New Features of ASP.NET Core to Build Modern Web and Cloud Applications

Overview of ASP.NET Core

ASP.NET Core is an open-source web framework that is available to everyone. Compared to the conventional ASP.NET and ASP.NET Development Services, it is far superior. The Core ASP.NET Framework operates on a modular framework, meaning it will run exceptionally well on both the Dot net framework on Windows OS and several other platforms. 

Many of the .net development services are inclined towards the Core framework because of its scalability and increased performance on its web applications. It is licensed by Apache 2.0, and its current stable release is 3.0.0, released a week ago. Many dot net development companies now hire .net developers owing to the radical popularity of the ASP.NET Core framework.

The following article will largely focus on some of the vast hordes of features that the ASP.NET Core packs for building advanced web and cloud applications. 

Latest Features of ASP.NET Core for Web and Cloud-based Applications

Let us take a look at the list of features that ASP.NET Core offers for building the applications,

• Cross-Platform Feature Set

As mentioned in the initial introduction about the ASP.NET Core, it contains a brilliant cross-platform capability across the operating systems. If the users are targeting to use the Mac OS, or Linux or Unix, then the ASP.NET Core will have no issues getting gelled up with any of them. Perhaps it also is considered one of the best platforms in the .NET Framework to have this kind of feature set. 

Compared to the Core framework, ASP.NET MVC Development Services do not have this capability. Developers would now be able to seamlessly deploy and utilize some of the new and improved technologies like, 

1. Docker – A Platform as a Service Enterprise Container Platform.
2. Microsoft’s Azure – Cloud Computing service is used for testing, managing, and deploying applications.
3. Kubernetes – Container orchestration system for automation of app deployment and management.

There are many more applications like these that can be deployed using the ASP.NET Core. The complete SDK provides users with the command line tools that would be instrumental in creating, compiling, building and publishing the .NET Core application on any Operating System.

• Increased Performance

ASP.NET provides increased performance levels as compared to the conventional ASP.NET by a margin of 10. The teams from Microsoft has ensured that the application’s execution is perfect as compared to the other technologies utilized in Microservices.

Some of these microservices technologies include. Node.JS, Go and Java Servlets. 

Some of the vital features like serialization, compression, networking, and concurrency that are very much in use with respect to the Web APIs are much swifter than the ASP.NET Core. 

Normally, the HTTP request size would not be optimum, and it would usually range up to 30kb. With ASP.NET Core in tow, the request size has reduced to just 2kb. This becomes a contributory factor in elevated performance. The benchmark scores have proved this fact time and again that the Core framework is suitable to handle over 1.15 million requests per second which are over 2300% that the usual ASP.NET 4.6 version. 

• The amalgamation of Development Models

The Model View Controller and the Web API Development models are one and the same which means, they are amalgamated. The reason that they are so is that they use a similar Base Class Controller. The Base Controller mainly avoids the use of common actions in the developers’ coding and tries to implement abstract classes to carry out the task. 

The unification feature helps out the controller in exposing the HTML view along with the Web Service features. The ASP.Net Core’s MVC Model also provides a heightened operation level to create the Web APIs, and thus making the web applications more capable of testing.  

Furthermore, the core framework also provides built-in support for many different data formats and content negotiation. The process provides the best possible representation for any given response when there is an availability of several other representations. This is advantageous for allowing the Web APIs to fit and be suitable across platform levels, including mobile devices and browsers.

• Fresh Health Checks API

The ASP.NET Core contains various functionalities and features that make it different and unique amongst its counterparts. Foremost among them is that it consists of a collection of libraries that defines an abstraction along with the iHealthCheck service, along with some middleware functionalities. 

The iHealthCheck Service is essentially a diagnostic check that can be used to check the status of the components present in the application. The interface can be utilized for running on a backend service, database or for some internal sites as well.

There is also a BeatPulse project that has made its inception in the ASP.NET Core environment for filling out some of the vital gaps in the system. It is used when there is zero availability of health check applications. The BeatPulse can now run along with the full compatibility of latest Health Check APIs that Microsoft integrates. 

This is good news for the developers as they could effectively add and carry out the health checks for multiple systems and dependencies. 

• Consolidated Dependency Injection

Dependency Injection is a prevalent concept in MVC. It is a design pattern that allows the developers to create loosely coupled codes, and it has always been the center point of issues related to development. Along with fixing up the coupling issues, it also ensures that code has better testability than usual.

ASP.NET Core combines a fresh, novel architecture that syncs with the dependency injection. The features of modularity and flexibility that are offered by the Core framework is very much reliable on the dependency injection. And it also happens to be one of the most important features of ASP.NET Core framework.

