Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
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 everexpanding 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.
Developer Highlights
Design time
Six weeks
Development
time
Four months
Number of
Developers
7
Language
C#
Key tools
Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0
Situation
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 clientfacing 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
Figure 1. Bexhill Premium Funding
Management System user
interface
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, threetier 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
“The transition to
ASP.NET [2.0] provides
a massive boost to a
solution’s performance,
especially around how
efficiently Web pages
are delivered.”
Jeremy Boyd, Lead Developer, Intergen
Figure 2. Performance
improvements results
by size of client
development and help produce a more errorfree 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
Mid-Size Client
Online Trial
Balance
report
Before redesign
Audit Trail
report
Before redesign
Current
Agreements
report
Before redesign
After redesign
After redesign
After redesign
Enterprise Client
11 seconds
3 seconds
22 seconds
6 seconds
32 seconds
7 seconds
Before redesign
After redesign
63 seconds
8 seconds
Before redesign
43 seconds
After redesign
13 seconds
Before redesign
70 seconds
After redesign
16 seconds
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.
“Visual Studio 2005 and
Microsoft .NET
Framework
2.0…absolutely reflect
where…software
development is going,
…[reducing the]
maintenance and
delivery effort being
realized by our
customers.”
Jeremy Boyd, Lead Developer, Intergen
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.”
For More Information
Microsoft Visual Studio .NET
Microsoft .NET Framework
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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.
The Microsoft .NET Framework is an integral
Windows® component for building and
running the next generation of applications
and XML Web services.
For more information about
Intergen, Ltd., call (64) (4) 472-2021
or visit the Web site at:
www.intergen.co.nz
For more information about Bexhill
Funding Group, Ltd., call (64) (4)
471-0086 or visit the Web site at:
www.bexhillfunding.com
For more information about Visual Studio
.NET, go to:
msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio
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Software and Services
Hardware
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
 Technologies
− Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0
− Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0
− Microsoft Visual C# 2.0


© 2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case
study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO
WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Microsoft, Visual C#, Visual Studio, the Visual Studio logo, and
Windows are either registered trademarks or trademarks of
Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other
countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective
owners.
Document published July 2005
For more information about the .NET
Framework, go to:
msdn.microsoft.com/netframework
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