Building Your Software on .NET

.NET is Microsoft’s free, open-source, cross-platform developer platform for Windows, Linux, and macOS. It’s the successor to .NET Framework and .NET Core. A new version ships every November, and every other release gets long-term support. It’s our default platform for back-end systems, APIs, and business applications.

As a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language, our developers use C# to provide support for an array of software engineering principles (such as strong type checking, array bounds checking, detection of attempts to use uninitialized variables, and automatic garbage collection). This language is particularly useful in writing applications for both hosted and embedded systems.

ASP.NET Core is the web framework of modern .NET. We use it to build REST APIs, back-end services, and server-rendered web apps that run on Windows, Linux, macOS, and in containers. It also covers the work previously done with ASP.NET MVC and Web API.

Blazor is a cutting-edge framework that allows developers to build interactive web UIs using C# and .NET instead of traditional JavaScript, offering a seamless integration between server and client-side code for creating dynamic single-page applications (SPAs).

Aspire is Microsoft’s open-source toolkit for building and running distributed apps. Services, databases, and queues are wired together in code, developers get a local dashboard with logs, traces, and metrics, and the same setup deploys to Azure. It started as .NET Aspire and now runs Python and JavaScript services too.

Entity Framework Core (EF Core) is the object-relational mapper (ORM) for modern .NET. We use it to work with SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Cosmos DB, and other databases through LINQ queries, change tracking, and versioned schema migrations instead of hand-written data-access code.

Dapper is an open-source framework for mapping an object-oriented domain model to a traditional relational database that uses fewer lines of code, has speedy and high performance, and supports multiple queries. It provides object-relational mapping in the .NET platform. Dapper offers a choice of static/dynamic object binding and operates directly on IDbConnection interface.

SignalR is a library that enables real-time, bidirectional communication between a server and connected clients in .NET applications, allowing for instant updates and interactions in web applications, games, and other scenarios where live data exchange is crucial.

Microsoft Agent Framework is the open-source successor to Semantic Kernel and AutoGen for building AI agents and multi-agent workflows in .NET and Python. It works with models in Microsoft Foundry and other providers and supports MCP tools, so agents can call into the systems you already run.

.NET MAUI is Microsoft’s open-source framework for building native apps for iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows from a single C# codebase. It’s the successor to Xamarin.Forms, and we use it for new cross-platform apps and for Xamarin migrations.

Uno Platform is an open-source .NET framework for building one app that runs on iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, Linux, and the web from a single C# and XAML codebase. It uses WinUI’s APIs, so existing Windows and UWP code carries over, and it’s a strong path for modernizing older Xamarin and desktop apps.

Blazor Hybrid runs Blazor web components inside a native .NET MAUI, WPF, or Windows Forms app, with full access to the device. Teams can share one set of UI components between a web app and its mobile and desktop versions instead of building each one separately.

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is a powerful UI framework for building Windows desktop applications with rich, interactive user interfaces, offering features like data binding, vector-based graphics, and an advanced styling system for creating visually appealing applications.

Windows Forms is a user interface framework in .NET that provides a simplified way to create desktop applications for Windows, offering a drag-and-drop design surface and a comprehensive set of pre-built controls for building intuitive and functional GUIs.

WinUI (Windows UI Library) is a user interface framework that empowers developers to create modern, fluid, and adaptive Windows applications, enabling seamless experiences across a wide range of devices and form factors.