Howard Baines

Start-Up Migrates from Open Source and Develops Web Solution in Just Three Weeks

Established in London in 2007, Howard Baines is a Web consulting firm that provides Web 2.0 based consulting, design, and development services. Clients include start-ups such as Trusted Places, as well as enterprises such as Reuters. The company needed a development environment to reduce the number of error reports for its applications, add new features easily, and cut down development time, money, and labour. It explored alternatives to popular open source environments such as PHP and Ruby on Rails, and developed a Web-based appointment scheduling application by using the Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2008 development system and the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5. As a result, it brought the solution to market within three weeks and reduced error reports to only two in the first month of releasing the application. The company will now develop all its applications using Microsoft technology.

Situation

Howard Baines, based in Chiswick, London, is a Web consulting firm that serves large enterprises such as Reuters, as well as start-ups such as Trusted Places. It provides Web strategic planning and consulting as well as design and development services based on Web 2.0 technology.

With open source, we could participate in online groups and forums to discuss technical issues, but the material available for developers from Microsoft—Visual Studio 2008 Learning Portal, technical tips, documents, coding cheat sheets, and the MSDN forums and blogs at www.asp.net —is far more helpful in creating feature-rich solutions quickly. Clive Howard, Managing Director, Howard Baines

The company was founded in 2007 by Clive Howard, a developer with 10 years’ experience working with Microsoft® technology, and Jeremy Baines, who has specialised in open source technology since 2004. The company’s consultation practices and product development strategies are grounded in their in-depth experience of the industry. Howard and Baines work on a one-to-one basis with their clients, and hire specialist developers according to the specific needs of a project.

Baines explains: “Being a young company ourselves, we understand the requirements of small businesses. Our approach is to provide them with customised solutions cost effectively and in a short timeframe, so that they can take their services to market ahead of the competition.”

But achieving these goals in the start-up market was difficult. Howard Baines is driven by its clients’ needs, and builds solutions based on its customers’ choice of technology. In most cases, small businesses select open source solutions based on languages such as PHP, perceiving these to be less expensive than commercial software such as Microsoft. “But in the long run, they pay a lot more in terms of time and resources,” says Howard.

“Firstly, the open source code is complex and our developers had to spend long hours building the product,” he adds. “Moreover, with open source we had to spend most of the time dealing with the large number of reliability problems and bugs reported for recently live applications, which we could otherwise use to design new products.”

His team also found it difficult to work with the newly launched products: “Some clients prefer tools that are new or trendy—for example, the Ruby on Rails framework used to develop Web applications. But new solutions with open source were not always reliable. They demanded continuous input from our developers to keep them running.”

The problem escalated when clients needed to scale open source solutions to accommodate growth in the number of users or to add more functions. For example, Howard Baines found it time consuming, difficult, and unreliable to use open source solutions when working with AJAX, a framework for creating interactive Web applications for browsers. “We wanted to provide this rich user interface tool for our clients, but it took a long time to configure open source codes to support new features,” says Howard.

As a result, the two entrepreneurs looked for a reliable and cost-effective solution. “We required a framework that could reduce the number of error reports for our applications, help us add new features easily, and above all, required less development time and resources,” says Howard.

Solution

In September 2007, Howard and Baines explored alternative development frameworks that could fulfil their company’s requirements. They started building a proof of concept for a Web-based scheduling application using beta 2 versions of Microsoft Visual Studio® 2008, the latest Microsoft development system. It was supported by the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5, an execution environment and library of pre-coded solutions designed to meet most programming requirements.

By October 2007, within three weeks of starting development on the beta versions of Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5, Howard Baines had built its first appointment-scheduling application, called Meet with Approval.

Enterprises use the Web-based solution to arrange meetings and events online. Attendees collaborate by using different communication channels such as e-mail and personal digital assistants because the solution supports both Web technologies and mobile devices. People can synchronise calendars even if their devices use different scheduling applications.

Business users can also customise the solution. For instance, they can replace the Meet with Approval logo with their company logo to maintain a consistent brand image for their clients.

“We hadn’t spent time with these new Microsoft products beforehand,” says Howard. “But once we started developing Meet with Approval, we not only developed it in a short time, but also quickly and easily learnt the latest features such as LINQ.”

The new features of Visual Studio 2008 used by Howard Baines include:

• Language-Integrated Query (LINQ)—a set of extensions to the Microsoft C#® development tool and Microsoft Visual Basic® development system. Developers employ a consistent approach and write less code when querying and transforming object collections, XML data, and relational data from databases based on Microsoft SQL Server® database software.
• The .NET Framework 3.5—programmers use a broad set of supporting class libraries. These include:
  − Microsoft ASP.NET—for Web development
  − Windows Communication Foundation—for seamless communications between applications using protocol such as SOAP, RSS, and JSON
  − Windows Workflow Foundation, to build workflows into any application.
• ASP.NET AJAX—also part of .NET Framework 3.5, used to quickly create Web application pages with sophisticated, responsive user interfaces that work with different browsers and environments.
• IntelliSense for JavaScript—assists developers by automatically completing statements in the command window. It displays the available variables, objects, properties, methods, and events of objects.

