ASP.NET happens to be amongst the most successful web app development frameworks which Microsoft has introduced recently. Innovative features are being added with every single update, enabling the ASP.NET development services to deploy high-performance and scalable web apps. ASP.NET turns out to be a robust solution for creating awesome apps when paired with application monitoring plus other performance tools.
Many innovative features within the framework will allow you to overcome typical development challenges, enhance performance, and perform more with your apps.
Here, we have mentioned some vital ASP.NET Core features that you ought to know.
1. Cross-platform
At present, it is feasible for ASP.NET Core apps to run on virtually any platform such as Linux/Unix systems, Mac OS apart from Windows. Previously, ASP.NET apps couldn’t run on Mac and Linux; however, it is not required to develop different applications for different platforms while using different frameworks. It allows the developers to choose an operating system while developing apps. Because of ASP.NET core cross-platform nature, it is possible to make their applications available to an increasing number of users across various platforms.
2. Container support
In cloud computing, containers happen to be a logical packaging system that is employed for including code and other related dependencies within an image so that it will be possible to test an application and run effectively as well as quickly in various computing environments. Containers are responsible for providing virtualization at the OS level. Support is provided by ASP.NET Core development for using all these contemporary container technologies, including Kubernetes-container orchestration system, Docker-containerization platform, and so on.
3. High-Performance
It is a fact that performance happens to be among the developers’ most important concerns while creating powerful web apps. ASP.Net Core libraries, faster release cycles, tools optimization, innovative concepts associated with memory and space allocation help the developers to write effective and maintainable codes. The introduction of the Kestrel web server and providing top priority to high performance has made Asp.net Core one of the quickest web frameworks obtainable on the market for mobile apps, IoT, and clouds at present.
4. Development mode as well as other multiple environments
You will come across an innovative environment feature in ASP.NET Core which will enable us to discriminate between various behavior functionalities exhibited in the environments. It might be development, staging, testing, or production. There was no way to do this before Asp.net Core.
The Startup.cs file can be used for configuring our app for various environments. We use different JavaScript or CSS files in different environments like we usually employ CDN in production and local files at the time of the development stage.
5. Unified Web API and MVC frameworks
The Web API and MVC frameworks have been combined by ASP.NET Core rather than separate structures. It provides a streamlined and better development at present as there had been plenty of confusion with these two frameworks.
Moreover, Razor pages have been encompassed in ASP.NET core features which encapsulate the controller code and the model. It helps to make coding more useful where every single page happens to be self-contained with its code and view organized together. It enables 2-way data binding, which makes the creation of scenarios more fluid in the long run.
6. Support for multiple environments
Asp.net Core aids in bringing enhanced support for regulating application behavior across various multiple environments. It would be possible for the developers to handle multiple environments quite easily by using an environment variable. It is possible to set this variable to any value like staging, development, and production, which are provided by the framework. The environment where the application is running is represented by the variable such that it can be set up perfectly.
7. Dependency Injection
This happens to be amongst the essential ASP.NET Core features. It provides a loosely coupled code and is imperative for achieving testability, maintainability, and extensibility. This feature is utilized by various framework dependencies such as routing, configuration, loggers, etc.
8. New Health Checks API
The new features of ASP.NET Core contain a set of libraries that define abstraction and an IHealthCheck service plus middleware. The BeatPulse project, which was initiated for filling a void in the ASP.NET ecosystem, supports the innovative Health Checks API executed by Microsoft. This implies that developers will be able to include health checks for quite a few systems and dependences quite easily by making use of them.
9. Unification of development models
The Web API and MVC development models happen to be unified and use the identical base class controller. This enables the controller to expose Web Service and HTML features. The ASP.net Core MVC model offers functionality for generating web applications and web APIs, which are testable. Moreover, inbuilt support for content negotiation and multiple data formats makes the web APIs applicable across an extensive range of mobile devices and browsers.
10. Asynchronous through async/await
ASP.NET Core comes with outstanding support for using asynchronous programming patterns. At present, async is implemented in all typical .net framework processes and the majority of the third-party libraries. The majority of the contemporary applications invest a significant part of their time and CPU cycles waiting for web service calls, database queries, and other I/O operations for completion. One particular reason why ASP.net Core happens to be faster is the extensive usage of asynchronous patterns within the brand-new MVC and Kestrel frameworks.
11. SignalR & WebSockets
ASP.NET comes with first-class support when it comes to WebSockets. Developers can use it for persisting long-running connections and also communicating with the browser back and forth. SignalR happens to be a full framework which makes it very simple to take care of common scenarios.
We make use of SignalR quite heavily at Stackify. For instance, while viewing the existing monitoring data regarding one of the servers, each time we receive new data, it is immediately pushed to the browser to be updated in real-time. These sorts of scenarios are ideal for WebSockets, and SignalR makes it very simple to do.
12. CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) Protection
Security is extremely important. It is amongst those things which can be plenty of work for preventing some specific types of attacks. CSRF happens to be about hijacking users’ authentic sessions for performing an action which they did not initiate.
For instance, let us pretend that you go to another website after logging in to your bank account. If the other website could perform a POST to your bank’s website for transferring funds, that would not be a good thing. It might perform that your online session is valid on the banking website, and your bank doesn’t validate requests properly.
ASP.net comes with a proper framework that helps to avoid these sorts of attacks. It helps in generating anti-forgery tokens.
13. “Self-hosted” web apps
On some occasions, you must make a web app that will be set up onto a desktop and not a server that is running IIS. One flawless example of this happens to be the free ASP.net profiler known as Prefix. Its front end happens to be all HTML loaded from an ASP.net app operating as a Windows Service.
There are various ways in which it is possible to create a self-hosted ASP.net web app. You can accomplish this in .net 4.5 by making use of Nancy, Owin, or WCF. We make use of ASP.net Web API along with Owin for Prefix.
You can also use the standard Kestrel Web server with ASP.net Core. One significant advantage of .net Core happens to be that your web app is a console application. IIS simply sits as a reverse proxy in front of it. This implies that it will also be possible to deploy the app only with the Kestrel Web server for non-server-based use cases such as Prefix.
14. Action Filters
One of the most significant features of ASP.NET Core happens to be the support for extensible filters. It enables you to implement functionality which you can apply to an entire action or controller without changing the action on its own. Filters are employed for specifying caching, authorization, error handling, or any custom logic that you like to apply.
15. Extensible Output Caching
ASP.net uses this feature for caching the output produced by a page and serving the content for any future request. It likewise stores information that is not regularly updated and outputs that particular information from a cached location.
Specifying the amount of time in any request should be cached using HTTP headers is made very simple by ASP.net. It likewise comes with support for caching output on your Web server within the memory itself. It is also possible for you to use providers such as Redis for handling the output caching.
16. Localization and globalization
ASP.NET makes it quite simple to localize numbers, dates, as well as text within your web app. Localization is extremely important in case, you’d like the application to be used throughout the world.
ASP.NET Core allows you to customize your application for more than one language utilizing resource files. One can consider these files to be the central source where every single text is kept, and webpages can read the files for getting the labels populated. You will come across a couple of resource types:
- Local resources which are specific for a particular page
- Global resources which are common for the entire website
Conclusion
One can consider ASP.net Core to be an open-source and high-performance multiplatform network that helps create contemporary cloud applications. ASP.net happens to be amongst the most effective frameworks for virtually all types of applications out there. Microsoft has invested a considerable amount of time in making ASP.NET Core a competitive framework on the market for helping the developers create powerful applications within a short period with the best performance and scalability.