In this age, startups contribute a lot in driving innovation across various industries. Not all startups succeed in their ventures however. Initially, it wasn’t easy for startups to compete and eventually surpass their already-established competitors and grow their own reputation at the same time. Software development startups, particularly, had many hurdles ahead of them at that time and they still do.

But Microsoft recently announced an initiative that could benefit startups in their run on dynamic, competitive environments – Microsoft for Startups. Also known as the Bizspark program, the initiative provides startups that lack funds for licenses and platforms an opportunity to develop and market enterprise-grade software solutions.

The ASP.NET program along with Bizspark is now considered an excellent way for startups to take their first step in the tech world. This consequently led to a rise in demand for ASP.NET development services. ASP.NET is now seen as a technology that startups can leverage for accelerated growth. We will be exploring this subject in this blog. But before we begin, here are a few facts that emphasize the importance of ASP.NET and the reason for its ever-growing popularity.

A SimilarTech research found that over 17 million websites are built using ASP.NET. According to BuiltWith, over 41 million live websites use ASP.NET in their records at present.

Let’s dig into how the popular Microsoft technology solution can help startups in 2019.
 

Easy interoperability

 
With Microsoft releasing Windows 10 IoT, startups have an opening they can utilize to grow faster in a world that’s expected to be dominated by the Internet of Things in the times to come. However, interoperability is a concern that many IoT enthusiasts have.

With ASP.NET, interoperability won’t be an issue. As a matter of fact, it’d be more secure with ASP.NET. Combined with Microsoft Azure IoT suite, the framework grants impressive open source flexibility that amplifies development speed without compromising security.

So in 2019, for startups planning to take a shot with IoT as ammunition, ASP.NET guarantees a precise aim and stability.
 

Security for the future

 
As technologies advance and IoT gains momentum, data security concerns and the increasing tenacity of cyber-criminals make startups hesitant to pool their available resources to drive innovation. ASP.NET however has evolved big enough to combat most cyber-threats with its high-end security features. The Microsoft framework’s MVC architecture makes it even easier to build scalable applications that can be easily integrated with existing business applications without opening up security holes.
 

The Azure harmony

 
We are pretty sure that the cloud holds the future for almost every kind of business that deals with new-gen technologies. For companies that rely on Microsoft platforms for growth, Microsoft Azure is an appealing and beneficial choice. But what makes Azure an ideal choice for startups is the fact that it goes hand in hand with ASP.NET. The combination has a very low fail-rate for startups that are prepared to wield them effectively. It will certainly make a difference for startups this year, and the cherry on top is that Microsoft will be there to help.
 

Improved versatility for mobile app development

 
Back in the day, it wasn’t easy for application developers to build mobile apps based on .NET. But now things have changed. .NET evolved over the years to become even more versatile than it used to be, enabling startups to build mobile apps that can provide rich user experiences without hassle.
 

Conclusion

 
ASP.NET has always been known for its versatility and diversity. Despite being pitted against strong rivals, the framework has been successfully retaining its demand and popularity for years. With its great flexibility and multitude of impressive features, ASP. NET is undoubtedly the most ideal web solution for startups to begin their journey to success in 2019.

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.

In the last couple of years, software development underwent many evolutions in terms of new methodologies, approaches, development tools, and even the mindset of the people using the tools. Due to new efficient approaches to development and users’ uncompromising expectations to quality assurance, testing also gained almost equal importance as development.

When it comes to software testing, there has been a significant increase in the number and variety of testing tools with multiple features and functionalities, which include both open source and proprietary tools. Due to the change, or rather ‘advancements’, in testing trends, testers are now considered as information brokers. They also have to be updated on emerging as well as modern mainstream technologies to design effective test strategies.

All of these facts emphasize the influence of technologies on various industries, and the influence will persist as long as there are advancements in technologies. If you look at a big-picture view, you would notice new technologies gradually shaping up the future of software testing. Here are 4 such technologies that will impact software testing and transform it in the near future.
 

Artificial Intelligence

 
AI, being the new buzzword, is at the top of almost every list of influential modern-day technologies. Thanks to AI, self-driving cars and intelligent digital home assistants are not sci-fi concepts anymore. They are today’s reality. AI’s influence spread across several sectors including finance, health care, travel & transport, and, of course, software testing.