The new Microsoft development tools are a great business opportunity for the start-up community. Clive Howard, Managing Director, Howard Baines

Howard Baines now maintains Meet with Approval by using the production version of Visual Studio 2008. “The new Microsoft development tools are a great business opportunity for the start-up community,” says Howard. “In-house product development is cost effective and easy with Microsoft tools compared with open source.”

Baines, who has worked with PHP source code for several years, agrees with Howard that from now on the company will develop all its solutions by using Microsoft technology. It is also developing many more products by using Microsoft tools such as a Meet with Approval Windows Vista® Sidebar Gadget.

Benefits

By using Visual Studio 2008 and the Framework, Howard Baines can not only reduce development time considerably, but also build stable Web applications that return the least number of error reports and require minimum developer inputs.

Howard says: “With Microsoft tools, we can meet the needs of both start-ups as well as traditional corporate firms, because their Web requirements of reliability and scalability are similar. We can easily provide them with a robust product in a short time by using labour and technology resources cost effectively.”

Product to Market in Just Three Weeks
One of the key objectives for Howard Baines for developing Meet with Approval based on a Microsoft environment was to demonstrate the speed at which it could get a product to market.

“The whole application design and development process took only three weeks, quicker by several weeks than if we had worked with the previous versions of .NET Framework, Visual Studio, or the likes of PHP and Ruby on Rails,” says Howard.

“I cannot think of a better development environment than Microsoft in which we could develop a product so rapidly and get excellent results,” he adds.

Recently Live Applications Receive Only Two Error Reports
The company expects its business to grow much faster because it can now build applications that are more reliable. “Our success in the Web 2.0 field depends on the quality of the development environment. With Microsoft, our applications run perfectly the first time— once installed on the server we do not need to worry about reliability,” says Howard.

For example, in the case of Meet with Approval, Howard Baines clients have not experienced any downtime since the application went live. In the first month, when most applications get the maximum number of errors, clients reported only two.

The whole application design and development process took only three weeks, quicker by several weeks than if we had worked with the previous versions of .NET Framework, Visual Studio, or the likes of PHP and Ruby on Rails. Clive Howard, Managing Director, Howard Baines

Advanced Toolset Means New Features Are Easily Added
Howard says: “By using the .NET Framework 3.5, we can easily add new features and scale a Web site quickly and cost effectively to support growth in the number of users.”

For instance, Howard Baines can use the ASP.NET AJAX libraries to create efficient and interactive Web applications that work across all popular browsers. Previously, the company’s developers spent long hours working with open source code libraries to add this feature. But with Microsoft, they can do it without any wasted time.
The company also enhances user experience of its products with the AJAX control toolkit—an infrastructure to write reusable and extensible controls and create interactive Web features. “All we have to do is drag and drop the advanced user-interface controls into the applications,” adds Howard.

Developers Improve Productivity Through LINQ Technology
Due to features such as LINQ, Howard Baines developers can work with various data types and generate programming language queries promptly. “They often struggle at learning a database language,” says Howard. “But with LINQ technology, they can communicate with the databases easily, and this has improved their productivity significantly,” says Howard.

He also finds the new Visual Studio tools easy to learn: “Previously, we had to spend a lot of time referring to technical documents while coding, but now we have user-friendly tools that work intuitively, and don’t have to go back to technical material repeatedly.”

A Secure Environment to Develop and Host Web-Based Applications
Working with Microsoft tools, Howard Baines can also host its solution through the Internet. “This is because the application is now compatible with a Windows Server hosting environment—which is more secure than the other available options, such as open source,” says Howard.

In terms of coding, the Framework provides pre-coded solutions for most programming issues related to security. “This means we can concentrate on adding new features—it’s another reason why development is faster in the Microsoft environment than in open source,” he adds.

Developers Get Consistent Technical Support from Microsoft
Howard Baines feels that technical support from Microsoft at the application development stage, such as the MSDN®, the Microsoft developer network, was important to create a reliable application and get it to market in time.

Howard says: “With open source, we could participate in online groups and forums to discuss technical issues, but the material available for developers from Microsoft—Visual Studio 2008 Learning Portal, technical tips, documents, coding cheat sheets, and the MSDN forums and blogs at http://www.asp.net/ —is far more helpful in creating feature-rich solutions quickly.”
 

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 is the world's most popular development environment for designing, developing, and testing next-generation Windows®-based solutions and Web applications and services. By improving the development experience for Windows, the Web, mobile devices, and Microsoft Office, Visual Studio 2008 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. Interaction between developers and designers is enhanced through the use of Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft Expression® Studio. With Visual Studio 2008, businesses can deliver modern service-oriented solutions more efficiently.

For more information about Visual Studio 2008, please visit:
www.msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio

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