Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
Customer Solution Case Study
Real Estate Service Company Switches to
.NET, Cuts Two Months from Development
Schedule
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Professional Services—Real
Estate Industry
Customer Profile
Based in Richmond, Virginia, LandAmerica
Lender Services provides a full range of
real estate transaction services to
mortgage lenders in the United States.
Business Situation
The Java-based tax and flood zone
certification application that LandAmerica
built in 1999 was dated and costly to
maintain. The organization wanted to lower
costs and ensure reliability and customer
satisfaction.
Solution
LandAmerica decided to rewrite its tax and
flood zone certification application using
Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 and
Microsoft Visual C#®.
Benefits
 60 percent reduction in development
costs
 20 percent smaller development group
 Availability of well-qualified developers
 Extensibility of application
 Increased application performance and
reliability
“With Microsoft Visual Studio, the cost to develop our
new application—with enhanced capabilities … and
better security—was significantly less than the cost of
developing the original Java-based application.”
Alan Brauer, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer, LandAmerica Lender
Services/Tax and Flood
By 2005, the six-year-old Java-based application that LandAmerica
had developed to provide tax information and flood zone
certification to some 1,400 mortgage lenders was becoming costly
and difficult to maintain. To improve reliability and reduce costs,
LandAmerica managers decided to rewrite the application—this
time using the Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 development system
and the Microsoft Visual C#® development tool. Four LandAmerica
developers delivered the new application in just seven months—two
months ahead of schedule. The new Microsoft Windows®-based
application is faster, more reliable, easier to extend with new
functionality, and less expensive to maintain than the UNIX/Java
solution that LandAmerica had been using.
Situation
Is the property that you intend to purchase
in a flood zone? The company holding your
mortgage wants to know, and Richmond,
Virginia–based LandAmerica can provide a
definitive answer. LandAmerica offers an
extranet-based real estate service application
with a tool that mortgage lenders use to
determine whether a property lies in a flood
hazard area.
“Visual Studio 2005 is
faster than previous
versions, and it also has
features that simply
were not there in
previous versions.”
Bill Mattox, Supervisor of Web Development,
LandAmerica Lender Services/Tax and Flood
The lender can access the extranet
application through a browser and enter the
address of the property under consideration
into the LandAmerica flood certification
system. The system then interacts with a
mainframe-based application that can
correlate addresses with a database of
information about flood hazard areas and
determine whether the location is vulnerable
or not. The mainframe then provides the
flood certification system with a response
that enables it to certify the flood zone status
of the property. For nearly 24,000 users
associated with some 1,400 lenders around
the country, the LandAmerica extranet
application has made it easy to obtain the
flood certification records that they need to
process a mortgage loan application quickly.
Additionally, the LandAmerica extranet
application provides a range of tax service
tools for lending institutions. For example,
lenders can use one tax tool to see all the
property taxes owed to local and state
authorities. The tool tells the lenders how
much is due to each tax authority at different
times, and the lenders can withdraw the
money from mortgagees’ escrow accounts
in a timely fashion.
But, by early 2005, LandAmerica officials
faced a challenge. The tax and flood zone
certification application—originally built using
Java, UNIX, BEA WebLogic, and an Oracle
database—had grown fragile. Despite
application changes and system updates,
the application’s core functionality had
become dated.
The six-year-old application was causing
financial concerns as well. The cost of
maintaining the UNIX-based hardware was
high, as was the cost of licensing the Oracle
database on which the application relied.
Change management and application
security were also issues. The application
had been built long before its developers
could envision the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of
2002, which placed significant security and
reporting requirements on publicly held
companies in the United States, so those
levels of security and change management
accountability had not been built into the
application. With Sarbanes-Oxley in force,
LandAmerica officials wanted to be sure that
the application met all compliance
requirements.
All these concerns prompted LandAmerica
officials to decide on a complete rewrite of
the tax and flood zone certification
application. Their goal was a more secure,
reliable application that could easily be
extended and enhanced with new
functionality quickly and without compromise.
