Case Study of Bungie.Net

nmb3000 writes "MSDN recently put up a case study of Bungie.Net (much more detailed than a previous one), the homepage for the creators of the Halo series, and its transition from Perl to .NET and ASP. From the study: 'The Bungie.net site is the online companion to the wildly successful Halo 2 video game for Xbox, released in November 2004 by Microsoft. The site also acts as the community hub for all things related to Bungie games. Built with the Microsoft .NET Framework, Bungie.net serves up more than 4 million pages per day, accumulating 300 gigabytes of online game statistics per month from more than 1 million games played daily.' This is an interesting look into the creation and integration of the very large and interactive website which was voted 'Most Innovative Design' by IGN Entertainment in 2004."

Comments

"Most Innovative Design"

[LostCauz]

I guess it's innovative to not render properly in Firefox.

Not a bad study.....

[bloodredsun]

For once something has come out of msdn that doesn't read like a blatant advertisement. This study is open about the amount of time that it took to create this site, although the forum development and security testing was not included as it was outsourced to other companies. As a non-MS developer I'm naturally wary of studies like this but seems like a competent piece of work although I thought it was spoilt with the simpering hero-grams at the end... "Without the ease of .NET we wouldn't have even started"...ick!

That's nice

[Trepalium]

How about we do a study on the gotdotnet workspaces, and how much better sourceforge is in terms of reliability, availablity and usability? How many sites have moved to SF because Microsoft's version were far too unreliable? Why do you suppose that all of Microsoft's "Open Source" projects (WiX, FlexWiki, etc) are located on sourceforge instead of gotdotnet?

Let's be honest. Although the insinuation within the case study is that perl was not capable of handling the task of getting so much traffic, and ASP.NET intrinsically is, this is clearly false. They could've rearchetected the website to cache content better, and perform better, but instead the decision was made to use the website as a showcase of ASP.NET technologies. There's nothing wrong with that, but we should not pretend that it's something that it's not.

Re:Works for me

[delus10n0]

Blame FireFox-- it's the one rendering it slowly. These bugs have been known about for quite some time:

Fixed background makes scrolling painfully slow
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=90198

slow scrolling in pages with position:fixed elements
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20130 7

Yay!

Poor site design

[xeaxes]

The site is designed very poorly. The website is no where near W3 compliant HTML/X-HTML/CSS. It runs extremely poorly in Firefox. They don't even serve up a proper DOCTYPE, and for that alone I would not hire their front-end developers for any website design.

Honestly, for all the back-end work, they should have gotten a GOOD front-end developer who understood design and standards.

Re:Poor site design

[xeaxes]

I'm disappointed that I was moderated as a Troll, when I was not trolling.

Although I was too brief before, let me expand on other reasons on why the front-end design is poor:

• The fixed navigation panels on the left side and right side do not function properly when a browser does not have a large amount of available vertical space. The menus become in-accessible.
• Inconsistent menus. The menus change depending on the section of the site AND the individual story.
• Does not work properly in all browsers. There are rendering errors all over the place, especially in Firefox.
• Poorly performing DHTML.
• Poor color selection. The site will be hard for visually impaired users. Especially the blue on slightly darker blue.
• The improper use of table elements, and overall ignoring of web standards.
• The lack of a DOCTYPE is a glaring omission.

The design isn't god-awful, but it could use a lot of work. It was clearly designed initially with flash over function, and that hurts the it in the end.

Still Perl?

[Winterblink]

Description: Focused on the reimplementation of most of the existing Perl based site on the .NET Framework. Some features, however, were left as Perl implementations.

I'm curious, which features, and why? And are they still Perl, or have they been subsequently ported to .NET? If not, why not?

Re:Works for me

[delus10n0]

Your logic doesn't make any sense-- they're perfectly valid HTML/CSS commands. Internet Explorer doesn't choke on them (and it happens to be the most popular browser right now, and has been for quite some time..)

FireFox should fix this soon, as it isn't just bungie.net that is affected.

Re:Not arguing against that

[bigman2003]

No...we understand that it is the 'expected result' (the Firefox bugs).

But there are two ways of thinking on that:

1- programming for/around these bugs is stupid. Program it the right way, and wait for the browsers to fix themselves. For instance, when Netscape 6.0 came out, I did not modify all of my pages to display in that piece of crap. Because 6.0 really was a piece of crap...Like the rest of the world, I realized that Netscape Navigator was a totally marginalized piece of software, and it was their problem to fix the bugs- which they mostly did in 6.1

2- If the company that you work for owns a huge chunk of the browser market, you make sure it works in your browser...and like I said before, if it makes your competition look bad- even better.

I don't think your verbal talent is lacking- I think it is your understanding of human motivation. What in the world would cause a Microsoft company to modify one of their sites to operate with a buggy browser, made by the competition? In this case they can even say 'well, we just designed it to the standards...'.

Do you really think they give a shit if they could fix it for Firefox? Why would they spend even 20 seconds on that?

And if you are thinking, "because then more of their customers could view the page" then you REALLY don't understand what is going on.

I dont know about you guys.

[hobotron]

But I would be pretty wary of a website voted "most innovative design" by IGN