you’re interested in this topic and you wonder which frameworks, platforms, and tools are best to develop these products? Since there is such a vast variety of possibilities and the technology landscape is also changing so fast, this question is quite tricky to answer unambiguously.  

Depending on the app’s goals, specification, features, and many other factors, the tools that will work best for its development will vary. In this article, we’ll focus on the .NET framework, which we find a particularly great choice for developing business applications.  

What is .NET?

Let’s start by explaining the framework. .NET is already a quite mature technology, with its many minor and major versions. .NET is a free, open-source developer platform for building many different types of applications. With .NET, you’re able to use multiple languages, editors, and libraries to build web, mobile and desktop applications, games and different devices (Internet of Things).

At the very beginning, .NET was developed by and only for Microsoft, but times have changed and now, the .NET framework (in its version 6) is an open-source technology developed by hundreds of developers worldwide and meant to use by anyone.  

But what makes .NET so great?

The First Reason: ASP.NET

ASP.NET is an open-source, server-side web application framework created by Microsoft that runs on Windows and was started in the early 2000s. ASP.NET allows developers to create web applications, web services, and dynamic content-driven websites. This framework was made entirely by using .NET.  

The framework itself is rich in features that need to be added in other languages and technologies. The simplest example can be authorization with authentication, which can be created by writing only a few lines of code. There can be three levels of authorization created based on the access level that users are provided with.  

1. Registered users: can view all approved data and edit/delete their own data.

2. Managers: can approve or reject contact information. Only approved contacts are visible to users.

3. Administrators: can approve/reject and edit/delete all data.

C# - The Main Language of .NET

.NET applications can be written in different programming languages. One of the most commonly used ones is C#.

What makes C# so special? It’s one of the most commonly used programming languages in the world, which means that finding the right developer for the job is quite an easy task.

C# provides language constructs to directly support these concepts, making C# a natural language to create and use software components. Since its origin, C# has added features to support new workloads and emerging software design practices.

Apart from that, C# is rich in a lot of handy features that are missing in other languages and it takes the best features from the other technologies. Developers tend to say that you can write a C# application with closed eyes. It’s obviously an exaggeration, but this saying gives you a clue about how easy, clean, and manageable programming language C# is. Also, it means that the applications can be written pretty fast.

Hosting

In the past, one of the .NET’s problems was hosting. The reason for that was that the hosting apps developed in .NET could be quite costly. Fortunately for all of us, this is not the issue anymore! From the version .NET core 3.0, .NET applications can be effectively hosted using Linux servers, which means that the hosting can be done without the extra costs. What’s more, you can run and scale your applications freely on Windows or Linux, using fully managed platforms to perform infrastructure maintenance, load balancing, and more.

Rich Extra Packages Ecosystem

Every language has its own package ecosystem. .NET and C# applications are using NuGet packages that are easy to install, update, and remove from the application. There are even more advantages of this system! You can even create your own, private NuGet packages repository with the packages that you want to hide from the world.

Since its introduction in 2010, NuGet has presented a great opportunity to improve and automate different aspects of the development processes.

Since NuGet is open-source under a permissive Apache v2 license, other projects can leverage NuGet and companies can build support for it in their products. Whether for open-source projects or enterprise application development, NuGet and other applications built on and around NuGet provide a broad ecosystem of tools for improving your software development process.

NuGet provides a free, open-source package management system for the Microsoft development platform. It consists of a few client tools as well as a set of services that comprise the official NuGet Gallery. Combined, you can form the NuGet project which is governed by the .NET.

ASP.NET Speed

As a whole, ASP.NET is a great framework to use when developing websites and web applications. It is reliable, fast, easy to use, free, and already widely known and popular. ASP.NET gives you full control of your development and can be used on any project: big or small.

ASP.NET is an amazingly fast web application framework in comparison to other language frameworks (which is a surprise, since the C# is a high-level programming language).

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The image above shows how many responses per second different technologies can handle. As you can see, ASP.NET rest API can handle even 7 million responses per second. The last result in the graph is server-side rendered pages made using ASP.NET.

Websites and applications built with ASP.NET can be faster and more efficient even than a website built with PHP, for example. ASP.NET applications are compiled, which means the code is translated into object code and then executed. This compilation process takes a small amount of time but happens only once. After compilation, the code can be executed over and over by the .NET platform very quickly.

ASP.NET latency

Another aspect is latency. We should remember that the lower latency, the better. Even though it might seem that the graph below shows a huge difference, these are actually milliseconds we’re talking about. Therefore will not be much effective, unless you are building projects with a really high volume of requests.

Summary

To sum up, .NET is a mature, constantly developed technology with a lot of innovative functions and advantages. Developing your business applications using .NET is a good choice, since:

1. finding a developer for the job is quite an easy task,

2. the code base is easily maintainable,

3. adding new features to your web application is also simply a piece of cake.

If you aren’t already using .NET, why not just give it a shot? What do you think? Share your opinion with us!  

Do you want to learn more about .NET and its allied products? At Score, we can help you develop a software product and answer any of your questions regarding the different frameworks used to build it.

Curious to see how we work? Check out the overview of Score here.

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