Can you describe your business?
aerobis|TrainSocial is an application that makes it easy to record, plan and analyze your sport activities. It was born out of my own need to have such a tool for my own training. Using multi-purpose software like Excel is great but I wanted to have something a little more sophisticated which can also be of use for other athletes and active people without the need to install anything locally. The software takes a very different approach when compared to other web-offerings as it completely plugs in into existing social networks. So aerobis|TrainSocial did not re-invent the wheel by building another monolithic community but leverages successful communities instead. No need to register or even login to the service. Just add the app in your favorite community and you are instantly ready to plan, discover sport routes or log and analyze your training. aerobis|TrainSocial is already up and running on myspace.com, facebook.com, meinsport.de and sportscheck.com. You can learn more about aerobis at http://www.aerobis.com.
Why did you choose ASP.NET 2.0?
After coming from a more Java-oriented background, I started working for a .NET based customer in 2006. ASP.NET quickly grew on me because the integrated development experience in conjunction with IIS and VisualStudio. So when I started aerobis as a side-project it was a natural choice to go with ASP.NET.
How did ASP.NET AJAX help you improve your user experience?
Nearly all of the backend-communication is done asynchronously using AJAX. At one time I had all the UI rendered with ExtJS and also used ExtJS async capabilities to talk to the backend web services. To reduce loading and response times I then switched to Telerik web components which also run on ASP.NET AJAX and offer a deep integration with the whole ASP.NET development experience as well as a great overall product quality. I was able to reduce loading times as well as deliver new features more easily because I was now using ASP.NET AJAX all the way and did not need to swap between using 2 different JavaScript frameworks.
What ASP.NET AJAX features did you take advantage of?
Apart from UpdatePanels, I used the whole ASP.NET AJAX API for DOM manipulation, asynchronous web service calls and dynamic event handling.
What other Microsoft technologies does your site use?
aerobis uses Microsoft´s sponsored Open Source project SubSonic which is probably the most easy to use ORM/Productivity tool when it comes to database abstraction. It also heavily relies on Virtual Earth and employs a custom pin-clustering mechanism. It clusters pins locations on the server and renders it on the client either as a single pin or multiple pins with a page-able pin-information popup.