Important things to know regarding the latest release of the.NET Core 2.0

Author: Ritesh Mehta

The development platform of Microsoft, NET has been around for some time now as the heart of the development tool and platform strategy of the company. Starting as a Windows-only tool, which brought new methodologies and languages to the platform,.NET has grown into a cross-platform environment, which supports everything, from walls to wearables, on to the cloud.

THE CROSS-PLATFORM AMBITIONS OF.NET

The framework has long had cross-platform ambitions, beginning with the educational Rotor runtime and tools release in 2002, under a non-commercial shared-source license and continuing with its unfortunately undelivered plans for the cross-platform WP/E, the.NET runtime, which became Silverlight.

OPEN SOURCE.NET AT THE CORE

There are .NET development services providers anywhere in the world. Some of the best service providers are the dot net development services India, wherein the place is the outsourcing and IT hub in the world. With over seventeen years of development under its belt,.NET is a complex and huge software piece. Thus, it came as no surprise when Microsoft designed to open source its design and development process back in 2014. It did so as the new.NET Core, rather than the monolithic.NET. It’s a modular implementation of a subset of the APIs, could run on a huge range of platforms and more than a single runtime. Initially,.NET Core did not support a lot of the key APIs and libraries of the framework, with a focus on UI-less web back ends as well as born-in-the-cloud apps.

THE EVOLVING.NET CORE

In the last couple of years,.NET Core and the associated Standard Libraries evolved. Today, with the.Net Core 2.0 release as well as the.NET Standard 2.0, it provides access to more than twice the APIS with the previous release, as well as access to a lot of Windows and non-Windows platforms, which include ARM32 on Linux as well as the latest MacOS releases.

GET THE MOST OF.NET CORE 2.0

To get the most of the latest release, website designers should be familiar with the Standard 2.0, which is meant to be supported by all..NET implementations, the 2.0 version has over 32,000 APIs, which include a lot of familiar framework APIs. Now, it replaces the Portable Class libraries. Any new libraries built to work with the.NET Standard must also work anywhere. It simplifies the development of cross-platforms by making certain that all the libraries work against a common set of APIs. There is even support to call through to existing APIs, to maintain compatibility while porting code to new frameworks.

MODULAR.NET FOR A CONTAINERIZED WORLD

One vital element of.NET Core is the use of NuGet package-management tools. When building web apps in Visual Studio, adding libraries as well as other packages to the code from NuGet is familiar. With the latest version, it also requires installing.NET modules needed along with the libraries that one wants to use. The result is a more modular. NET wherein code not needed is not loaded. This is a relevant change and makes sense in the light of the changes that Microsoft’s been making to its Nano Serve container operating system as well as with its work with Linux distributions that’s container-optimized. With a smaller operating system, smaller and more customizable runtime, one could optimize the apps for use in quick-deploying containers, either on Windows containers or in a thin container Linux such as CoreOS. Also, the modularity of.NET Core helps with development, which targets resource limited devices, such as Raspberry PI that runs the IoT releases of Windows 10 or smart watches that run on the Tizen of Samsung.

THE ENTERPRISE APPLICATION OF THE FUTURE

.NET Core is not only lighter, newer, it is also the start of the push of Microsoft to be the dominant platform for complex containerize apps. The enterprise uncertainty of Java and stagnation under the stewardship of Oracle has put it out of running for today, and although newer languages such as Go have a rising following, still they are only really starting to acquire developer mindshare. With Node.JS the only true option for micro-services, it is high time to have an alternate approach.

By refactoring.NET for the new world, Microsoft delivers the right platform for the new app architecture, while bringing together more than ten years of developer experience. This is a smart move. The existing C# SKILLS continue to be relevant, while apps that need functional programming could move to F#. The existing code could be containerized, while new apps could extend and replace older code for launching new services. In the meantime,.NET Core-based container apps now are OS-agnostic, and is able to use Linus or Windows. NET runtimes, with code that is portable enough to run internet of things hardware at one end of the scale and in cloud on the other.

NEW MANTRA OF THE INTELLIGENT CLOUD AND INTELLIGENT EDGE

The new mantra of Microsoft, the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge, depends on.NET Core and its modular nature. With a single programming models, which works across the choice of platforms and devices, distributing functionality across compute in and out the cloud now is a possibility. All it is needed is a distributed architecture for appropriately hosting and deploying code. The flexible, modular.NET Core and the associated.NET Standard APIs set seem to be the ideal foundation for a new generation of enterprise apps. They could be used to begin creating new code at present, and migrate older.NET apps to new frameworks as existing libraries move to support.NET Standard. Modernizing the code base takes time, but at least one could now see wherein to begin.

The most obvious benefits of migrating to.NET Core is performance. As newer language enhancements and technology emerge, the code is optimized automatically when compiling code. The best part on this certain benefit is that there is no need to change code. The compiler would, by nature optimize one’s own code when re-compiled with the new language improvements.