Which .NET platform suits your project best?
Understanding the difference between .NET Core, .NET Framework and Xamarin
For quite some time now, coders have been flooded with various unique innovations, making it complicated for them to choose the right platforms for developing projects. Today, their focus is not only on developing IT solutions that achieve the pre-decided functionality, but also on ensuring that the solution doesn’t get outdated soon, is compatible on multiple platforms and is easy to build, with the necessary pre-built libraries and widgets making the work faster.
Technologies like .NET Core, .NET Framework, and Xamarin have changed the face of application development and made it easier for developers to adapt to different screens like laptops, tablets and mobile phones. Even though all three of them might seem overlapping, each one is considerably different from the other.
Prima facie, the main distinction between the three is simple. The .NET Framework is the traditionally used platform for building .NET applications on Windows. The .NET Core is a cross-platform which is used to develop consoles and web-apps that can run on any platform – Windows, Linux or Mac. Xamarin is an open-source Mono-based cross-platform used for building mobile apps that are compatible with iOS, Android and Windows phones.
.NET Framework
The .NET Framework proves to be highly beneficial in providing services such as memory management, type safety, networking, application deployment, security and data structures. It is recommended to use .NET Framework if the existing application already operates on it and you are looking to extend its functionality, or if you want access to third-party libraries.
Applications of .NET Framework are written in C#, F# or Visual Basic and compiled to Common Intermediate Language (CIL). The main components of .NET Framework include Common Language Runtime (CLR) and .NET Framework Class Library. Since the CLR runs .NET applications on a given machine, it converts the CIL to machine code. Along with this, the .NET Framework Class Library provides language interoperability among supported languages.
.NET Core
.NET Core is a high-performing, open-source cross-platform for building websites, services and console apps on Windows, Linux and Mac. Its performance with regard to mapping is better as compared to .NET Framework, as well as it has the ability to self-host or host on Docker, IIS, Apache or Nginx and requires only a single NuGet package.
.NET Core definitely has its own advantages. It can be used for server applications when:
- You are targeting microservices.
- You are using Docker containers.
- You need scalable systems.
- You want to use several versions of .NET in the same project.
.NET Core has been designed to cater to a modular approach and it is fast and lightweight.
Xamarin
Xamarin is a .NET implementation for running applications on all the major mobile operating systems, including iOS and Android. It uses Mono as the .NET implementation for running the apps, and projects can be created from Visual Studio or Visual Studio for Mac. In the age where apps run on iOS and Android, Xamarin promises to create the best User Interface. In fact, Microsoft claims that Xamarin is the finest way to optimize performance in apps on multiple platforms. It is the best choice for developing native mobile apps with the best UI performance.
Xamarin brings some exciting features to the .NET ecosystem such as base framework for accessing native features, platform-specific libraries, and Extensible Markup Language (known as XAML) for building dynamic mobile apps using C#. In order to build any mobile app using C#, Xamarin is the only available choice for developers.
All the three platforms provide unique options for building various desktop, mobile, cloud, gaming and IoT applications within the .NET Ecosystem, as they share many underlying technologies. Moving ahead, Microsoft is heavily investing in .NET Forward to open up more avenues for developers on these platforms. Each of these software-building technologies has varying characteristics and implementations which gives each their distinct characteristics. But it becomes necessary for developers to compare them and gain sufficient knowledge about them, so that they can choose what’s best according to their requirements.
If you are looking to develop an idea and want to explore your options, connect with us at support@stw-services.com and we can help you choose the best platform to build optimized solutions.
