Stuck on a math or science problem? Tutor.com can help. The company creates innovative, on demand homework help and tutoring services that connect students to a professional tutor online the moment they need help in math, science, social studies or English. It has a network of more than 2,200 professional tutors and has delivered more than 3 million one-to-one tutoring sessions since its founding in 1998. Its technology is built entirely on the Microsoft.NET Framework and uses a range of Microsoft database and server tools. In August 2007, Microsoft and Tutor.com announced a strategic alliance to provide on-demand tutoring to students who purchase Microsoft Student with Encarta Premium 2008, the recently launched homework productivity suite.

Here is our conversation with Russell Greenspan, VP of Technology Strategy and Software Architecture at Tutor.com.

Microsoft Startup Zone: Why and When did you first choose the Microsoft Platform?

Russell Greenspan: At Tutor.com, we’ve built solutions using the Microsoft platform since the company first launched 10 years ago, and Microsoft technologies continue to provide the best self-contained platform for our Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering. Since we connect real people in real-time, we require both Web-based and thick-client front-end applications, a suite of Web services linking back-end databases, and a set of reports on key business metrics. Using Microsoft technologies end-to-end (.NET WinForms, ASP.NET, SQL Server 2005, and Reporting Services) gives us a complete solution for these architectural needs and assures optimal integration between products, cost-effective and quick-to-market product development, and a ubiquitous community of Microsoft developers and vendors to assist us.

MSUZ: What one MSFT technology is most critical to your business model/success, and why?

Greenspan: As a startup, we need to move ideas from thought to product very quickly, while still maintaining high levels of quality. The .NET Framework’s ease of coding, testing, and deployment is ideally suited for such agile-style development. Our engineering team spends most of its time writing productive, high-level C# code. The .NET unit and Web-testing tools in Visual Studio 2005 ensure we maintain solid quality levels from build to build. And when exceptions occur, the Framework’s robust error reporting enables us to pinpoint problems and react to them quickly.

The greatest specific benefit we’ve realized from .NET is in our core multithreaded, thick-client application. Prior to .NET, writing such an application was time consuming and error prone, but by taking advantage of .NET features like garbage collected memory and asynchronous programming in our port from VB6/C++ to .NET, we were able to significantly improve our application’s stability and reliability. This means higher connection rates and lower crash rates for our students and tutors.

MSUZ: What have been the key quantifiable benefits of using Microsoft technologies?

Greenspan: Our top priorities from a technology perspective are reliability, performance, and maintainability—improving Microsoft technologies have helped us accomplish our goals in each of these areas. By seamlessly moving from SQL Server 2000 to 2005 and from Internet Information Systems (IIS) 5 to 6, we’ve been able to achieve near 100% server uptime and a 3X improvement in both our database transactions-per-second capacity and our Web requests per second capacity. This magnitude of improvement would have been otherwise unachievable without an expensive application rewrite. At the same time, mitigating the risk of hardware failure is especially crucial as our business grows, and SQL Server 2005 clustering technology has been extremely easy to implement and maintain.

MSUZ: What Microsoft technologies will you support or integrate in the future, and why?

Greenspan: We are currently building our next generation thick-client application using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). WPF gives us the same ease of development for rich media features, such as layer-based drawing, dynamic user interface and animation, and speech recognition, as .NET does for our business applications. These features have been cost-prohibitive to implement until now, and leveraging the capabilities of WPF will yield new methods of collaboration and a greatly enhanced online classroom experience. A Silverlight, Web-based version that requires no user installation, utilizing much of the same code base, will not be far behind.

Early in 2008 we’ll greatly improve our business intelligence systems using SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services, Excel 2007, and SharePoint 2007. These technologies provide a complete path from OLAP services to multidimensional cube analysis through tools we are already proficient in. We also look forward to the new productivity features in Visual Studio 2008, Windows 2008 (IIS7), and SQL Server 2008.

Russell Greenspan's Background

Russell Greenspan joined Tutor.com in 2000 and is the Vice President of Technology Strategy and Software Architecture. He is a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) in Distributed Applications, and earned his Master’s Degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois after graduating from Duke University.

For more information, read the Tutor.com success story:Tutor.com: A Business-to-Consumer Opportunity.