Can you describe your business?
foonance.com was developed by a group of freelance asp.net developers, based out of South Africa, who all share a passion for Web 2.0 and Microsoft ASP.NET and Ajax technologies. We look to build Web 2.0 brands which add real value using the most current technologies available. Foonance.com is 1 of 4 brands currently being developed by our team.
Why did you choose ASP.NET 2.0?
foonance.com was originally developed using ASP.net 1.1 and a "home baked" Ajax library. In April 2007, when work began on the version 1.0 release, we made the decision to redevelop the entire site using ASP.net 2.0. There were some fundamental reasons for this:
- We wanted to use ASP.NET AJAX to improve the interface
- A rapidly increasing user base means we want to easily scale to a 64bit server. With ASP.NET 2.0 being 64bit enabled it was perfect.
- Managing financial data also required us to rethink the security model, ASP.NET 2.0 offered solutions out of the box.
How did ASP.NET AJAX help you improve your user experience?
ASP.NET AJAX allows us to provide our users with a rich user experience in an application that responds in milliseconds to user requests and provides users with instantaneous feed back through progress indicators, a reduced number of page post backs as well as an asynchronous programming model which keeps the application responsive even over a very slow internet connection.
What ASP.NET AJAX features did you take advantage of?
Foonance.com was developed with a complete service layer which abstracts away a lot of the complexity and forms an API through which developers can integrate with. One of the ASP.NET AJAX features allows us to communicate requests from the client (JavaScript) directly to Web Methods exposed by the service layer. Apart from this we used the following features of the ASP.NET AJAX and AJAX Control Toolkit:
- Update Progress
- Script Manager and Script Manager Proxy
- Rounded Corners Extender
- Modal Popup Extender
- Auto Complete Extender
- Tab Container
What was the ASP.NET AJAX development experience like?
The beauty of working with any technology that comes from Microsoft is the immense amount of online resources available, as well as direct access to the people responsible for developing and maintaining the technologies through their blogs. ASP.NET AJAX also works seamlessly from within the Visual Studio IDE and allows you to add "WOW" functionality in minutes, in some cases without even writing a line of code.
What other Microsoft technologies does your site use?
Foonance.com is hosted on a Windows Server 2003 server using IIS 6.0. It uses a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database. The site was developed using Visual Studio 2005, C# and ADO.NET.
Anything else you want to add?
Everyone involved with foonance.com has a passion for new technologies and Web 2.0. Most of us have had exposure to Rails and Java development as well but keep coming back to ASP.NET for development projects running in the production environment. What’s great about Microsoft is that not only do they innovate with their tools and technologies but they keep a close eye on what the community demands as well as good innovations coming from the open source community.