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.

It’s blatantly obvious that slow loading times and awkward interactions in a web application deter users forcing them to seek a better alternative. For years, developers relied on powerful microsoft technologies to develop high performance, interactive web applications. But not all developers always manage to build websites and web apps with the best performance.

That said, this blog will serve as a guide to many web development beginners on improving the performance of a website.

Before attempting to improve the performance of a website, it’s wise to collect a baseline of the web application’s performance. This is to see how the changes to the site are impacting its performance. Sometimes, the changes may do more harm than good reducing the performance. But performance tuning is still recommended as a holistic exercise that will impart deep insights on developers.

The following tips are recommended by our team with years of experience in delivering top-notch ASP.NET development services. The effectiveness of some tips may vary from website to website, and also depends on the nature and scale of the website. So, do take this with a grain of salt.
 

Reduce HTTP requests

 
Did you know that a browser pays a tax to open connection to a server?

It does. And the tax is what you call a TCP/IP connection overhead. When there is high latency, it takes quite a long time for the browser to establish new connections. In addition, browsers may also come with a limit on the number of requests they will make to one server at a time. The significance of these connection requests makes it evident that reducing the number of HTTP requests is a great performance optimization tactic.
 

CSS content should be loaded first

 
It’s better to load the CSS content of the website first. To understand why, it’s important to understand the nature of browsers – what it is that gives them great speed when downloading web pages.

When downloading pages, browsers attempt to render the application as soon as it has content. This is pretty much a wild guess by the browser as it won’t know what content on the page would go against the guesses it made while downloading the page. If the browser discovers that it has made a wrong guess on the rendering of  the page, it will start over again discarding all the work it has done till then. A stylesheet can trigger such a scenario which is why it’d better to avoid having styles that modifies elements that have already been rendered by the browser. This is why loading CSS files first is important.
 

Image compression

 
A website without images would be bland and without substance. Experienced web developers often use inline-SVG or CSS tricks to make vector images for web pages. This is because such images tend to be smaller than raster images. Not all developers can make this happen. They can compress the image instead or in their words ‘shrink the image’. Developers can make use of a number of services or plugins for JavaScript build tool to perform image shrinking.
 

Conclusion

 
Unlike software development, developing web applications require developers to take a lot of other factors into account including web browsers. Tuning the performance of web apps is much diverse than that of software. The end goal, however, is to satisfy users. Web performance optimization promises a better experience for end-users and better opportunities for the brand itself owing to the impressed app users.

Microsoft’s always had a pragmatic approach when it comes to Virtual Reality. The tech giant seems to be sticking to that approach with SharePoint spaces, the most recent addition to one of the most Microsoft technologies today. SharePoint spaces enables users to build and view Mixed Reality experiences with SharePoint platform, potentially redefining collaboration.
 

SharePoint Spaces

 
SharePoint Spaces serves a purpose similar to PowerPoint. The latter made it easier to create business presentations. SharePoint Spaces, however, helps build content viewable with Mixed Reality headsets or with browsers that support WebVR. It features templates for content like a 360 degree videos or a gallery of 3D models – anything immersive enough to be potentially of use in training employees or a virtual customer catalog.

The technology was unveiled on May 21 during the SharePoint Conference North America opening keynote.
 

Potential usage scenarios

 
Microsoft teased a lot of potential usage scenarios for SharePoint Spaces including but not limited to:

• Recruitment and training
• Onboarding
• Product development

This seems to go with Microsoft’s approach to support business-focused applications that leverage modern mainstream technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, and Augmented Reality.
 

Sneak peek on Microsoft’s new strategies

 
From what we can see, Microsoft’s new strategy for ‘modern workplaces’ seem to be revolving around mixed reality. At a recent Build conference, Microsoft unveiled two new Mixed Reality-based apps – Layout and Remote Assist, designed for work scenarios which speaks more on the tech giant’s strategy.

Despite the uncertainty whether SharePoint Spaces is just another solution without a problem asking for it, Microsoft’s gesture still seems to be potentially building up innovative opportunities from a business’ perspective. The highlight is that the user doesn’t need to have any 3D knowledge to craft a Mixed Reality experience with SharePoint Spaces. The feature might come of use for many business domains including software development companies.