Since the implementation of dependency injections are all managed natively by the ASP.NET framework, the developers would not need to worry about the third-party tools to achieve this goal.

• SignalR Java Client

Another one of the vital features offered by the ASP.NET Core is the SignalR Java Client. It is a library that has been developed by Microsoft especially for the .NET framework, and it allows the server code to transmit asynchronous notifications to the web applications located on the client’s end. This software library also consists of JavaScript components on both server and client-side.

It allows the developers to add up web functionality to their applications in real-time. It is an essential feature to have since the server-side codes push the related content to the respective clients, again all done in real-time. 

SignalR also takes a crucial advantage by automatically selecting the best transportation option as per the availability in both the client and the server-side. It mainly takes advantage of an HTML API called the WebSocket that is utilized for bi-directional communication between the server and the browser. 

Along with the Java Client that has been added to it, it also supports connection to the server of SignalR from Java codes, and this includes the Android Applications.

• Self-Hosted Web Applications

Another key feature that is offered by the ASP.NET Core framework would be that its applications do not require Internet Information Services or the IIS. IIS is the webserver that is specially created by Microsoft that supports the HTTP, HTTPS, HTTP/2, FTP, FTPS, SMTP, and NNTP. A typical IIS Server would accept requests from the client systems located remotely and accordingly sends the responses to them.

All of the web applications can be hosted by self or they can be hosted on Nginx for distributing on Linux systems. Nginx is a web server that can be utilized as a reverse proxy, mail proxy, load balancer, and HTTP cache. 

ASP.NET Core also provides the functionality for launching the core applications independently on all of the platforms. Also, in the production systems, IIS along with Nginx provides the reverse proxy for the self-hosted applications. 

• Less amount of coding

The ASP.NET Core framework is able to implement multiple common APIs along with the .NET Framework. This would also include the APIs that are specifically created for Unix, Linux and OS X. 

Some of these common APIs are collated into .NET Standard which is expressly implemented by both the .NET Core and the .NET framework as well. This would conclude the fact that any of the codes that would target the .NET Standard would be able to run on the .NET Framework and on the Core one as well. This would make it very easy for sharing codes between these two available platforms with relative ease.

• Cross-Site Request Forgery Protection

Security is one of the most important factors when it comes to technology. It is also an important aspect that needs to be worked upon if you want to prevent any and all kinds of cyber-attacks. CSRF or Cross-Site Request Forgery Protection is in reference to those users who tend to hijack with respect to validated sessions for performing an action that was not initiated by the source.

If we take an instance, like if a user has logged into her bank account, and then while navigating has been taken to a completely different website altogether. If that website is able to do a POST on your bank website for transferring funds, then that would create a massive issue. If your banking session is legitimate then this transaction might take place and that might not require any authentication from the bank’s end.

This is why CSRF protects the ASP.NET Framework which would be present to stop any such attacks and thereby stop such acts of forgery.

• Globalization and Localization

ASP.NET Core makes it very easier to provide the localization feature set to some of the important points like dates, numbers and the texts present in your web application. This is important and it should be in your application if is being used internationally, localization needs to be the touchstone of the said application.

The Core framework would help out in customizing the application properly and also with respect to several languages, and this can be done via resource files. These files would act as the central database where all the related texts would be kept, along with all of the web pages. They would be able to read these resource files and the labels will also get populated accordingly. 

The types of resource files are as follows,

1. Local Resources – These are specific for one single page, which is to say that local resources will be present for every single page.
2. Global Resources – These would be common for the entire website, which is to say one resource file would be accessible by all the pages.

• Razor Pages

Another one of the great and unique aspects of the ASP.NET Core framework would be the availability and the appearance of the Razor Pages. These pages would be able to make coding page-based scenarios much more simplistic than necessary. 

This is instrumental since it would thereby increase productivity and its advantageous than using controllers and views. The Startup class can properly enable the feature through the Dependency Injection. Some of these fresh new pages would allow the implementation of self-sufficient views of the controllers. This would also allow the creation of more development-related scenarios, making them more effortless, and would also give the developer boundless clarity with regards to the entire architecture of your solution.

Conclusion

As we have seen above, the ASP.NET Core framework increases performance. This great framework is available for all and is indispensable in creating the web and cloud applications. It also provides increased security compared to its counterparts and is a preferable option by many. This is also the reason that companies hire asp.net developers in India by a larger number than necessary, owing to the new and improved ASP.NET Core framework.

If you need assistance with customized solution using ASP.NET Core framework then keep us posted and our experts will contact you soon. 

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