Why we’re excited about .NET Core – and why you should be too

As you can see from the photo, we’ve had a lot of fun days teaching our .NET Core course all over Australia.

.NET has been around since 2002 for the initial release. When it came around it was really revolutionary and we’ve been loving .NET ever since. SSW has built thousands of apps over the last 15 years on .NET and the language and tooling have improved with each release.

This new version, called .NET Core, is a generational change. It is a major rewrite that solves a number of issues.

Let me tell you the 4 amazing benefits (in my order):

  1. Performance
    It’s much faster. You can see the 1.1m represents a 2,300% gain from ASP 4.6 (RPS = requests per second).

    Figure: ASP.NET Core easily trounces ASP.NET 4 (See the number of requests per second)

    The performance is helped by the advantage of only including libraries you explicitly choose to use rather than bringing in the entire framework.

  2. Cross-platform development
    I don’t feel this pain myself – I use a Surface Book, but so many devs at SSW these days have a Macbook, and jump into Windows only when they have to. .NET Core can be developed on Mac OS, Linux and Windows.
    Developers can now code on their operating system of choice using any text editor – for example, Visual Studio, Visual Studio for Mac, Visual Studio Code, Atom, Sublime, or even notepad.

    Figure: Devs now have a smorgasbord of text editors to choose from, no matter which OS they’re running
  3. Cross-platform deployment
    You can now run your .NET apps on Windows, Linux or even make MAC OS your server, which might be fun to do (if you’re drunk! 😜). This is a big deal because it opens .NET up to deploying in environments that haven’t run .NET before.

    Figure: It should be noted that nearly 1 in 3 VMs in Azure are Linux.
  4. It’s open source
    Many customers really care that .NET has now been open sourced. In fact, a third of the room in Brisbane told me that this is their #1 reason that they like .NET Core. They said it gives them security in terms of feeling that .NET Core will be successful long term. So it’s not because they want access to the code, but because they believe it will lead to longevity of the platform.

    Figure: It should be noted, Microsoft has more employees contributing to Open Source projects than any other company.

Summary

There’s massive excitement around .NET Core. – and not just from us at SSW. In the last weeks, SSW has run sold-out .NET Core Superpowers sessions around Australia, which I co-presented with Brendan Richards and Jason Taylor.

Brendan and Jason have deployed many solutions in the last 12 months on .NET Core and bring a lot of real world experience.  

We covered the essential topics to help devs get a head start on .NET Core:

  • The New Stack and Visual Studio 2017
  • When to use .NET Core over .NET Framework
  • When to use Entity Framework Core over EF 6
  • Getting started with .NET Core
  • EF Core
  • Clean Architecture
  • Unit Testing
  • Swashbuckle
  • Validation – using Fluent validation
  • Logging and Exceptions
  • Security
  • Deployment

⭐️⭐️We’ll be running the course again in October. Get your tickets before they sell out (again!)⭐️⭐️

  • Brisbane:
    Monday October 16
  • Melbourne:
    Thursday October 19
  • Sydney:
    Friday October 20