Though SharePoint Spaces only gives a basic Mixed Reality experience now, it’s bound to be updated to pack better, more innovative features if Microsoft still sticks to its present approach. Microsoft reportedly plans to make SharePoint spaces available to anyone with an Office 365 commercial plan. Users would be able to work with templates with which they can create Mixed Reality environments. They have the option to add documents, 2D files, 3D videos, and many other data stored in SharePoint.

Microsoft also touted new additions to OneDrive and SharePoint that will augment the platforms to possess AI capabilities. Microsoft will be adding a Scan button to the OneDrive mobile app soon which will enable users to scan images, photos, business cards, and whiteboards. The app will also be capable of automatically uploading images to Office 365 which users can work with later.
 

Conclusion

 
The beloved collaboration platform seems to be climbing new heights or at least making an effort to. Considering the fact that VR/AR, or rather Mixed Reality, will play a pivotal role in the growth of businesses in the not too distant future, enterprises using SharePoint would heartily welcome the latest upgrade to the platform. For an Agile software development company that leverages SharePoint for collaboration, there could be a lot of immersive experiences ahead.

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.

It’s 2018 now – a year where the cloud, open source, and artificial intelligence are rising in power. Microsoft, having always been a pioneer in offering dynamic and flexible technologies, is still at it providing compliant, integrated frameworks, servers, languages and more.

One of Microsoft’s greatest contributions to developers is ASP.NET. Microsoft’s been looking out for it all these years, evident from its feature-rich present release. It’s been making developers happy for so long, and ASP.NET development services are now being looked up to for its role in Microsoft’s mobile-first and cloud-first strategy.

Out of all Microsoft technologies we’ve had till now, ASP.NET is one of the most competent technologies that facilitate development and implementation of complex enterprise applications. With the release of ASP.NET MVC, the future of ASP.NET is looking brighter.
 

ASP.NET MVC – A more modern approach

 
ASP.NET MVC brought with it a new, flexible approach to app development compared to the traditional style. The fresh framework from Microsoft is already popular for its scalability, simplicity, performance, testability, and quick rendering capabilities, and is now a top contender in the market when it comes to developing high-performance enterprise apps with intuitive user experience.

The highlights of ASP.NET MVC include:

• The MVC framework: This is what segregates the Business, Presentation, and Data layers making things much easier for developers.
• Focus on TDD: This capability of ASP.NET MVC makes it ideal for Agile environments where collaboration between testing and development is vital. The MVC’s focus on Test-Driven Development (TDD) synchronizes testing and development by facilitating project testing during the development itself. This also ensures good quality and timely delivery of the final deliverable.
• Control over HTML: ASP.NET MVC provides a higher availability over the modern changes of user interface, and more control on the rendered HTML. This makes front-end modifications much faster and more efficient.
• Easy JavaScript integration: With the MVC framework, developers are saved from strenuous hard-coding. JavaScript integration is much simplified now.
• Cross-platform compatibility: If it isn’t cross-platform compatible, it isn’t the latest tech. This is how it is nowadays. ASP.NET MVC allows developers to independently operate on various platforms without being concerned about the application’s execution on multiple platforms. The developed application would be compatible with any platform.
• Improved cloud support: The modular architecture of ASP.NET MVC and its flexible structure supports the cloud deployment model. Apps developed with the technology can run on the cloud.
• It’s open source: The essence of open source technology is embedded into ASP.NET MVC. Its code is accessible to anyone, and experienced developers can even create ViewEngine. They are also able to append additional libraries and frameworks depending on the requirements.

Conclusion

 
Many software development companies still use ASP.NET to deliver powerful solutions to enterprises, after all these years. The many benefits of ASP.NET MVC and its capabilities are testament to the potential of ASP.NET even in today’s cloud age. With Microsoft’s support for open source and their strategy focusing on the cloud and mobile, ASP.NET will indeed be subject to further evolutions in the coming years. The technology so far hasn’t disappointed, and will hopefully continue to remain the developer’s delight for years to come.