Enterprise application development has undergone a sea change over the last decade. Earlier, expectations were centred around ways to reduce costs and increase efficiency, but enterprise apps today are expected to drive growth.
For instance, enterprise apps boost workforce and overall productivity, empower field workers with smart devices to deal with a digital world, and parse data to help you make numbers-based quick decisions.
With such a wide range of use cases, businesses need enterprise application development solutions that can be built quickly, scaled up, upgraded, and deployed across multiple platforms and devices.
As things stand, there’s no better software development platform today than .NET to help enterprises meet those parameters. Why is that the case?
If you’re part of an enterprise looking to chart the digital future of your organization, here’s why .NET makes a lot of business sense.
Business Advantages of .NET for Enterprise App Development
Easy to Use
Among coding languages, .NET offers one of the largest class libraries, making life easier for developers when they test waters with new functionalities and build feature-rich enterprise apps.
It also helps that .NET is free, open-source, and integrates with a variety of databases (ODBS and cloud) in a seamless manner. This, for instance, helps you to automate report generation from your databases.
Other aspects of .NET that enhance developer productivity include line-by-line code debugging with auto-refresh to know whether it’s applied, assigning temporary value to variables to test different cases, and knowing the variables’ value on hover and in real-time.
Scalable
A scalable application allows enterprises to keep up with changes in technology, business, and consumer trends. This has a direct bearing on an enterprise’s profitability and growth plans in the long run.
.NET scores well on scalability as the platform is highly versatile, allowing developers to experiment with different class, component, and suite changes at any time, irrespective of application size.
This enables businesses to develop apps that are highly customizable and capable of handling a surge in user load during a spike. There are also savings to be made as you don’t have to invest in new software as your business scales.
Even in terms of revenue expenditure, using .NET is cost-effective as it’s easy and affordable to hire .NET developers for your enterprise app development project.
Cross-Platform & Cross-Device Compatible
One hallmark of .NET that makes it so popular with enterprises is compatibility. For instance, developers can use .NET to build software and apps for not just desktops but also mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets across iOS and Android.
This results in a user experience that is uniform across different devices, leading to greater efficiency and productivity. .NET also allows for a fair bit of code, parameter, and configuration reuse when developing for multiple platforms and devices.
Furthermore, enterprises require new applications to be compatible with their existing systems. .NET is backward compatible and integrates with any platform or system as it can use XML files of any type.
And with more and more enterprises moving their applications and data to the cloud, an enterprise app development platform needs to work smoothly with any cloud service.
.NET does well on this aspect too as it works seamlessly with cloud services such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM etc.
The versatility of .NET is a recurring theme when talking about its business benefits. Since it adapts to nearly any platform and coding language, .NET can be merged with almost any new or legacy application.
.NET can also be used to combine your mobile apps with a desktop or web-based software and to share data and code between native and hybrid app development. This adaptability not only enhances security but also makes MVP development faster.
Easy & Cost-Effective to Maintain
The .NET community is a large and vibrant one with thousands of dedicated .NET developers and web application development services contributing to coding problems, technical glitches, troubleshooting tips, and development guides.
To add to this, enterprises can also count on the 24×7 support that Microsoft offers for .NET projects. Together, this significantly reduces the amount of resources you spend on maintaining your .NET application or project.
For instance, there’s a minimal rewriting of code with .NET. This is because .NET is based on object-oriented programming, resulting in fewer code rewrites and more code and component reuse.
This also allows for easy integration of new features and modules with your existing project. The result is not just reduced maintenance costs but also lower development costs when using .NET for your enterprise app project.
Enterprise-grade Security
But more than maintenance costs, it’s the security aspect that is of greater concern to enterprises as data (of customers, vendors, and various business processes) is the most important asset in a digital world.
Thankfully, .NET offers no cause for concern here as it gets excellent security features such as code checks, character validations, encryptions, and code access security (CAS).
Moreover, Microsoft proactively releases .NET updates and security enhancements while also quickly fixing issues and bugs red-flagged by the alert .NET community.
Types of Enterprise Apps You Can Develop Using .NET
Being a general-purpose software development platform, .NET can be used to build enterprise software for desktop, mobile, web, cloud, and IoT, etc. Enterprise apps built using .NET can be run on Windows, macOS, and Linux machines.
Desktop Enterprise Apps: You can build a variety of enterprise desktop apps in .NET using tools and frameworks such as WPF, Windows Forms, UWP, and Xamarin. Examples of such applications include Windows GUI apps, accounting apps, inventory apps, warehousing and supply chain management apps, and Windows services apps etc.
Mobile Enterprise Apps: Using cross-platform tools and libraries, you can build native apps for Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows using a common .NET codebase with seamless functionality.
Web Enterprise Apps: The ASP.NET framework is a component of .NET that is used to develop dynamic web apps. Based on the MVC architecture, ASP.NET comprises common libraries to build web apps with a rich set of features and functionalities.
Cloud Enterprise Apps: As mentioned previously, .NET can be used to develop cloud apps that are in-demand with enterprises today. While Microsoft Azure supports different types of cloud apps, .NET can integrate with any cloud service provider of your choice.
IoT Enterprise Apps: A sector that is hot among enterprises these days, IoT apps help businesses become leaner and more profitable. You can integrate an IoT app with your processes using the UWP framework for devices based on Windows 10 IoT Core.
Future of .NET Enterprise App Development
As much as it’s required, change is something that most enterprises and businesses tend to avoid. After all, major changes cause a lot of money, man-hours, and disruption of existing processes.
And though technology changes at a fast clip, .NET development is unlikely to give you cause for concern on this front. This is because the platform is getting better with each major release, as seen with the .NET 5.0 release in November 2020.
For your business, this means there’s a predictable and reliable upgrade path for .NET, enabling you to plan your app development process for the long term.
Enterprise application development needs a modern and mature framework that can help you build feature-rich, scalable, and secure apps for different devices and platforms. .NET fulfils these criteria to the T, making it the preferred technology for enterprises the world over.
As a custom web application development company, we can help you leverage .NET to earn a high ROI and ensure long-term success. To know more, get in touch with us today.
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Responsible for developing and managing web presence, Sarah has been associated with eLuminous Technologies for 7+ years. Strategic and innovative with a passion for Content Marketing and enhancing brand awareness. Administered all business marketing operations and advertisement campaigns that eventually increased web traffic. She works under the motto “Think like a Publisher, not a Marketer.”