Solution
Prior to the decision to rewrite the tax and
flood zone certification application, IT officials
at LandAmerica had decided on a new
strategic direction for technology and
application development. “By 2004, we were
convinced that we needed to change our
technical strategic direction to Microsoft®
.NET,” says Alan Brauer, Executive Vice
President and Chief Information Officer of
LandAmerica Lender Services/Tax and Flood.
“We needed an environment that would be
flexible and adaptable, and enable us to bring
out new products and services quickly. It had
to be scalable yet less costly to maintain than
the environment we had been using.”
Microsoft .NET connection software connects
a range of personal and business
technologies, enabling access to important
information, whenever and wherever it is
needed. Built on Web service standards, .NET
enables both new and existing applications to
connect with software and services across
platforms, applications, and programming
languages.
“We began our rewrite in
early 2005 and
anticipated a ninemonth development
period—and within
seven months, [the Web
development] group had
the whole application
built.”
Alan Brauer, Executive Vice President and
Chief Information Officer, LandAmerica
Lender Services/Tax and Flood
As the premier environment for .NET-based
applications, the Microsoft Visual Studio®
development system enables developers to
create secure, scalable applications and Web
services faster than ever before—so it was not
surprising to LandAmerica officials when its
group of four developers projected that it
could deliver a completely rewritten tax and
flood zone certification application—with
greater functionality, more flexibility, greater
security, and reliability—in only nine months.
That group of four was 20 percent smaller
than the group that had built the original
application, and the nine-month projection
was 62 percent shorter than the time needed
by the larger group to build the original Javabased application.
Learning of the service provider’s decision to
rewrite the extranet application, Microsoft
invited LandAmerica to participate in an early
adopter program for Visual Studio 2005. The
organization’s IT managers examined the new
development environment and considered
their options. By the time the LandAmerica
developers finished building the new
application, they reasoned, the new version
of Visual Studio would be in full release.
There was no point in commencing a project
of this magnitude using the previous version
of the tool if they could start with the new
tool, even if it was still in beta release—so
they accepted the invitation to participate.
The development enhancements in Visual
Studio 2005 promised to make it much
easier to build the application that company
officials envisioned. Visual Studio 2005
provides support for Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0
master pages, for example, which make it
easier for developers to build Web pages
consistently, even in the context of a large,
complicated Web-based application. The
development system provides support for
themes and skins, which LandAmerica could
use to personalize the experience for its
customers. It provides a code-focused rapid
application development environment with
support for advanced debugging and
rollback. Support for refactoring—new in
Visual Studio 2005—enables the automated
reuse and modification of code.
“The Visual Studio 2005 integrated
development environment was key,” says Bill
Mattox, Supervisor of Web Development at
LandAmerica Lender Services/Tax and Flood.
“It’s one-stop shopping, and it’s nice to have
everything integrated into one area. Visual
Studio 2005 is faster than previous versions,
and it also has features that simply were not
there in previous versions.”
Benefits
The benefits that LandAmerica derived from
building the new tax and flood zone
certification application using Visual Studio
2005 easily validate the company’s decision
to move to Microsoft .NET. Mattox’s group of
four developers brought the new application
to market in seven months—three and one
half times faster than the previous, larger
group had brought the original application to
market, and in 77 percent of the time
estimated for the full system rewrite.
“Our goal was to develop a new application
with enhanced capabilities and more
features,” says Brauer, “that would be more
customer friendly and that would be more
secure from the point of view of SarbanesOxley. We began our rewrite in early 2005
and anticipated a nine-month development
period—and within seven months, Bill Mattox
and his group had the whole application
built.”
“Our ability to bring new
products to market
swiftly and be nimble
enough to add them to a
familiar and functionally
rich application is a
major benefit to us.”
Alan Brauer, Executive Vice President and
Chief Information Officer, LandAmerica
Lender Services/Tax and Flood
60 Percent Reduction in Development
Costs
Not only did Visual Studio 2005 help Mattox’s
group build a better application faster, it also
helped LandAmerica build it more costeffectively. In the days when the organization
had been building using Java, UNIX, and
Oracle, it was difficult to find developers with
the necessary skills. When the organization
finally did find such people, the rarity of their
skills enabled them to charge a premium for
their services.
