List of ASP.NET Core Features You Need to Know to develop scalable applications

Over the years, web application development has become an integral part of web development services offering the latest web solutions such as enterprise mobility solutions to their clients.

There are numerous web app development frameworks which are being utilized by these services. However, choosing the best one always remains a challenge. In this regard, ASP.NET, which was introduced by Microsoft, has emerged as one of the most successful and potent web application development frameworks. Owing to every update that has been made in recent years, along with new as well as extended features which are added, it assists developer. They can deploy highly scalable as well as high-performance web apps. 

Along with application monitoring and different other performance tools like a profiler, ASP.NET has turned out to be a powerful solution for creating incredible applications. Within this framework itself, it has myriad features to assist the developers in overcoming various common development challenges, achieve more with the apps and even boost the overall performance.

Listed below are the best features of ASP.NET Core in order to create better applications.

1. Cross-platform and container support

Through the introduction of .NET Core, the developers can easily create different ASP.NET applications and even deploy them to Linux, Windows and macOS. Along with this, Microsoft and the entire community has put up massive efforts into making the Linux as a first-class citizen to successfully run ASP.NET.

At present, containers are now eating clouds. Kubernetes, Docker and other technologies are now in the trend. ASP.NET Core actually allows the developers to use all of these latest technologies. Even Microsoft Azure has support for easily deploying the apps to containers and Kubernetes. That makes it easier to develop Azure Cloud Solutions.

2. Asynchronous through async/await

It has excellent support for using asynchronous programming patterns. Now, Async is being implemented in all of the common .NET framework classes along with most of the third-party libraries. Most of the modern apps spend a lot of time as well as CPU cycles waiting for different database queries, along with web service calls and even other I/O operations to execute and complete.

Among the reasons why ASP.NET Core is faster is its massive use of asynchronous patterns right within the latest MVC as well as Kestrel frameworks.

3. Improved Performance

Few of the experts say that the performance remains to be the most critical feature of any software. With the recent introduction of ASP.NET Core as well as the Kestrel web server, it is being considered as one of the swiftest web app frameworks which is available. The technology which powered the integrated pipeline of ASP.NET, as well as IIS, was around fifteen years old. Even though it did almost everything but still carried a lot of baggage. In this regard, the latest Kestrel webserver was duly redesigned from the scratch to take complete advantage of the various asynchronous programming models, be much faster and more lightweight. A Microsoft technology associate needs to know these benefits.

4. Unified MVC along with Web API frameworks

Essentially, before ASP.NET Core, the developers were commonly utilizing the MVC as well as Web API frameworks. Also, the MVC was duly tailored to create web apps which served up the HTML. Even the Web API was actually designed to create the RESTful services utilizing XML or JSON.

With the assistance of ASP.NET Core, the MVC, as well as Web API, have been duly merged together. There was certainly a lot of overlap between the two frameworks. MVC could easily return JSON data rather than that of HTML. Also, combining them was a great move, and it easily simplified the development.

Now, we also have the latest Razor Pages. Basically, they extend the entire MVC framework to readily allow the encapsulation of the controller as well as model aspects of the page together through the two-way binding. Also, they are sort of replacement of the popular WebForms while utilizing the familiar Razor syntax. One can check SharePoint application development to get more details about this aspect.

5. Numerous environments along with development mode

Among the key features of ASP.NET Core, is the new environment feature which allows the developer to easily differentiate various part of the code for their behaviour in the overall development, staging, and even production and more. Previously, there was no standard way to perform this.

For instance, it is utilized within the Startup.cs file in order to assist in configuring the app. In this particular case, whether or not, we wish to show a more detailed and exhaustive exception page for the development purpose only. Also, environments are quite perfect for utilizing various CSS or even JavaScript files. Utilizing the CDN in production, however, local files during development. A Dot Net development company must consider this during development mode. 

6. Dependency Injection

The key latest feature of ASP.NET is inbuilt dependency injection. Also, it is quite heavily utilized within the entire ASP.NET MVC too. It is among the most preferred ways that things such as logging contexts, along with database contexts and different other things are passed into the MVC controllers.

7. SignalR and WebSockets

It has first-class support for the WebSockets. It can be utilized to persist in various long-running connections and even communicate back and forth with any browser. Also, SignalR is a complete framework which is even available for the developers to make it quite easier to handle various common scenarios. 

8. Cross-Site Request Forgery Protection

Essentially, the security remains to be a paramount requirement. It is one of those things which can be a lot of work to actually prevent different types of attacks. Hence, CSRF is in reference to the hijacking of users authenticated sessions to perform a particular action that they never initiated. 

Read the blog- .NET 5 merges Core and .NET Framework into one solution

For instance, let’s assume that you log in to the bank account of your and then navigate to a particular website. In that case, if that other website can do a POST to your bank website to particular fund transfer, that would certainly be a bad thing. It can certainly do that it your entire online session on the actual banking website is quite valid, and the bank doesn’t validate requests properly.

ASP.NET has quite a good framework which is duly available to prevent such kinds of attacks. It readily generates anti-forgery tokens to enable security.

9. Web Applications (Self-Hosted)

For certain web applications, you need them to be deployed on to a particular desktop but not on a server running IIS. In that case, there is certain profiler such as Prefix, whose front end is completely HTML which is loaded from a particular ASP.NET app running as a given Windows Service.

A developer can create his own self-hosted ASP.NET web app in different ways. With ASP.NET core, one can utilize the standard Kestrel web server. Among the great advantages of ASP.NET Core is that the web app is basically a console application. The IIS simply sits in front of it as a particular reverse proxy. It means you can easily deploy the app only with Kestrel for any of the non-server based use cases. 

10. Innovative Action Filters

Among the best features of ASP.NET is the inherent support for the extensible filters. It allows you to easily implement functionality which can be duly applied to any controller or action without actually modifying the entire action itself.

Also, filters can be utilized to specify error handling, caching, authorization or any of the custom logic that you would want to implement.

11. Extensible Output Caching

It is a feature which allows ASP.NET to easily cache the output that is generated by a page and then serve this particular cached content for the future request. Also, it stores the data which isn’t frequently updated and then output that particular data from a given cached location.

ASP.NET even makes it easier to specify how long one particular request needs to be cached through common HTTP headers. Also, it has support for the caching output within the entire memory on the given web server itself. One can even use Redis or different other providers to handle the output caching. 

Read the blog- Take Advantage Of A Quartz.net Hosted Service To Schedule Background Jobs In Your Asp.net Core Application

12. Localization and Globalization

Essentially, ASP.NET makes it quite easier to localize dates, text and numbers within the web application. In case you wish that your app to be utilized across the globe, then localization is quite essential to you.

ASP.NET even enables customizing the app for different languages through resource files. These particular resource files are actually considered as the major central repository where all of the texts are duly kept as well as the web pages can easily read this resource file and even get labels readily populated. 

13. Swagger OpenAPI

In case you are developing API apps, you wish to make sure that you are utilizing Swagger. Essentially, it makes it quite easier to document and even test the APIs. Also, ASP.NET has provided inbuilt functionality historically, which is quite similar for SOAP web services that were created with WCF. 

Conclusion

ASP.NET Core is among the top framework for almost all types of apps, a particular device or size of the app. Also, Microsoft and the community have actually done a lot of hard work in order to make ASP.NET Core quite a competitive framework in the entire market to assist ASP.NET development services in rapidly developing many powerful applications with the scalability and best performance. The major feature of the ASP.NET framework is that developers don’t require any latest knowledge of working on the ASP.NET Core. It is why ASP.NET Core was readily adopted by these developers in quite a short span of time.