Over the past few years, .NET has firmly held the top slot in the Stack Overflow survey in the “Other frameworks” category. For example, in the Stack Overflow 2022 survey, almost 35% of professional developers picked .NET as their most often used framework. Considering how flexible, reliable, but also developer-friendly the framework is, this popularity shouldn’t be anything surprising.
Let’s take a look at a few companies that have used .NET in their projects with success.
Stack Overflow
Our first example will be Stack Overflow, a community-based Q&A website for developers. The Stack Overflow team has used the .NET framework to power its website from the very beginning. In 2018, though, they announced that they were migrating their system architecture to .NET Core in order to solve some of the problems plaguing the older technology.
What has Stack Overflow gained from using .NET applications?
Among the major changes following the migration is that their infrastructure has become much faster. Thanks to this, the Stack Overflow team can now build applications faster, but it also takes less time for users to find the information they need.
But what has really made the difference for them is that now they can build and run applications on different operating systems and deploy them via the Azure cloud platform.
Nick Craver
Architecture Lead at Stack Overflow
With .NET Core 3.0, we can build an app and then run it on our Windows developers’ machines, design computers on Mac, and the enterprise cloud in Linux. We can build the application in one way, and that’s tremendous.
Another thing .NET core helped them with is by making Stack Overflow applications more modular. With the modules, the Stack Overflow team can host different parts of an application in separate places and also experiment with Kubernetes and Docker.
.NET Core also made testing applications easier for the development team. Now they can test a method, end-to-end, or server with ease – something they struggled with on the older version of the .NET framework.
Nick Craver
Architecture Lead at Stack Overflow
With .Net Core, I’m not fighting all of the meta of building software. We can actually just go and build the software.
UPS
UPS is one of the largest package delivery companies Worldwide, handling over 24 million deliveries daily to over 220 countries and territories. To improve customer service and increase its IT staff efficiency, UPS decided to run two projects:
- Building a faster, consolidated version of UPS Mobile so the app would work smoothly on different devices, reducing the amount of work developers needed to maintain the app code.
- Designing a UPS Bot that would let customers find information about shipments, rates, and UPS locations via text or voice commands.
Both of those projects were run on .NET, Azure, and Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin.
What has UPS gained from using .NET applications?
With the new version of their mobile app, the amount of code that UPS developers need to maintain has dropped by half. What’s more, developers now also need only a few weeks at most to implement new features to their apps compared to months previously.
Also, UPS’s new app has significantly improved the user experience – customers can use the application on multiple devices, both iOS and Android.
The UPS Bot, meanwhile (built with the .NET framework), made the support team’s job much easier as it handles the majority of simple and repetitive questions for them. Customers can also talk with the chatbot either by using the text field or by giving it voice commands, whichever is more convenient for them.
Kate Duffy
UPS Architect
Conversation as a platform is the future, so it’s great that we’re already offering it to our customers using the Bot Framework and Azure. Even though we’re just getting started with our bot, we believe we are the first in the shipping industry to offer this type of technology on social media.
Forza Horizon 5
What about games in which users expect top-notch graphics, smooth gameplay, and outstanding performance? Would the .NET framework and its applications also be helpful here? Forza Horizon 5’s success proves just that – the .NET framework can also be an excellent choice for video games.
Forza Horizon is a racing game developed by Playground Games and Turn 10 Studios, released in 2012. The latest edition, Forza Horizon 5, was released in November 2021 and immediately became a massive hit. In the very first week, the game had 10 million concurrent players – a new Xbox and Game Pass record.
However, the game’s growing popularity started becoming a problem for the developers as they struggled to scale up the infrastructure. That’s why they decided to migrate their entire code base to Azure Cloud Services with virtual machines and eventually to Azure Kubernetes.
What has Forza Tech gained from using .NET applications?
Thanks to the migration, the studio can take advantage of ultra-low latency, accelerated networking, and lower CPU utilization for better performance. Moreover, with autoscaling Azure Kubernetes service clusters, the game can automatically adapt to changing demands.
