowed Intergen to enrich the company’s development framework and further increase developer productivity.
“Master Pages make the creation of consistently laid out Web pages more efficient. They really helped push through the HTML part of the build process quickly,” says Boyd. “Also, new Visual Studio 2005 Team System tools, such as unit testing and code coverage, better align with our existing build processes, so they easily integrate with our existing process. This is also true for the new [Microsoft] MSBuild Tool itself.”
Support for Service-Oriented Architecture
One major benefit that Intergen developers appreciate about the combination of Visual Studio, Microsoft .NET Framework, and ASP.NET is the support for service-oriented architecture (SOA). Bexhill now has an adaptive infrastructure that can respond to current business initiatives and one that will more efficiently manage and support future growth.
Boyd says, “Visual Studio 2005 and Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 give users a more scalable and adaptable development toolset. The features and capabilities absolutely reflect where we predict the future of software development is going, and the result is a reduction of maintenance and delivery effort being realized by our customers.”
Microsoft Visual Studio .NET
Microsoft Visual Studio .NET is the rapid application development (RAD) tool for building next-generation Web applications and XML Web services. Visual Studio .NET empowers developers to rapidly design broad-reach Web applications for any device and any platform. In addition, Visual Studio .NET is fully integrated with the Microsoft .NET Framework, providing support for multiple programming languages and automatically handling many common programming tasks, freeing developers to rapidly create Web applications using their language of choice.
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Microsoft .NET Framework
The Microsoft .NET Framework is an integral Windows® component for building and running the next generation of applications and XML Web services.
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