.NET Core – What’s the Word?
In an industry quickly becoming oversaturated with zealous newcomers, businesses that strive to top the web and software development ladder need to adapt now more than ever. Bog standard is out of the window as clients hunt for the most intuitive developers to further their business operations with innovative technology and bold designs.
This week, we’d like to take a look at what makes Microsoft’s cross-platform and open source developer platform .NET Core so popular with modern digital developments.
What is .NET?
.NET is Microsoft’s free, cross-platform, open source developer platform for building applications. It supports C#, F#, and Visual Basic and is subdivided into .NET Core, .NET Framework and Xamarin/Mono depending on what you’re building. .NET is highly versatile, supporting builds from web and mobile applications all the way to cloud and machine learning and is rapidly becoming a favourite with modern development.
For the purposes of this review, we’ll be taking a look at .NET Core and its most common application in web and CRM development.
Usability & Versatility
.NET Core is largely praised by the developer community, and surely our own in-house community, for its general usability. It’s very easy to get setup and build systems applications – a feature often attributed to its foundation in C#.
It’s also seamless when designing and building your own custom modules, making it adaptable to your client’s needs. Being able to upload them to NuGet for further project use also future proofs your work for later application.
Although C# is a statically-typed, strongly-typed language, .NET Core is very versatile, allowing you to develop different types of applications, using the same base. You can go from building an authenticated API and website, to building a standalone application with little change of work.
Scalability & Buildability?
Scalability and buildability are phrases commonly used in the digital development industry but what do they actually mean? They’re often used synonymously, with scalability more specifically referring to a software of processes abilities to be used in a range of capabilities, and buildability focusing on how future proof it is. In light, .NET Core certainly fits this paradigm.
When developing medium to large and enterprise-level business applications, Microsoft’s stack is often the first suggestion as it is supported by a huge brand – backed by a massive community. .NET Core is also supported on multiple platforms and supports the latest cloud technology due to its modular architecture. It’s open source and very easy to extend upon, making development a breeze.
What about C#?
C# is a general-purpose, multi-use programming language. Initially developed by Microsoft as part of the .NET development, C# is simple and modern:
- Many different domains targeted; desktop GUI, mobile phone apps, and especially anything via Windows such as Xamarin. Even Android and iPhone is targeted, web backend via ASP-NET, gaming via Unity.
- Many third-party libraries available if even the STD isn’t sufficient, and very easy to use/share via NuGet.
- Great performance in a VM-based environment.
- Well designed without many inconsistencies
- Large support community