A few years ago, the concept of the Internet of Things was seen as some weird concept from a sci-fi flick. But things changed. Though IoT is still in its infancy, it garnered a lot of attention lately and is now seen as a revolutionary technology that will transform and disrupt various industries. There’s great interest in building IoT devices and IoT software development today.
As a matter of fact, many organizations are competing to make various components available in the market in order to promote the already trending development of IoT solutions. However, some of those platforms ran out of steam.
Among those platforms that came complemented IoT is .NET – one of the most popular microsoft technologies. Corporate behemoths like Amazon, Accenture, Dell etc. has been leveraging .NET for years due to its versatility and impressive performance. Coincidentally, these two traits are what IoT app development demands today.
That said, let’s explore the merits of using .NET for IoT projects.
Windows 10 IoT Core compatibility
Windows 10 IoT Core is a free, optimized version of the popular Windows 10 OS from Microsoft, designed to work with low-power devices such as Dragonboard 410c, Raspberry Pi 2 & 3 etc. The OS features an impressive toolkit and a plethora of integration options.
But the icing on the cake is that .NET is fully compatible with Windows 10 IoT Core. Combining both these contributions from Microsoft enables developers to build great IoT apps with a decent UX.
The rich toolset of ASP.NET Core
A popular, widely-used open-source web framework, ASP.NET Core allows developers to create visually appealing web applications including IoT apps. Combined with the Windows 10 IoT Core, one can also use ASP.NET Core to build services that can run on the background of IoT devices.
The highlight however is ASP.NET Core’s toolset. The framework supports a number of popular programming languages like Visual Basic, C# etc. and facilitates faster deployment, excellent performance, and easier cloud integration. With ASP.NET Core, the devs are also free to choose the cloud platform for their applications – be it AWS, Google Cloud IoT, or Microsoft Azure. It’s no wonder why the ASP.NET development services industry is still one of the fastest growing tech industries in the world.
Ready-made solutions
.NET encourages developers to use its ready-made solutions to save time. But this also has another advantage. When using .NET’s ready-made solutions, the developers are less likely to encounter a coding issue that hasn’t been rectified or resolved by the community.
If the devs use ready-made .NET solutions for IoT and comes across some obstacle, chances are someone already encountered and resolved it and was generous enough to publish the code on GitHub. The reusable code generated by the .NET community can speed up IoT app development considerably.
Supportive community
The best thing developers can have is a supportive community backing a technology they are extensively working with. .NET has such a community. Thousands of experienced developers in the community can help thousands of amateur developers trying to figure out IoT development. They normally hang out on GitHub and StackOverflow publishing unique pre-written code pieces and relieving amateur developers of their coding headaches.
Conclusion
.NET has been around for a while and consistently retains its position in the market countering advancements from potential replacements. In fact, it’s only become more popular with its rich toolset, open source persona, and strong community support. All of these traits combined makes IoT app development a fun activity with .NET.
