The .NET technology is a framework built as a complete infrastructure for software programming, developed by Microsoft. It’s commonly used to build, run, and deploy web, IoT, mobile, desktop or gaming applications.
It is made up of three important components – The Common Language Runtime, The Framework Class Library, and NET. With this framework, you can use multiple programming languages (like C#, Visual Basic, or F#), code editors, and code libraries.
A rich environment has grown around .NET, and it has become one of the most popular open-source technologies, with it’s own foundation – the .NET Foundation. There are around 25,000 developers, with over 1,700 contributing to the .NET platform.
.NET has become popular thanks to providing a strong, high-level software development framework, and allowing developers to use different languages that they prefer. It’s a silver bullet kind of tool, one which provides solutions to a wide range of business, and technological problems.
What’s curious about .NET is that it has never been very popular with start-ups. It’s probably because the framework itself is kind of heavy, so it can be too costly to use the .NET framework in development, especially if you have short deadlines, or just want to build a light MVP.
And so the .NET community is mostly centered around enterprise solutions – integrating with legacy systems, creating enterprise-sized architectures, and systems for supporting a vast number of different business processes.
Start-up projects typically carry much more risk than enterprise projects, so managers always look for an advantage. One such advantage is using a new, more popular, and more flexible technology in order to shorten time to market – in such situations, the reliability and robustness of a framework like .NET doesn’t matter.
Because of that, the .NET is most useful for big projects, with a large development team, in mature companies, when the developed product is required to work perfectly with Microsoft solutions, and compatibility with other operating systems isn’t mission-critical.