But what made the ForzaTech developers especially happy is that Kubernetes enabled them to run stress testing much more efficiently. Previously, they needed at least half an hour to swap out old images on the VMs and prepare them for load. With Azure Kubernetes, this process takes seconds, allowing the developers to make changes in a flash.
Daniel Adent
General Manager of ForzaTech
With our compute, storage, and data stacks all on Azure, our engineering teams can now spend more time building new experiences for our players rather than managing our infrastructure.
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is best known for its annual awards ceremony, the Oscars®. As hard as it might be to believe, however, for years the vast majority of tasks related to picking nominees and category winners were done offline and most of their data was either held in on-premise databases or paper documents.
In 2014, the Academy decided it was high time to modernize its website and also design a new mobile app for Academy members. So, after analyzing their options, the Academy decided to move its infrastructure to the Azure Cloud platform.
What has the Academy gained from using .NET applications?
The Academy’s .NET Framework applications now run in Azure App Service. Thanks to its deployment slots, they no longer need to put applications on downtime whenever they need to add new content to the member portal. Moreover, Academy members can now watch movies (even from the “Best Picture”) category and cast their votes across various devices.
The data that used to reside in on-premises SQL Server databases, meanwhile, now is stored in Azure SQL, which shares its code base and SQL query language with SQL Server. This enabled the Academy’s team to quickly and safely migrate the entire database to the cloud.
But what the academy points out is that the migration also helped them move to work remotely during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Bev Kite
Chief Information Officer
Everything we do now is through the cloud, including ongoing software development. Azure helped us keep going during Covid-19. If we had still been on-premises, it would have been more difficult. We’ve managed to increase our ability to respond to member needs because we’re a lot more agile and flexible now.
Allegiance Consulting
Another company that also mentions Covid-19 as the main driver behind the decision to move to the cloud is Allegiance Consulting, a South African fintech company specializing in complex financial planning systems.
The forced move to remote work brought three challenges for them:
- Staying in touch with their employees and clients during lockdown times
- Developing applications on a highly secure but also flexible infrastructure
- Reassuring their anxious clients that the consulting company was working as usual
The Azure cloud service turned out to be the perfect solution to all those problems.
What has Allegiance Consulting gained from using .NET applications?
One of the things they did to put their clients at ease was to create an application using the Blazor web framework. The application worked as a diagnostic tool that also gave users tips on how to deal with a health crisis financially and what they should do to stay safe. That way, the company could stay in touch with its clients during the lockdown periods.
Kobus Barnard
CEO at Allegiance Consulting
We deployed the application on Microsoft Azure, which gave us the scalability and security needed for an enterprise-level application in the financial services sector.
The company also moved its financial advice platform, Avalon, from a private cloud (which they have been using for ten years) to Azure. The benefits of the migrations were visible almost immediately – significant savings on infrastructure costs and the ability to scale applications up or down whenever they needed.
GE Digital FlightPulse
GE Digital is a global leader in airline manufacturing, avionics, electrical power, and mechanical systems for aircraft. To make the skies safer and pilots more confident, GE Digital wanted to build an application through which pilots could easily access data coming from aircraft systems and sensors.
Building such a complex solution the traditional way could take years, though. So instead, GE Digital built and deployed the application using Microsoft developer tools, GitHub, and Microsoft Azure.
What has GE Digital gained from using .NET applications?
GE built the backend APIs for FlightPulse using ASP .NET Core and then used Blazor to build its Config Console App. For the code editor, meanwhile, they used Microsoft Visual Studio Code and the platform’s extensions, such as Live Share for real-time coediting and IntelliCode for AI code completion.
Additionally, the GE team uses Azure Key Vault, Azure SQL Database, and Azure Storage to store airline data. The results?
Ken Kozman
Principal Architect at GE
We were able to build the app faster and work more efficiently given the componentization that we were able to use out of the box with Blazor. And it worked a lot more seamlessly than some of the stuff we’d done previously in Angular.
Geocaching.com
Geocaching is a game of hide-and-seek where players leave boxes in specific places and other players try to find them.