When LandAmerica set about recruiting
skilled developers to build a new .NETconnected application, it had no trouble
finding qualified people. Nor did it have to
pay the same premium for their skills. From a
cost standpoint, this was a double win: The
group was 20 percent smaller, and the cost
savings—given that the company no longer
was paying the price for UNIX developers—
were even greater than 20 percent.
Couple this benefit with the fact that the
group developed the application in less than
one third the time that it took to develop the
previous application, and the benefits of
using Visual Studio 2005 are clear: “With
Microsoft Visual Studio,” says Brauer, “the
cost to develop our new application—with
enhanced capabilities, more features, and
better security—was significantly less than the
cost of developing the original Java-based
application.”
Nor is the cost of development the only area
where LandAmerica has saved money.
Previously, LandAmerica was using large
UNIX-based computers from Sun and HP as
well as a costly Oracle database; today, it
relies on eight PowerEdge server computers
from Dell running the Microsoft Windows
Server™ 2003 operating system and
Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005, both part of
Microsoft Windows Server System™
integrated server software. “It is significantly
less costly for us to maintain the hardware
and software components of this solution,”
says Brauer. “I would say that our costs are
only 60 percent of what they were before—
primarily because of server and software
licensing costs.”
Easy Application to Extend
Extensibility was a key design goal of the new
tax and flood zone certification application,
and Visual Studio 2005 made it easy to build
an extranet application that LandAmerica can
expand with new products and services over
time.
“We made it easy to extend the application by
using a lot of design patterns in building the
application,” says Mattox. “They’re classic
patterns, where you separate your Web user
interface from your business logic and data
layers. Theoretically, for example, that would
enable us to reuse the business logic layer in
a Windows® Forms environment. If we ever
wanted to use that logic in a Windows Forms
environment, it would be very simple to do.”
And in the LandAmerica strategic vision,
application extension and expansion are very
much part of the plan. “Our strategic vision
includes adding many more Web-based and
customer-facing products,” says Brauer. “Our
ability to bring new products to market swiftly
and be nimble enough to add them to a
familiar and functionally rich application is a
major benefit to us.”
Easy Application to Sell
Speed and reliability are the watchwords
these days: “Our new application is two to
three times faster than the old one,” says Pat
Hoover, National Sales Manager for
LandAmerica Lender Services, “particularly
when loading reports. You used to wait 30
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft
products and services, call the Microsoft
Sales Information Center at (800) 4269400. In Canada, call the Microsoft
Canada Information Centre at (877) 5682495. Customers who are deaf or hard-ofhearing can reach Microsoft text telephone
(TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in
the United States or (905) 568-9641 in
Canada. Outside the 50 United States and
Canada, please contact your local
Microsoft subsidiary. To access information
using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
seconds on the old application; on this one,
the report just pops up.
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 is the world’s
most popular development environment for
designing, developing, and testing nextgeneration Windows-based solutions and
Web applications and services. By improving
the development experience for Windows, the
Web, mobile devices, and Microsoft Office,
Visual Studio 2005 helps organizations
deliver a variety of solutions more
productively than ever before. Visual Studio
Team System expands the product line with
new software tools that enable greater
communication and collaboration throughout
the development life cycle. With Visual Studio
2005, businesses can deliver modern
service-oriented solutions more efficiently.
“Our sales team provides demonstrations of
our application over the Internet, and we
have them going on at all hours of the day,”
continues Hoover. “We have constant
reliability. When we walk prospective clients
through the features of the system, we’re
working with the system itself. The fact that it
runs quickly and reliably is a great
advertisement for what the tool can do for
them. We can put prospects on the
application and show them exactly what
we’re going to provide them—and it’s very
powerful.”
For more information about LandAmerica
tax and flood products and services, call
(866) 353-7382 or visit the Web site at:
www.landam.com/lender
For more information on Visual Studio 2005,
go to:
msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio
Acquire Visual Studio:
msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/howtobuy
Software and Services
Hardware
Microsoft Visual Studio
− Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
 Microsoft Windows Server System
− Microsoft Windows Server 2003
− Microsoft SQL Server 2005
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© 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT
MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS
SUMMARY. Microsoft, MSDN, Visual C#, Visual Studio, the
Visual Studio logo, Windows, Windows Server, and Windows
Server System 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 February 2006
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