Their plans were later elaborated in detail through a series of blogs. There will be fundamental changes that looks favorable to C# and F#. Though there wasn’t any negative statements regarding VB’s future, the vibe their statements left made it seem that a bumpy road awaits VB.

Where they stand now…

According to Torgersen, C# is the most popular of the three, and will keep evolving as a state-of-the-art programming language. He added that F# is steadily climbing the ladder, and could become the best-tooled functional language on the market. VB is apparently the odd one here, as it is now mostly used for Windows Forms applications and in ASP.NET development by new developers. But many surveys indicate that developers are moving from VB to C# owing to the latter’s richer ecosystem.

Microsoft’s reason for changing its development strategy could be the fact that both C# and VB have different audiences. They found that new developers in Visual Studio favor VB, as it’s more comfortable them to learn the tricks of the trade. VB is still a tool for client-server programming while C# evolved to being useful for n-tier web-based applications.

F#, on the other hand, takes a different, more independent path. Microsoft will reportedly take measures to make F# more useful in the .NET landscape, hopefully with better error messages and support.

Where they are going

C# and VB will be going different ways from now on. VB’s popularity is dwindling and it will eventually end up disappearing from the radar for good. Evidently, C# is diverging from VB. As VB will be supporting the standard base class libraries set along .NET framework in the not too distant future, we can expect some amount of cross-platform work in the dying language. However, not all VB codes would be portable. Some can be shifted to a smaller set of libraries while the rest remains on on-premises applications. F# will find its place among financial services and machine learning-based applications.

What’s in it for enterprise developers

For starters, they will have two important choices.

• Move VB codes to newer platforms
• Start using C#

The second choice gives them access to a plethora of target frameworks, and across many devices. C# can also directly address the .NET Core platform via APIs, not to mention other platforms. This means, Unity and other derivatives of C# will be capable of supporting their own APIs.

Choosing one of the two will require the developers to think about where they want to be in a few years. Only a subset of .NET APIs will be made available to them if they choose to go with VB development. They need to consider the evolution of .NET platform as a whole, and whether they plan to work on cloud or mobile technologies. C# seems to be a safe bet from the looks of things though VB will still be around for a little while longer.

One other alternative is to stick with both VB and C#, as the .NET framework makes it easy to mix them up. The transition is as easy as that between VB.NET and VBA. But this could be just a temporary advantage. From what we could surmise from Microsoft’s new programming language strategy, C# would prove to be the better path in the long run. This would likely bring about more changes in the software development industry this year.

The post Microsoft’s Programming Language Strategy & The Future of Visual Basic appeared first on Software Development Company Dubai UAE - Verbat Technologies.

The company is known for the research it does prior to developing and releasing products. According to the Director of Product, their research saw frustrated marketers, content creators, and developers as they are swept over by the sheer complexity of various CMS tools they have to use, while not getting the advertised benefits of those tools.

This was stated as one of the reasons they developed the latest Kentico version as an intuitive tool that solves aforementioned issue by properly aligning both marketers and developers, while allowing them to get their job done faster.

Pain points

Karol also explained three primary issues or pain points Kentico noticed in the market during its research, which were also considered while they developed a rooted solution in the form of Kentico 10.

• Many organizations want to increase productivity but lack the necessary technology to do just that
• CMS lacks the capability to deliver enough context for businesses to achieve their goals
• CMS either doesn’t scale as needed or demands a price to do so

First pain point – Improving productivity

He further stated how the new Kentico addresses each pain point, and emphasized the importance of improving productivity. He explained with an example of how content authors spend about 10-15 minutes searching for the right image, and then spend more time optimizing it for various channels and layouts. Kentico 10 offers a solution for this in the form of responsive images management, which enables users to specifically predefine image variants. The system will only need a command from the user on the variants they want to be created, and the image will be automatically optimized accordingly before upload. This improves productivity, addressing the first pain point.

Second pain point – Context

Regarding context, Kentico pointed out that marketers struggle the most with three main issues.

• Converting prospects into customers
• Increasing existing customer value
• Attaining an ROI through marketing

The success of marketing campaigns directly influence the chances of achieving these goals. But Kentico identified a workaround which involves tweaking the marketing campaigns. Marketers learn and improve with failures. However, the tools available don’t let marketers tweak the campaigns they are already running based on their new findings. They will have to conclude the campaign, and start a new one from scratch.

