ASP.NET turned out to be one of Microsoft’s greatest contributions for innovative web application development. The popular open source framework kept getting refined with each update adding more features or augmenting the existing ones to help developers effectively build and deploy highly scalable web applications. The framework’s myriad features are designed to help developers overcome various development challenges while giving the clients high-performance web apps.
ASP.NET’s success in delivering value over the years contributed to the high demand for ASP. NET development services. In this blog, we picked 5 features of ASP.NET Core that we though was the most useful to build innovative web applications.
Cross-platform & container support
.NET Core brought with it several features that enabled developers to create ASP.NET applications and deploy them across all the popular platforms – Windows, Linux, and macOS. The open source community along with the tech giant contributed to making Linux an ideal platform for running ASP.NET. It also offers great support for popular containers including Docker and Kubernetes.
Boosted performance
For a software, performance is the most important aspect. No matter how feature rich it or appealing it is, if its performance is underwhelming, it’d be rejected. A combination of ASP.NET Core and the Kestrel web server considerably buffs the speed of the framework.
Back in the day, the technology that powered the ASP.NET integrated pipeline and IIS was outdated. The new Kestrel web server, however, was completely redesigned to leverage asynchronous programming models which subsequently made it lightweight and fast.
MVC & Web API frameworks unified
Before the arrival of ASP.NET Core, developers relied on MVC and Web API frameworks. MVC catered to building web applications that serve up HTML while web API frameworks were used to create RESTful services using XML or JSON. However, there were many overlaps when the two frameworks were involved. ASP.NET Core combined both thus simplifying software development. The Razor Pages feature of ASP.NET Core extend the capabilities of the MVC framework in encapsulating ‘model and ‘controller’ aspects of a page with two-way binding.
CSRF protection
The importance of security for enterprise web applications is obvious. In addition, the web application’s end user will also have to employ stringent security policies to identify and eliminate several vulnerabilities that can be exploited. Of the many types of attack that can happen, CSRF happens to be a particularly dangerous one for an enterprise. CSRF is where cyber-attackers hijack users’ authenticated sessions and perform actions in their name without their knowing. ASP.NET Core can generate anti-forgery tokens preventing this kind of attacks.
Output caching
The output caching feature of ASP.NET Core allows the framework to cache the output a page generates and serve the cached content later when requested. Data that are not updated frequently are stored securely, and are served from a cached location when there is a request. The framework also can be used to specify how long any request should be cached.
Conclusion
Unlike most Microsoft technologies, ASP.NET Core is open source. The community itself is dedicated to improving the framework further. Due to its open source nature and community support, ASP.NET Core supports the use of various third party platforms and frameworks in conjunction with it to build innovative applications easier than before.
