Can you describe your business?
Fuelstart.com is a web site which is meant to make it easier for home owners to find energy companies and compare their prices. Energy companies selling fuel such as oil, pellets, coal, propane, bio fuels, etc can post their company information on our site free. Homeowners have the ability to post energy prices they find through our price report forum. We also have a set of forums where people can discuss a wide range of topics dealing with energy. Other tools on the site include a home energy cost calculator, pellet/pellet stove manufacturer directories and coal/coal stove manufacturer directories.
Why did you choose ASP.NET 2.0?
ASP.NET 2.0 provided me with the framework to develop fuelstart.com quickly with a rich set of features. Out of the box ASP.NET 2.0 has everything I needed to build a stable, secure and most importantly scalable site. The built in caching features allows us to serve up pages from the cache, only refreshing when the underlying data changes. Also with its integration with AJAX I was able to build a site with a better user experience with extremely quick response.
How did ASP.NET AJAX help you improve your user experience?
AJAX brings web applications to a new level of user experience. Getting rid of full page post backs and being able to asynchronously load parts of a page is incredible. Bringing the client application feel to the web is a great step forward in the web application experience.
What ASP.NET AJAX features did you take advantage of?
The feature we used most was a simple UpdatePanel. The UpdatePanel makes it incredibly easy to create a more seamless user experience. I also used webservices with the scriptmanager to allow server side processing through javascript. On the client side we used the Ajax Toolkit for things like modal pop ups, calendars, etc.
What was the ASP.NET AJAX development experience like?
A lot easier than I thought it would be. When you can integrate AJAX into your website with just a few lines of code and a built in control like the UpdatePanel it doesn’t get much easier.
What other Microsoft technologies does your site use?
We use a Sql Server 2000 database along with ASP.NET 2.0 and AJAX.