As a solution to this, Kentico added a campaign management tool in Kentico 10 which enables marketers to tweak running campaigns on the go, rather than ending it and starting all over again while losing data in the process. Karol also mentioned that they added something similar to an analytics tool to the Kentico 10 in the form of ‘campaign journey tracking’. This basically gives marketers an analysis of the running campaign, enabling them to identify the point in the campaign that got the highest visitor drop outs. This indicates the points of failure and the steps in the campaign that can be improved. Though the solution addresses the context pain point, it also aids in productivity enhancement.

Third pain point – Scalability

Data sets in organizations today are larger than ever. 53% of the data in these organizations are estimated to be left unanalyzed. 45% of the organizations surveyed were unable to analyze data across disparate sources, and 42% do not feel they can analyze the data enough to gain beneficial insights.

The data will only keep growing. Consider Internet of Things (IoT) as well, and we will have over 20 billion ‘connected devices’ in the world by 2020. This means there could be a great increase in data volume and data fragmentation. A tool that scales itself along with growing data can make a significant difference. Keeping scalability in mind, Kentico made sure that the latest release of its CMS tool is the most scalable version to date.

The Future of Kentico

Karol also spoke about the future of Kentico in the interview, and what they plan to do now that Kentico 10 is out. He revealed that they have already started working on Kentico 11 which will be featured as an improved ecommerce solution that focusses on integrations. As organizations generally go for reputed, standalone ecommerce solutions, Kentico plans to provide integrations with those popular B2B/B2C ecommerce solutions.

This would be beneficial particularly to organizations in the mid-market as they wouldn’t miss a stable, effective CMS solution that matches their ecommerce functionalities well. The Director of Product also revealed that Kentico plans to work with ecommerce market leaders to develop optimal solutions that deliver the best of both CMS and ecommerce. He added that they will be improving data visualization, and the marketing dashboards as well.

As Kentico’s Bronze Partner, Verbat looks forward to more innovative CMS solutions from Kentico that caters to the needs of the market and help organizations meet or exceed the high level of customer expectations.

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Originally announced as ASP.NET vNext, it was later referred to as ASP.NET 5. But because the core concept was new and due to a couple of other reasons, ASP.NET 5 was renamed ASP.NET Core 1.0. One reason for renaming was that the Core 1.0 framework wasn’t designed as a replacement or a continuation of ASP.NET 4.6.

It’s an all new modular and comparatively smaller framework that works well with everything else we know about ASP.NET Development.

What does it bring to the table?

ASP.NET Core 1.0 is a full re-write. It’s an open source, cross-platform framework with an alternative to Mono – CoreCLR, allowing developers to build and run applications on both CoreCLR and Mono regardless of the computer’s operating system. Node.js has been heavily integrated into the framework to run pre and post build events.

Microsoft took a big leap by introducing a new IDE in the form of the Visual Studio Code editor – open source as well. Apparently, Microsoft went to great lengths and invested heavily on ASP.NET Core 1.0 to make it cross platform portable.

But why?

Running applications in not just Windows but Mac and Linux too? Yes, it seems. But why would Microsoft invest so much to attract developers who don’t use Windows? They are already keen on using effective technologies they are familiar with and it’s unlikely they will use MS SQL server in their projects.

Visual Studio Code is free as well. Though it doesn’t matter, there is no clear answer to these questions apart from a few speculations. The .NET community is shrinking. It could be the reason why Microsoft decided to go completely cross-platform to attract .NET developers from every nook and corner.

Without .NET developers, demand for Microsoft Azure and MS SQL will dwindle. Think about it. Windows desktop application development is taking its last breath. The mobile app market still belongs to Android and iOS. This leaves web applications development where ASP.NET still reigns (sort of) despite heavy competition.

Now non-windows users will also be able to develop web applications with ASP.NET Core 1.0. The lack of portability issue has been addressed as well. Things are finally starting to look good for Microsoft.

The Replacement

The ASP.NET 4.6 was a disappointment for many developers as they didn’t get to try out big innovations. The innovations were not readily made available in the Windows platform. The developers couldn’t keep up with the vastly changing technology and knew little to nothing about new innovations that other open source frameworks provided.

Add to that the lack of cross platform compatibility, and it will make more sense why ASP.NET community became smaller.

This is why ASP.NET Core 1.0 is considered to be a game changer.

• Open source
• Cross platform compatible
• Fast, modular and extensible
• Can be developed with languages like C#, F# etc.

ASP.NET 4.6 is living on borrowed time and will eventually go down in history as the new classic ASP.NET. But for now, it won’t completely vanish. ASP.NET Core 1.0 offers some exciting prospects with compelling features. The future of web development looks bright at this point.

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