Initially, geocaching.com was meant just as a simple website through which players could find geocaches in their area. As mobile devices with in-built GPS became widespread though, the company started to grow rapidly as well – going from serving thousands to millions of players. Thus, the company needed to scale up its web application quickly to meet the growing demand.
.NET provided a perfect solution to their needs.
What has geocaching.com gained from using .NET applications?
Now, their entire backend is built with .NET web APIs. By using the .NET framework, they can create web APIs that can smoothly handle millions of players all over the world, 24/7. The geocaching database also stores over a billion geocache logs now.
Sean Boots
Director of Engineering
.NET has been the cornerstone for us because it’s been helping us grow and scale along with our customer base. It’s reliable. It does what I want it to do. It’s secure, and everyone knows how to use it. It performs. It’s my favorite platform.
The Postage
The Postage is a startup website that allows people to create and store information that can be used in the future by their families, such as:
- Last will and funeral preferences
- Financial information
- Medical records
- Online passwords
- Other legal documents
Before their idea became a real product, however, they needed to secure funding for the project. And for this, the startup needed to create a working product demo first.
Since they knew they would be storing plenty of sensitive information, making the application as secure as possible was a priority. What’s more, the ready application also needed to be easy to use, scalable, and offered high availability as well. Microsoft .NET had everything they needed for the task.
What has The Postage gained from using .NET applications?
To bring this idea to life, Ken Myers (now the company’s Chief Technology Officer) started analyzing the platforms they could work on and ultimately decided to use Microsoft Azure.
Ken Myers
Chief Technology Office
I knew we wanted to use .NET, and Azure is the best cloud for NET. What’s more, with .NET, we would get access to Blazor and Xamarin, which let us use C# across the entire application stack, from the front end to the back end to mobile. That approach has proven to be very effective in terms of both speed and cost.
By using Blazor, their small development team could work both on the front end and the back end of the solution without having to hire two separate groups for the development. The beta version of the application went live in June 2020, and the complete application was released three months later.
Emily Cisek
Chief Executive Officer
We’re seeing strong growth in terms of site traffic, account subscriptions, and general interest in the overall platform. And those people who do subscribe are actively uploading documents, adding their accounts and passwords, and saving messages for loved ones. It’s all coming together as we had hoped – we’re hearing stories about how it’s helping people change how they plan for the future, which is exactly what we set out to achieve.
Siemens Healthineers
Our last example will be a company from the healthcare sector – Siemens Healthineers. One of their main products, Digital Ecosystem, is intended to help healthcare providers offer better care to patients by giving the providers better quality insights derived from healthcare data.
Yet, as healthcare companies must comply with several data security and privacy laws, they must be extra careful when migrating data to the cloud. That’s why Siemens Healthineers thoroughly researched their options to ensure its clients would be comfortable with having their private data stored in the cloud.
Ultimately, they selected Microsoft Azure, since the platform has many security certifications that helped the company reassure their customers that cloud storage is as secure as any other on-premises data center.
What has Siemens Healthineers gained from using .NET applications?
For deploying and managing their applications, Siemens Healthineers uses Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Using this service, developers can quickly and easily work with their applications without taking them offline for maintenance or upgrading, reducing downtime significantly.
Their development team also appreciates that they can comfortably scale up the Kubernetes environment and scale it back down again when they don’t need the extra computing power. Siemens Healthineers also uses other Azure services for their applications, such as the Azure Cosmos database.
Thomas Gossler
Lead Architect
Azure Cosmos DB is an amazing technology. The biggest benefit for us is that we can have one database for anonymous data that is replicated worldwide into all regions that are relevant to us.
Conclusion
As you can see, .NET development can be tailored to virtually any industry or project. Healthcare, gaming, or maybe fintech? Whatever project you have in mind, the .NET framework and the applications running on it can give you outstanding performance and customer experience.
To enjoy all the benefits .NET can bring to your project though, you’ll need a reliable partner like our talented .NET developers at Inwedo. So how about meeting our team for a short chat, so we could show you how you can bring the full potential of .NET?
Sources: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/customers