These days it’s very tempting to use the latest and greatest framework or library to do web development, but this is a dangerous inclination if profits or success are the goal rather
than academic distraction or technical spelunking. The problem is that the flavor of the month of frameworks and tools that are cluttering the web development landscape are long on promise and short on track record for delivery.
ASP.NET is a known commodity that has a proven track record of scalability, reliability, ease of use and comes with an ecosystem rife with tools that can greatly accelerate getting the job done and the site generating the profits or the success for which it is designed.
These days everything has to be a list so while I cannot recommend the latest fad in development, I can at least keep to the latest fad of journalism. To wit here are the top 7 reasons to use Visual Studio and ASP.NET for your next Web Application:
1. Visual Studio is the gold standard for software development and is widely regarded as the most productive software development environment with incredible debugging capabilities to help handle those unforeseen issues that are destined to threaten the delivery date (more on those at #5).
2. There are existing systems and starter projects for hard problems from CRM to Ecommerce. If you are developing a sophisticated system for the web then odds are very good that there is already a really good starter, exemplar or framework that will get you most of the way there before you ever write a line of code. For example if collaboration is required then DotNetNuke and SharePoint both provide ASP.NET development projects with almost anything you could want from Wikis to marketing tools to photo galleries to blogs for example. If you need Ecommerce there is the open source NopCommerce framework built on a foundation of ASP.NET. The list goes on and on.
3. Ecosystem: ASP.NET has a well-developed Component Ecosystem that reduces grids, date pickers and anything else to a drag and drop component. A notable example is Telerik’s UI for ASP.NET AJAX which is an incredible library of ready-made, cross browser compliant widgets that significantly reduce development time and supercharge a UI. A fierce competitor of Telerik is ComponentOne. They have an equally extraordinary library to aid the average ASP.NET programmer. For Dashboards, Reporting, Data Analytics and Data Visualization, Dundas is a great choice. The concept of writing everything from scratch these days is so totally “old school!”
4. Scalability: Thanks to Azure integration you can finish writing your code and put it on a hundred or a thousand servers in minutes.
5. Debugging: As mentioned earlier, ASP.NET has been through the ringer. It and Visual Studio were first released in January of 2002. And from day one has had fantastic debugging tools not only build into Visual Studio, but also available from third parties.
6. Security: While Microsoft takes a lot of abuse about security (it’s the biggest target after all), ASP.NET provides a wide range of security options for system authentication including capabilities for federating with providers such as Facebook or Gmail.
7. Framework: All frameworks are not created equal. In web development a Framework is often just a slick way to get databinding or some other facility, but the .NET Framework is the real deal and ASP.NET gives you the full power of Windows allowing deep integration with things like the file system or Active Directory for real enterprise web applications.
So give ASP.NET & Visual Studio a serious look while deciding on a course of direction for your corporate IT strategy. It’s a robust, rock solid foundation upon which you can build anything you imagination can conceive.
If you have any questions about how ASP.NET and Visual Studio can benefit your organization, please contact us and we would be happy to discuss your situation.
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