It's hard to believe it's been 21 years since the first release of Microsoft's revolutionary .NET framework. Over the years, it has found countless applications, from websites to desktop and mobile apps. And nowadays, it is one of the world's most popular open-source platforms for software development.
Among the advantages of .NET are the comparatively high execution speed and the framework’s language-independence, which allows developers to code in their own development language and then compile them into a common format for execution.
Read on to discover some more of the key benefits of .NET that makes it one of the most popular platforms in the world after all these years.
Easy to design components and applications
The software developed in .NET usually executes in an environment called CLR (Common Language Runtime), a virtual machine that manages memory, garbage collection, type safety, and exception-handling. The framework also includes the FCL (Framework Class Library), which is a large collection of classes, interfaces and value types that provide access to system functionality.
Object-oriented software development model
.NET is a framework that is based on object-oriented programming (OOP). Used in many other languages since the 90s, OOP simplifies programming by making code manageable, easier to test and responsive to recurring problems. It also helps to avoid unnecessary redundancy in code and generally reduces the coding effort for developers. .NET enables code and components reuse, which saves time and development costs.
Security is integrated into .NET from the ground up
Security is an important topic for everyone, especially for software development in highly sensitive sectors such as healthcare or financial services. .NET provides support for role-based and code access security, threat monitoring and many other ways to improve security of the developed application. In traditional role-based security, authentication and authorization are done through one of the many common mechanisms, such as a .NET Passport, NTLM, or an application-defined mechanism. Code access security is a unique feature of .NET, as it takes into account the fact that malicious code may be present. This system allows for control over the behaviour of code, depending on its source and identity.
Visual Studio
The .NET framework works seamlessly with Microsoft’s own IDE - Visual Studio. The integrated development environment (IDE) is a tool designed to simplify the application development process by providing all the necessary tools. There are numerous other options for .NET IDEs but Visual Studio is the oldest and most established one.
Large community of developers
Since .NET was released as open source, a large community of developers has been involved in contributing to the framework. This includes developers with various seniority - from very experienced to juniors. These community members are ready to help everybody who wants to improve their skills. There are also hundreds of resources and documentation available for beginners and intermediate developers to master the framework. With such support, a great number of complicated development issues can be easily solved.
Already experienced with the .NET framework and eager for some interesting projects? Have a look at the hot vacancies we offer, or simply get in touch with us to find out more.