.NET is a popular software development framework designed by Microsoft exclusively for web application development. With this framework, web developers can integrate a wide range of features like cloud infrastructure support, desktop software, and other web-based services. This framework can be efficiently used for large-scale applications and is being used by many Fortune 500 companies across the globe.
Microsoft started to develop this framework in the late 90s. Their goal was to build an ecosystem that is based on a managed code, that can be executed under a runtime environment. The advent of this framework had improved the overall development experience and avoided the need for active memory management, security operations, etc.
After a decade long development, Microsoft has finally launched the first release of the .NET platform in 2002, with a core aim to target systems using windows OS and Microsoft servers. The initial version of the .NET framework offered mainly three key elements:
- GUI library: mainly for desktop applications
- ADO.NET: for data access
- ASP.NET: a framework for Web
Over time, the platform underwent various updates such as a new runtime environment, APIs for service-oriented applications (WCF), new desktop graphical systems (WPF), and more.
In 2016, Microsoft made the release of .NET Core, a new open-source, cloud-friendly and cross-platform version of the .NET framework. It was in the same year that Microsoft acquired Xamarin, a cross-platform UI framework for mobile development.
Unlike ASP.NET, ASP.NET Core can run on multiple computing platforms such as macOS, Windows, and Linux. ASP.NET core has now received a stable 3.0 release and is now a better choice for Windows-hosted ASP.NET web apps.
With ASP.NET Core, web developers can build new web apps by following the MVC architectural pattern and can create a new project in Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 by using ASP.NET Core Web Application template.
In this blog post, we will list out the top 5 Reasons to Choose the ASP.Net Core for Web Development?
Reasons to Choose the ASP.Net Core
1. Merged Web API & MVC frameworks
As you can see from the above diagram, the Web API and MVC have a lot of concepts in common like actions, filters, model binding, controllers, dependency injection. ASP.NET Core merged both these frameworks together to simplify the web development process.
The best part about ASP.NET core is that, by just giving an @page directive, a view would be able to handle requests directly. The requests don’t need to go through a controller.
2. High performance
How Kestrel handle the Http request?
ASP.NET core has provided some key updates that significantly increased the performance of this framework:
- Improved its HTTP Client performance
- Added the support for hosting RPC( Remote Procedure Call) services by utilizing gRPC.
- Now has a modular, high-performance and lightweight HTTP request pipeline.
- Has got built-in dependency injection.
3. Cross-platform & container support
ASP.NET core allows web developers to build ASP.NET apps using multiple frameworks such as Windows, macOS, and Linux. Apart from that, it allows web developers to use containers such as Docker, Kubernetes, and other technologies.
Docker images can be easily made from ASP.net core apps. These images can be deployed to Docker containers and Kubernetes.
4. Open-source and community-focused
The interesting fact is that Microsoft has made this an opensource framework. So web developers can freely access Git hub and other resources. Since the community of ASP.NET core is well developed, web developers can make use of the vast number of repositories and codes that are hosted in the Github. As the community of ASP.NET Core is quite active when compared to other frameworks, web developers can always find up to date and latest code in stack overflow and GitHub.
Being open-sourced and community-focused are the two biggest perks offered by this framework. Moreover, these could make the process of web development a lot faster and smoother.
5. Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) Protection
Cross-Site Request Forgery(CSRF) is an act of stealing user’s authenticated sessions to perform an uninitiated action. CSRF is among the biggest threat to web apps in today’s world. Having a framework that raises less vulnerability to CSRF attack is considered as a secure option among web developers.
We will illustrate this with the help of an example, consider that you are booking a flight ticket, in the payments page you have entered the bank details but you are not aware that an intruder has embedded code to hijack your session. After making the payment the hijacker can use this session authenticate on behalf of you.
ASP.Net Core generates anti-forgery tokens, which can efficiently contain security risks like the one mentioned above.
Besides the above-mentioned features, ASP.NET Core 3.0 has loads of other exciting features, from single-file executables to side-by-side versioning, to the ability to host on multiple web servers, and on and on… With all these functionalities and active community support, we’re sure that ASP.NET development tops among the best frameworks for web development.
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