What Is ASP.NET

This article covers two key terms: the technology stack and the ecommerce enterprise platform. Therefore, let us start by giving some more explanation about them first. 

An enterprise ecommerce platform can process 10K+ requests per day, and even scale up to millions of requests per day when based on the same technologies. Retailers and other online commerce players such as manufacturers, distributors, logistics companies, etc. need to purchase such a platform from a vendor, or their own development team must write such a software. Even if a company buys a solution from a vendor, it needs to rewrite some code because every large business has many unique processes that require adaptation by integrator partners or by the company’s own IT team. 

The technology stack is a combination of programming languages and various development tools, e.g., SDKs (Software Development Kits), frameworks, etc. These tools are usually divided into technologies for the client-side and server-side development. With the popularity of headless architecture, the front end and back end are completely separated and communicate only over API. This means that the front end and the back end can be developed by different teams and even in several programming languages. Therefore, when we speak of the ecommerce platform technology stack, we primary mean the stack for the server side while front ends can mean anything. 

If you have a small online store, the platform issue is not very important, but you need to be future proof when choosing a system for an enterprise-level project. You will need a platform that provides a technological advantage over the competition for years to come. Being ready for the competition means the ecommerce project can grow fast and new functionality can be introduced more quickly, thereby sales increase and costs reduce constantly. 

For enterprise ecommerce, there are also requirements caused not only by the number of orders, but also by the challenges of the market: 

• B2C stores operating in several countries with multicurrency payments and delivering to different regions through local and global delivery companies.
• B2B online sales, which require the support of dozens of catalogs from different manufacturers and flexible pricing models.
• Stores with unique business processes, for example, with online negotiation of the price depending on volume.
• B2B projects with a sophisticated distribution system, franchising, etc.

Since its introduction in the year 2000x, Microsoft ASP.NET is considered an enterprise technology stack for the corporate server platform. Microsoft supports it with far planning horizons and a mature developers’ community. By choosing an ecommerce platform based on ASP.NET, businesses can be sure that it is compatible with Microsoft server products.

Since 2016, Microsoft offers ASP.NET Core, successor to ASP.NET, as a free and open source web framework. ASP.Net Core was developed from the ground up by combining ASP.NET MVC and WebAPI frameworks. The migration from ASP.NET to ASP.Net Core is now popular because the new version of the framework is much faster and more productive, implementing a new level of scalability, performance and security. As we speak, ASP.Net Core 5.0 has been released.

Virto Commerce’ experience in implementing global ecommerce projects with tens of thousands of visitors per day for Fortune 500 companies has shown that the most important advantages for ASP.Net Core are: 

• Targeting the enterprise market  
  In many reviews, ASP.Net Core is ranked as the #1 enterprise-grade, server side rendered, primarily MVC (Model-View-Controller) web framework, with support of asynchronous, reactive programming, and runtime components. This framework is intended to develop large, highly scalable applications where maturity, flexibility and tooling support is more important than development velocity. “Feature-wise, ASP.NET Core is the best Server-Side Web framework”, — stated in Top 10 In-Demand Web Development Frameworks in 2021 article by Towards Data Science.  

   

• Active community of millions of .NET developers  
  It looks like Microsoft’s 1.5M+ of .NET developers is even a downgraded number. According to DAXX, today there are approximately 7-8 million .NET developers and this community is growing rapidly as ASP.Net Core is being studied in many universities. The majority of them stick to the most popular C# language. The same source evaluates the total number of all kinds of software developers in the world to 27 million people showing a large .NET market share.  

   

• The best framework for developer ergonomics 
  According to the StackOverflow developer survey in 2020, it is the most beloved Web framework that even surpasses the React.js. ASP.Net Core has the best tooling support as popular IDEs (VS Code, Visual Studio) from Microsoft, enabling sophisticated fast application development experience in combination with CLI and IDE support. 

   

• Possibility to hire developers on the wide job market 
  Businesses can attract the required number of skilled developers from the job market within a reasonable time frame. Having them certified by Microsoft helps you select the best people and quickly get them on board. 

   

• Compatibility: performance and virtualization  
  Cross-platform ASP.NET Core means it can run on macOS, Linux and Windows. Improved performance and architectural changes lead ASP.NET Core 5 to be the quickest .NET web framework ever delivered by Microsoft with the fastest performance expected in 2021 using .NET 6.  
  The support of containerization (Docker ready), automating application deployment, scaling and management (Kubernetes) are the definitive strengths of ASP.NET Core. 

   

• Possibility to scale and make changes to the platform code 
  With an open source approach, the teams can publish all source code of their project to GitHub, scale the development and make changes to the code to effectively collaborate online. ASP.NET Core supports the so-called clean architecture that puts the business logic and application model at the center of the application. Business logic becomes independent of data access or other infrastructure issues, and an inverse relationship arises where infrastructure and implementation details depend on the application core. 

It is also essential to add, that the ASP.NET Core framework provides built-in templates for the two most popular JavaScript frameworks; Angular and React (plus Aurelia). JavaScriptServices in the ASP.NET Core provides the infrastructure that developers need to program client applications using the JavaScript frameworks.

Visit our Dev Community and GitHub for more information about Virto Commerce features, installation, howto and other development resources.

ASP.NET Core is the strongest framework ever intended for enterprise web application development. Thanks to the continuous improvement of ASP.NET capabilities, the life of an ASP.NET Core developer has become much easier and the presence of online commerce enterprises has become more profitable, ASP.NET Core is clearly the best choice for building ecommerce applications for enterprises.