However, as of now, the AI in software testing is still in its infancy. Only a very few tools that use AI/Machine Learning technologies are considered reliable for authoring and executing functional testing, end-to-end testing, and regression testing. AI finds its use primarily in test automation associated with UI. The algorithm evolves by learning from the test cases created by users, eventually becoming capable of creating test cases on its own adhering to specific preset conditions. AI algorithms can also track changes in the code made by developers which may affect test cases that were already performed prior to the changes. This means the tester won’t have to spend maintenance time on test scripts.
 

DevOps

 
The DevOps approach promoted collaboration between the software development and operations team, thus ensuring constant automation and monitoring throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC). DevOps is likely to bring major changes to software testing in the coming days.

For instance, DevOps may require the QA tasks to be aligned to ensure a hassle-free Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery cycle. We can also expect QA environments to be standardized in a DevOps ecosystem. However, for DevOps to truly make a difference in testing, automation is the key. Automation and DevOps are quite dependent on each other as one cannot be effective without the other. Considering that fact, we can safely assume that automation will have great value in the future of software testing, more than it has now.
 

IoT

 
Another technology that shares the same spotlight as AI, IoT at present is considered to be very promising. The advent of smart wearables and the concept of smart homes and connected devices give IoT a lot of hype, garnering it major investments from tech behemoths. However, behind the flashy concept lies the sophisticated reality of multiple communications and integrations taking place every second.

The data that IoT devices share are transmitted through the cloud seamlessly in real-time across multiple connected devices and apps. The notification should reach the right user at the right time as well. Testing such sophisticated functionalities can be very challenging for testers. Because IoT introduces such complexity, it’s expected that software testing will adapt to meet the challenges with further evolutions that focus more on integration testing.
 

QAaaS

 
QA as a Service is not anything new, and has been around for the past couple of years, enabling companies (medium-large sized businesses) to meet their software testing needs effectively. Not all companies that provide enterprise application services offer QAaaS solutions. But those that do can make various aspects of the testing process much easier.

QAaaS providers offer in-depth test reporting features with logs, screenshots, and even video logs. They also facilitate easier integration with Continuous Integration systems and provide automation tools to reduce coding time. QAaaS providers can also handle the maintenance of servers that run automated tests so that team members would be able to focus more on critical testing tasks.

Owing to the many benefits of the service, QAaaS could be standardized very soon. The service is not yet accessible to businesses of all sizes. However, we can expect it to be much more affordable and refined with better offerings in the near future.
 

Conclusion

 
Software testing is expected to get big changes starting this year. It’s just a matter of time as other technologies advance to being more affordable and accessible to all kinds of businesses. Even under such positive conditions, the mindset of the testers need to change as well, in order to accept and adapt to using better technologies to ensure quality.

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Mobility is just as important for businesses as it is for people. According to UN’s International Telecommunications Union, there are more active mobile devices on the planet today than the total human population. Though mobility is consumer-driven in general, it’s fundamentally different for enterprises.

Though businesses have to leverage the potential of mobile technologies to move ahead of competitors in this age, many are still hesitant to do just that. They do use a number of apps however but rely a lot on legacy systems to run their core processes.

One reason for their indifference to enterprise mobility is the thought that they will need to invest a lot in building a fully functional mobile app that can deliver the same results as the apps running on their legacy systems. This can take months or even years. Many misconceptions about mobile application development and enterprise mobility also attribute to deterring businesses from going the mobile way.

Let’s explore a few such popular myths and the truth behind them.

#1. Optimizing a desktop app to work on mobile devices will work

Many businesses have the wrong notion that the best approach to adopting mobility is to have their existing desktop apps transformed to work on mobile devices at a low investment. This is mostly seen as a first step to mobility. Such a transformation won’t be worthwhile as most legacy desktop apps would only be able to run on smaller mobile screens while being incapable of utilizing mobile hardware to make operations easier and faster. In addition, they will also lack many mobile-friendly functionalities that a business will need.

Users will have to spend more time pinching and zooming to access the app’s functions, and scroll a lot for navigating too. This would eventually force them to find a different, more convenient solution.

#2. In-house mobile app development is the best bet

Some enterprises do find success with their in-house development teams. But there are potentially hundreds of apps that have been shelved or is taking too long to enter the market. Mobile app development is a challenging process that takes a lot of time. Additionally, mobile apps require more time and cost for maintenance and upgrades compared to other technologies.

With technologies evolving dynamically and becoming harder to keep track of, it may not always be possible for the in-house team to customize the mobile solution accordingly unless the enterprise is willing to spend vast resources on achieving mobility. Ultimately, the cost and the requirements would be challenging to meet for a growing enterprise.

A professional mobile application development company can do justice in such a situation, and build the app much faster at a much lower cost.

