Why We Love Microsoft .NET And Why You Will Too

.NET has been around since 2002 and has evolved extensively since its release. .NET Framework, much like Java, was used in many applications designed in the early 2000’s and some people assume .NET is around today for backwards compatibility or is an ancient relic of the past used only for supporting legacy systems; however, the reality is quite opposite. Microsoft and .NET is innovating and evolving every day.

In 2016, .NET Core came out, bringing the features and productivity provided by .NET Framework into the open-source and cross-platform world; since then Microsoft has regularly been releasing updates to .NET, providing more features, interoperability, and developer simplicity, helping to reduce time needed developing bespoke software solutions from scratch.

But why do we prefer to use .NET in particular over other frameworks?

• .NET is a complete framework; with .NET we can design your web application, APIs to integrate between your systems, background jobs, and even mobile apps. We can also share common code between your projects, and link them together in one ecosystem, to reduce development time and therefore the cost of the overall solution.
• .NET has many useful tools, including:
  • Entity Framework; we can design a web application using .NET that manages back-end data sources itself through the use of Entity Framework. This supports multiple database engines – not just Microsoft SQL Server).
  • Linq (a collection of tools to work with collections / lists of data)
  • The Task library (a collection of methods to run tasks in parallel to each other)
  • and many more features.
• .NET is maintained by Microsoft and therefore is highly stable; each version of .NET has a specified lifetime; versions released in the odd years are supported for three years, and versions released in the even years are supported for 18 months; this does not mean the solution would need rebuilding at the end of its support cycle – it is usually a case of updating a few parts of the code to work with the latest version of .NET. The support cycle also doesn’t mean that after 18 months / three years the solution will no longer work – it can indeed work for many years afterwards, but Microsoft will no longer provide security updates for these versions of .NET.
• .NET is a very popular framework; we have previously taken over the support and hosting of clients’ existing .NET solutions.

If you are looking for a brand new bespoke software solution, whether that is website, a mobile application, or something else, we think .NET will be the right fit for your requirements. Please reach out if you would like to discuss further.