Leading Swedish Social Site Meets the Migration Challenge

When LunarStorm needed to migrate its code base to ASP.NET,  the social networking site wanted to avoid costly downtime. Compuware DevPartner Studio Professional Edition helped LunarStorm  developers make the connection with code that is fully tested and functional.

Downtime is always bad for business. That is especially true for LunarStorm, an immensely popular social networking web site based in Sweden. The site has more than 1.2 million members, mainly between the ages of 12 and 24, who log on to the site at all hours of the day and night to interact with their friends and make new connections.

"The best feature we’re using right now must be the DevPartner Studio memory analysis tool," Christensen says. "It gives us better control over the life cycle of the objects created." —Marcus Christensen, Head of Development, LunarStorm

LunarStorm is a bit like a combination of Internet services such as America Online and Friendster, allowing users to utilize the information-sharing elements of the Internet within secure confines. LunarStorm is tightly focused on social interaction for young people, with members having the option of creating e-mail addresses, personal web pages, blogs and photo albums, as well as participating in chat rooms and message boards. Membership is free, but many members choose to upgrade their experience with any number of premium paid features and services. So when the site is down or running slowly, the end users are unhappy—and LunarStorm is unable to drive revenue.

A whopping 80 percent of Swedish youth between 12 and 24 have LunarStorm memberships, giving the site more penetration with that age group than popular Swedish cable television networks like ZTV. The average LunarStorm visitor spends 44 minutes each day logged into the site, creating high expectations for uptime and smooth performance.

Code on the Move

LunarStorm’s site is based on code that is a little over four years old. Some functions of the site have been modified multiple times over that period. The site’s developers found themselves in a transition phase when LunarStorm decided to switch from ASP3 to ASP.NET for coding last year.

"We are trying to move all our code from ASP3 to ASP.NET, one function at a time," says Marcus Christensen, head of development for LunarStorm. "All new functions developed during the last year have been ASP.NET from the start. One of our challenges right now is trying to tame ASP.NET and making a site this big run smoothly."

Christensen led the search for development tools that could potentially help LunarStorm with this tricky transition. He turned up useful information on the web about the Compuware DevPartner family of products, including a presentation about the products on a Swedish Microsoft site.

Christensen and his team of seven developers were impressed with the comprehensive functionality offered in DevPartner Studio. In particular, they liked the tight integration with Visual Studio .NET, the amount of data DevPartner Studio Professional Edition could collect during analysis, and the ability to collect and analyze that data across remote machines by installing the DevPartner Studio Server license. Confident that DevPartner Studio will help LunarStorm ease the transition from ASP3 to ASP.NET, Christensen decided to move forward with the purchase.

DevPartner Studio Professional Edition provides an awardwinning suite of capabilities that enables developers to build reliable, high-performance applications for Microsoft .NET and native Windows platforms. Fully integrated in the Visual Studio .NET IDE, DevPartner Studio helps developers quickly detect, diagnose and resolve software errors, maximize code performance and ensure optimum code coverage and testing.

Installing the optional DevPartner Studio Server license on a remote server machine allows that machine to be used as a distributed application remote data server. When this is done, any number of DevPartner Studio Professional Edition user machines can access the remote server. When this is done, data from components running on a remote machine, including memory, performance and code coverage, can be collected from the server.

Quick Results and a Bright Outlook

After the first month of use, Christensen could already see the benefits of using DevPartner Studio Professional Edition. "Now when we transfer the code from ASP3 to ASP.NET, it is suddenly possible to test the code in a completely different manner," he says. "We’ll try to include the testing throughout the software development processinstead of having a large separate block with testing late in the project. This way we hope to get higher quality in our code and less errors while changing the mindset of the developers, from disliking testing to loving development."

Christensen cites memory analysis as the most-used feature of DevPartner Studio Professional Edition at LunarStorm. "The best feature we’re using right now must be the memory analysis tool," he says. "It gives us better control over the life cycle of the objects created."

DevPartner Studio memory analysis shows the amount of memory consumed by an object or class, tracks the references that are holding an object in memory, and identifies the lines of source code within a method responsible for allocating the memory. The memory profiler saves valuable development time by locating inefficient code that would otherwise take hours or days to find manually.

Looking Toward the Future

Christensen says LunarStorm is already looking to expand the presence of DevPartner Studio Professional Edition in the development process. "The most interesting feature we haven’t yet included in our process is the distributed analyzer tool," he says. "I think it will help us in finding the bottlenecks in the parts of the site which span multiple servers. I know LunarStorm is looking into extending its investment to buy DevPartner Studio for everyone in the development group and by adding a few more server licenses.  We’ve had good dialogue with Compuware throughout  the process, which gives us the confidence to know  we can proceed with the product and know that any  questions we have will be answered."