#3. Businesses and its operations can keep going without mobility

Many businesses that haven’t adopted mobility can give many reasons for why they don’t need a mobile app to keep moving forward. The truth is that those enterprises failed to see the revolution that’s been happening around them. Mobile devices have become personal for people, providing businesses with new, innovative opportunities to reach their consumers on their own personal devices anywhere across the globe.

The BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) trend is gaining more momentum every day, with many businesses adopting it. Smart businesses have found that it’s statistically feasible to take ways that beget more productivity from users rather than keeping their focus on user preferences. High performance, mobile-ready business processes are being introduced every day. All these facts are a testament to the fact that enterprise mobility can indeed turn the tides for a business, facilitating a more accelerated growth.
 

Conclusion

 
If a business is still not convinced that mobility is the gamechanger, they would just fall behind competitors very soon. The investment has proved worthy for businesses across various domains. Mobility is changing the way businesses operate, especially when technologies like IoT and the cloud keep growing at incredible pace. Enterprise mobility is now or never.

Open source keeps picking up the pace every year evidently. It was expected to boom as each year passed. Now we have reached a point where almost all applications feature some sort of open source element.

According to Gartner, an estimated 70% of newly deployed applications would be running on open source databases by 2018.

Integrating open source elements to an application enables developers to cut costs considerably and reduce time-to-market. The immediate future may add to the benefits, but because of technology’s metamorphic nature, the existing and established ways will be replaced with new ones.

Here are a few ways open source technologies can transform enterprises in the coming years.
 

Critical gaps in the model will become obsolete

 
Despite its unprecedented growth and the many benefits for developers, the open source model still has many critical gaps that haven’t been addressed yet. One of the most important of those gaps – collaboration, however, is being redressed. By 2018, experts expect seamless collaboration in software development and other sectors with multiple functionalities.

We already have collaborative platforms sporting functionalities like video conferencing, essentially allowing developers to form workgroups. A great example is GitHub.

But it isn’t just collaboration that needs to be addressed. There are obstacles for troubleshooting and technical support as well, more so than we think despite the huge open source community in the internet. Great technical support so far only applies to the more popular open source titles. This ‘hitch’ led to a new trend where open source software will be provided with commercially supported services. Though this can somewhat set things right, this particular gap is expected to be completely taken care of next year.
 

Security concerns will be addressed

 
This is something we’ve been hearing for a long time, ever since open source started gaining traction. Security has always been a concern since the source code of open source software is open and free. Because anyone can modify this code, vulnerabilities will most likely be present. This makes it particularly easy for hackers, and particularly threatening for enterprises wanting to use such software.

Things got more complicated after enterprises started shifting to the cloud while using open source software outside the company firewall. All hackers need to do is exploit those vulnerabilities to get access to the system from outside the firewall. This increases the risks of high impact cyber-attacks on profitable applications that enterprises use.

For the past few years, developers and security professionals have been paying close attention to this issue, while figuring out ways to implement effective security mechanisms and encryptions. 2017 increased the stakes. So we can expect some serious progress on this issue next year.
 

The Open Source – IoT compatibility

 
Open source established its authority as a preferred platform for the growing IoT. The application is primarily on the automobile industry. Although things look good at the moment with open source technologies being adopted by more businesses for IoT related applications this year, experts estimate that the sector will soon start to be plagued by the same concerns people have when it comes to general open source software.

2018 will be about exploring open source vulnerabilities in the IoT and sector, and hopefully coming up with effective solutions. That said, the automobile industry is certainly going digital and open source will definitely play a vital role in its evolution in the coming years.
 

The fate of existing open source technologies

 
Open source technologies have proved their worth in the form of stable and efficient infrastructure software as well. However, more cutting-edge closed software solutions have been coming out recently, offering considerably better services to customers. However, despite the odds, the open source community promises an immediate comeback in the sector. This could mean that enterprises will have far better options for infrastructure solutions next year that are well worth the investment.

The same can be said for Cloudera, another open source platform that’s gaining popularity along with Elastic. Though it’s still too early to say that these technologies will have a much bigger role in the coming years, they will nevertheless trigger the development of more efficient solutions – open source and otherwise. Other existing open source technologies like Drupal 8 is expected to evolve even further to give more flexibility to developers in future projects. This also applies to companies providing open source development services.

Collectively, everything seems to be indicating that there is no stopping the open source trend any time soon. It has grown larger this year, and shows no signs of stopping next year as well, unfolding lucrative prospects for enterprises and startups alike.