What is .NET Core and Everything You Need to Know About it

When it comes to developing and writing enterprise-grade technologies, no one does it as gracefully as Microsoft. .NET Core framework is one such general-purpose framework used across the globe to build software applications for Windows, Linux, and macOS.

Compared to other software frameworks, .NET Core is much more versatile and meticulous; used to build every kind of software including Web applications, Mobile apps, Desktop applications, Cloud services, Microservices, APIs, Games, and IoT applications.

The hallmarks of .NET Core

Being Free and Open Source

The entire dotnet Core platform is free and open-source, giving expert developers a vast playground where they can develop futuristic enterprise-grade applications. You can easily find information about the .NET Core source code on Github. A huge number of active developers participate in .NET Core development with a drive to improve the existing features, adding new features, and fixing bugs and issues.

Currently, more than 60,000 developers and 3,700 companies are contributing to the .NET ecosystem.

.NET Core is Modern

Shifting away from older frameworks and functionalities, the .NET Core framework is built to solve today’s modern needs, some of them include being mobile-friendly, building it once and running it everywhere on all platforms, scalable, and high performance.

It is Cross-platform

The framework supports and runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems. It is also amazingly consistent across architecture including x64, x86, and ARM. You can import and use the same assemblies and libraries on multiple platforms.

.NET Core supports modern language constructs using C# version 8, like object-oriented and modular programming, generics, collections, lambdas, Language Integrated Query (LINQ), and asynchronous programming.

Speed

When compared to the .NET Framework and .NET Core 2.2 and previous versions, .NET Core 3.0, the latest version is superiorly fast. Also, it is faster compared to current server-side frameworks like Java Servlet and Node.js.

Lightweight and Friendly

You will find that the framework is extremely lightweight; it can be included in your app or installed side-by-side user, machine-wide, or on a server. You can deploy .NET Core in Docker containers.

Additionally, the .NET Core framework is aptly compatible with .NET Framework, Xamarin, and Mono, via .NET Standard. You will also get support while working with other popular Web frameworks and libraries like React, Angular, and JavaScript.

What is .Net core used for?

Since .NET Core is a general-purpose software development framework, it easily allows developers to build a plethora of software including Web, Desktop, Mobile, Cloud, Gaming, IoT, etc.

The applications built with .NET Core are supported on Windows, Linux, and macOS.

Web Applications:- The core component of .NET Core diaspora is ASP.NET Core, a framework good for building web pages. ASP.NET Core comes from the lineage of MVC architecture and provides common libraries to build the Web.

Mobile applications:- With Xamarin offering a set of tools and libraries for building cross-platform mobile apps using C#, developers can build native apps for iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS on a shared .NET codebase with seamless functionality.

Desktop Applications:- You get a myriad of tools and frameworks with .NET Core to build desktop applications. If you want to start building desktop applications, Windows Forms, WPF, UWP, and Xamarin are four major pillars for you.

Cloud Apps:- With cloud gaining traction across the IT sector, the demand for cloud apps has also surged. Azure provides support for different types of cloud apps.

Internet of Things:- The most popular domain across information technology today is IoT. You can get .NET Core support for IoT development via the UWP framework for IoT devices running Windows 10 IoT Core.

Games:- You can use C# and UWP are used to build games for mobile, desktop, console, TV, VR, AR, and the Web. With support from Unity, one can make astounding games.

Features and tweaks in .NET Core 3.0

• Support for MSIX Deployment in Windows Desktop
• Build copies dependencies
• Fast built-in JSON support
• Improvements in IEEE Floating-point
• .NET Platform Dependent Intrinsics
• Framework-dependent executables support
• Unload assembly easily
• Windows Native Interop
• TLS 1.3 & OpenSSL 1.1.1 on Linux
• Improved Cryptography
• GPIO Support for Raspberry Pi

What next: Features in .NET Core 5.0

• C# updates
• F# updates
• Visual Basic updates
• System.Text.Json new features
• Single file apps
• App trimming
• Windows ARM64 and ARM64 intrinsic
• Garbage Collection (GC)
• System.Text.Json
• System.Text.RegularExpressions
• Async ValueTask pooling
• Container size optimizations

Cloud-native support

Several changes are specifically aimed at improving performance in container workload scenarios:

• Better .NET performance in container environments.
• Reduction of the size of published images
• Larger selection of available images.
• Support for orchestration APIs to make it easier to work with .NET

Why Hidden Brains?

Hidden Brains is a Microsoft Certified Partner, so you can expect specialized ASP .Net Core development services which is the open-source version of ASP.NET, that runs on macOS, Linux, and Windows. We accomplish every task right from analysis to design, implementation, testing, and integration of systems. Our team has 50+ Microsoft certified professionals with a proven track record of delivering 100+ projects successfully across 10+ industries. Our ASP .Net core application development services include ASP .NET Core web application, ASP .NET Core 3rd party integration, Cloud application development, and many more.

Conclusion

Modern-day technology demands modern frameworks and mature programming languages. A few applications, websites, and microservices require a powerful and experienced framework supporting them in the background. And nothing beats .NET Core when it comes to fulfilling those demands.