Top 10 ASP.NET Core Features You Should Know

Before going into the features,let’s take a look into the revolution of ASP.Net Core and how it’s being introduced into the .Net framework system. Almost two decades back, in 1996, Microsoft introduced web application technology called ASP and in regular intervals,they introduced new ideas and the updates were based on the changes in the world of technologies and they were competitive with others. Later they introduced ASP.Net Web Forms, ASP.Net MVC, Web API etc and in 2016 the latest version of ASP.Net Web Forms was 4.*The arrival of SPA (Single Page Applications) with different JavaScript frameworks and Node.js, are something new and it will leads to the introduction of ASP.Net Core. ASP.Net application development companies in India ensures implementation of effective ASP.Net application development services.

ASP.Net Core is a framework which is used to build internet connected applications, which can run on top of .Net Core or full .NET framework now .Net Core 2.2. is the latest version of ASP.Net Core.

Let us take a look into the core features of ASP.Net Core:

Cross-platform support

.Net frameworks are targeted towards windows platforms and that was one of the main constraints faced over the years. This has been removed in ASP.Net Core and it supports multiple platforms like Windows, Mac, and Linux for both development and hosting. That means ASP.Net Core application can run under non-IIS web servers.

Open source

ASP.Net source code is now open source and it can be available from gitHub.

Microservices and docker support

Microservices, it is an architectural style that structures as an application, which is a collection of loosely coupled services. And each service would be small, modular and independently deployable. Containers are lightweight run-time environments which may contain the core components of the virtual machine or operating system. Docker container is one of them and it simplifies the deployment and testing by bundling microservice and its dependencies into a single unit, which is then run in an isolated environment.

High performance and scalability requirement

When you look into the benchmarks provided by different sites by comparing asp.net core with other technologies, it’s understood that the performance improvement is way higher for ASP.Net Core application. The number of requests handled in a second by .Net Core is almost 5 times higher than the Node.js. In ASP.Net Core, Kestrel is used as the web server, which states that the ASP.Net Core development companies in India have given higher priority to performance than anything else. This doesn’t mean that Kestrel is better than IIS. Kestrel is much faster but also lacks a lot of functionality when it is compared with IIS. So as per MSDN, it is always better to use another web server in front of Kestrel for public websites.

Single Programming model for MVC and Web API

Previously MVC and Web API are two different frameworks and controllers are inherited from two different controller base classes. In MVC, the controller classes are inherited from System.Web.Mvc.Controller base class and for Web API, the controller classes are inherited from the System.Web.Http. ApiController base class. Both of these frameworks are merged into a single framework and both are inherited from the same controller base class (Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc.Controller). Now the controller action method can return HTTP Status codes or C# specific objects.

Built-in Dependency Injection

Dependency Injection is an important thing when we think about separation of concerns, loose coupling and maintainability in an application. Previously to integrate Dependency Injection and IOC Containers we have to depend on third-party packages like Unity, Autofac etc. In ASP.Net Core, they are providing built-in support for Dependency Injection. If you want to override this feature, you can use any of the available IOC containers.

Use any IDE

Previously to build a .Net application we have to heavily depend on the Microsoft Visual Studio IDE for the development process. With the cross platform support we can create ASP.Net Core application with the help of Command line interfaces and for development, we can make use of Visual Studio Code or any HTML editors like Atom.

Supports Signal-R

Real-time communication is very important in today’s web application scenarios and it can be implemented with the use of websockets more precisely Signal-R for .Net related application. Asp.Net Core 2.0 onwards Microsoft ensures support for Signal-R in Asp.Net Core applications.

Gulp, Grunt, and Bower Support

Gulp and Grunt are mainly used for bundling and minifying process. Normally we use these task runners to automate commonly needed tasks like bundling JavaScript and CSS files, minifying JavaScript and CSS files etc. They can be installed using Node Package Manager and that will add configuration files to solution and we can monitor the tasks using Task Runner Explorer. Bower is a package manager similar to Nuget package, but primarily used for front-end libraries. So this package manager can be used to install javascript framework or libraries into the application and there would be bower configuration files for the settings.

Use of asynchronous pattern via async/await

async/await keyword is familiar to a .Net developer nowadays and an extensive use of asynchronous pattern has been there in ASP.Net core which is one of the reasons for better performance. All the .Net framework classes are now implemented using async feature and by using this we can improve the throughput of the application.

From the above list of features, you can see that it’s a nice upgrade/transformation over previous versions. ASP.Net Core has been built from scratch and it’s not an enhancement from previous .Net versions. New features have been implemented to it and some of the existing features has been dropped to support cross-platform and performance. Vofox Solutions is an ASP.Net development company in India which assures brilliant application development services.