Why Is .NET So Popular? Reasons to Choose It for Your Next Project
Last year, Stack Overflow asked developers about their favorite technologies. Turns out, devs love .NET.
Among web frameworks, ASP.NET and ASP.NET Core were quite popular. Although technologies like Node JS and React JS came in first.
Among non-web frameworks, .NET is by far the most favorite one. A third of developers use .NET extensively and love it. But how come?
Which other frameworks and libraries have you done extensive development work in over the past year, and which do you want to work in over the next year?
Today you’ll learn what’s so special about .NET. If you’re a developer or looking to hire some programmers, this article is for you.
.NET is a framework for programming languages like C#, F#, and Visual Basic. It’s free, open-source, and cross-platform.
With frameworks like .NET developers can build software faster and cheaper. Frameworks provide the basic structure, so developers don’t have to start building every app from scratch.
Backed By Microsoft
All popular programming languages are supported by Big Tech:
- Java is backed by Oracle;
- Swift by Apple;
- Python is open-sourced, but it’s still funded by major corporations like PayPal or Amazon;
- C# and its main framework .NET are backed by Microsoft.
Businesses and products pass through several stages. They launch, grow, and mature. At some point, they may either decline or extend beyond the original lifecycle.
Typical Business Life Cycles
It seems that Microsoft is the one to extend. The company tries hard to win over developers and customers:
- They take up open-source approaches. Microsoft bought GitHub and launched dozens of open source projects;
- They make bold deals. Microsoft announced a partnership with Open AI and integrated GPT-4 into Bing Chat. Just one month after, 30 million people downloaded the Edge browser.
TIOBE Index For C#, The Most Popular .NET Language
When I started coding 11 years ago, .NET was already an established framework used by many companies. It’s still very popular in 2023. In fact, for the last 5 years, it’s only been gaining popularity.
Frameworks come and go. It can be a good idea to stick with a trusted solution.
Make Any Type Of App, For Any Platform
Many frameworks are native. It means that they can be used for 1 platform only. .NET also used to be like that. Until 2016 it only supported Windows.
Today .NET is cross-platform. The framework can be deployed with any app:
- Mobile. Android, iOS. With .NET’s MAUI and Xamarin you can build powerful mobile applications.
That’s why organizations like the American Cancer Society, UPS, and Alaska Airlines build their apps with .NET. - Web. With ASP.NET and Blazor developers build powerful web apps.
Global providers like Tencent, StackOverflow, and Siemens Healthineers rely on the framework. - Desktop. Windows, MacOS, and Linux. With .NET Core developers can build cross platform desktop apps.
Companies like Chipotle, GoDaddy, and GE Aviation build cross-platform services with it. Naturally, Microsoft also uses the framework for their projects: Teams, Exchange, Bing, Graph, etc. - Cloud. Azure is one of the biggest cloud computing platforms. It has options for small and enterprise projects.
Organizations like NASA, Verizon, and Adobe use it for reliable and fast hosting.
.NET is also very versatile. As I mentioned, it’s good for desktop, web, and mobile development. But you can build any type of app and service:
- Machine Learning. With ML.NET companies make data-driven decisions.
It’s used for medical research and software malware detection. With the framework, agriculture companies even predict perfect harvesting seasons. - Games. Unity is the most popular gaming framework: half of all published games are built with it. For most Unity games developers code with C# and .NET. Games like Terraria, Bastion, and Magicka are made entirely with .NET.
- APIs. With ASP.NET Core you can build the fastest REST.APIs. For comparison: APIs built with .NET make 7M requests/second. For APIs in Java Servlet it’s 2M. For Node JS it’s 0.6M.
- Microservices. With .NET Core, developers can build lightweight and scalable microservices. They can use them with any other language, so the framework is very easy to adopt.
- Internet Of Things (IoT). With .NET developers can build apps for specialized hardware. From simple sensors to complex machines, and everyday objects like household appliances, wearables, and vehicles.
- Front-End Web. With .NET developers can create frontend based on HTML and CSS. With Blazor they can also build interactive web UIs on C# instead of JavaScript. As a bonus, you can get free website hosting on Azure.
What Can You Build With .NET 7?
Build Big Projects
With .NET you can build any type of app, but it is especially focused towards enterprise projects. That’s why large organizations choose it so often. Healthcare, finance, and education companies love .NET. Let’s see why:
Security. Developers don’t need to build security features like authentication or authorization, they come pre-installed. Because the security features are reused so often in different projects, they are much more reliable. This makes the software with .NET more secure.
Cross-Platform Compatibility. I’ve said it already, but will do it again. With .NET you can build cross platform applications for Linux, MacOS, Windows or mobile. Enterprise projects target large audiences, so being multi-platform is great.
Scalability. .NET is designed to scale applications to large. There are many aspects to it, but let’s try to figure it out.
What Makes .NET Apps So Scalable
There are some features that stand out .NET among the competitors. Here they are.
Great Memory Management. With the garbage collector, developers don’t have to worry about memory management. This causes two things: it saves time and prevents memory leaks.
When developers have to manually allocate memory, sometimes they may forget to do it. In these cases a bug called memory leak occurs. The device runs out of free RAM and the application freezes. With .NET this is not a problem.
Parallel Tasking & Processing. If you can break down a task into smaller sub-tasks, the processor with multiple cores can run the smaller tasks simultaneously. This makes the applications run faster. In .NET there are lots of tools for parallel tasking and processing. Here are the two main ones:
- Task Parallel Library (TPL) helps to write code that automatically runs in parallel;
- Parallel LINQ (PLINQ) helps to write queries that are executed in parallel.
.NET promotes good design principles. The principles have funky names, but they make development much more efficient. They help write better and more maintainable code:
- KISS – keep it simple, stupid. The framework lets developers write clean and easy-to-understand code. .NET is great at OOP: abstraction and encapsulation. It keeps the code organized, and simple.
- DRY – don’t repeat yourself. It’s always better to write reusable components. To promote code reuse, .NET supports the other OOP principles: inheritance and polymorphism.
- YAGNI – you aren’t gonna need it. With .NET devs can write lean and efficient applications. To minimize code waste, .NET supports agile development:iterative development and continuous integration.
Hundreds Of Other Small Features. We’ve discussed a couple of points, but there are far too many things to list. .NET is very robust and complex.
Develop Powerful Software Cheaper
With .NET development is efficient. Companies can hire just one .NET dev team instead of hiring three separate ones: for Mac, for Windows, and for Linux. Essentially, you can make your development budget three times cheaper – all while getting robust software.
There are many available developers & jobs. The framework is popular, which is good for both customers and developers. On one hand, businesses can always find experienced .NET programmers. On the other, the developers can quickly find jobs because they’re in such high demand.
If you are looking to hire .NET developers, feel free to reach out. Most of our employees are Middle and Senior tier. The developer who wrote this article has been coding with .NET for 11 years. We can build you powerful software: from simple microservices to complex healthcare platforms.
