Mobile app development is a competitive market. It’s crucial for businesses to take advantage of the appropriate resources to be observed as top players and gain a lasting competitive edge. The continuous wave of trends and innovation stimulates enterprises to find ways to obtain long-term growth by reducing challenges.
One such trend is cross-platform app development. By adopting cross-platform development businesses can easily attain fast digital growth. However, businesses should choose the right framework and toolset for developing their app. .NET Core is one such largely used technology for enterprise-level cross-platform projects. Simply put, it’s a “one-size-fits-all” framework to develop mobile apps for multiple platforms. Businesses can outsource .NET development teams to design, develop, and deploy highly engaging, and efficient cross-platform applications.
Introduction to Cross-Platform App Development
In general, cross-platform mobile development is the practice of constructing mobile apps that work seamlessly on standard operating systems, like Android, Windows, and iOS using a single tech stack. Using a compatible cross-platform compatible framework, developers no longer need to build separate versions of the app for each OS. This process significantly reduces the cost and time taken for app development. This is one of the key reasons for the increasing adoption of cross-app development.
Why Use .NET Core for Cross-Platform Mobile Development
.NET Core is a modular, open-source app development framework. This cross-platform framework is launched by Microsoft with the intention to overcome the limitations of the centralized (NET) framework. In simple, .NET Core is a decentralized, platform-agnostic, and portable framework. This framework allows developers to build applications for different platforms using the standard .NET superclass libraries (NET standard) and several runtimes models like Razor Pages.
By using .NET Core, developers can get access to a broad range of platform-specific functionalities and APIs, such as Fingerprint, CoreML, NFC, ARKit, etc. Besides, developers can use the .NET Core platform to build applications using different programming languages like C#, VB.NET, JS, and C++ through the use of protocols like SOAP, UDDI, ASP, WDSL, and XML. This allows app content to be generated once by developers and automatically made available or published to other platforms.
Benefits of Using .NET Core for Cross-Platform Development
Code Reusability
.NET Core framework allows app developers to work using a single code base that can function on different platforms. App development on a shared code base removes the need for time-intensive coding efforts and speeds up the development lifecycle. With the .NET Core toolset, developers can reuse almost 95% of the coding required to support every mobile platform/device. Code reusability allows developers to solve the application growth problems associated with business challenges. Moreover, the reusable code base also allows developers to solve technical challenges like bugs and include augmentations on all platforms comprehensively, instead of doing it for each platform distinctly.
Greater Flexibility
One of the primary reasons .NET Core has gained immense popularity among cross-platform app developers is due to its open-source nature. The framework source code is now obtainable on GitHub, where developers can review, modify, or contribute. Moreover, various bug fixes and enhancements are quickly released by the Microsoft community at regular intervals, so that developers can harness the modern updates without greater delays.
Flexibility is another key reason why.NET Core is highly preferred for cross-platform development. Based on project requirements, developers can add framework components and libraries to their applications and adapt easily to different real-time scenarios. Besides, businesses looking for developing complex cross-platform applications can team up with the right .NET development service providers. The developers can help businesses with rapid and seamless application development.
Integrated Development Environment
.NET Core framework users can get access to Microsoft Visual Studio. This is one of the ideal IDEs available to construct advanced mobile applications. It helps developers by providing advanced features such as profiling, code completion, debugging, API&GIT integration, and many others. Visual Studio IDE helps in automating workflows, improving developer velocity, and shortening the development lifecycle while providing end-to-end security.
Better Coding Productivity
.NET Core allows developers to make the codes more maintainable and productive using Razor Pages. Razor Pages is a visual compiler that allows developers to create an app’s UI (User Interface) simply and effectively. Razor Pages offer a cleaner hierarchical structure of the code for developers, thereby reducing programming complexity. With robust anti-falsification functionality, Razor Pages ensures better protection of the application’s original code. Moreover, the codes and content of each app page can also be consolidated and organized efficiently. Therefore, by modifying code and content based on a certain platform through Razor Pages, the changes will get automatically updated on other platforms.
Testing
One of the important phases in app development is testing. .Net Core platform offers a broad spectrum of solutions to test and monitor User Interface (UI) and app performance. With such intuitive .NET Core testing tools like dotTrace and JustMock, developers can run automated tests on numerous real-time platforms and devices in the cloud and identify performance concerns before the launch.
Wrapping Up
.NET Core is an appropriate cross-platform framework to build incredible mobile applications that give businesses a competitive edge. .NET Core improves the mobile apps performance by using an asynchronous programming approach. The applications developed using this technology have rapid improvement chances.
