What the World is Saying About .NET Core is True

Learn what .NET Core is and what its attributes are. Learn about the benefits of a .NET Core migration and why Progress Sitefinity is worth it.

As a leading Progress Sitefinity Partner, Smooth Fusion strives to be on the cutting edge when it comes to our own use of technology, so that in turn we can share our learnings with our customers. We are always interested in being early adopters and this was no different with .NET Core, as we recently migrated our own site to the platform. We learned a lot about .NET Core CMS capabilities along the way and we’re excited to share our findings.

Our Interest in .NET Core was Driven by Several Factors: 

• Our desire to invest in the latest development framework.
• Our developers enjoy the overall faster development and efficiency that .NET Core brings.
• Our developers can be more efficient with customizable open-source widgets.
• We were excited to try the new page editing experience of .NET Core. 
• We like the faster time to market and other productivity benefits for our customers as we start to build sites for our customers on .NET Core. 

.NET Core Attributes

In particular, we view the top three .NET Core attributes as follows:

• True Open Source—We found what the .NET world is saying about .NET Core is true. The .NET Core framework is truly open source. As an example, more than 10,000 non-Microsoft employees contributed to the effort. You can go to GitHub and begin contributing yourself here: https://github.com/dotnet/core. In addition, all Sitefinity .NET Core widgets are open source and we can easily learn best practices to create new ones or extend the current functionality to fix custom scenarios.
• Cross Platform Support—When it comes to cross platform support, we also found that .NET Core once again delivers. You can develop on multiple platforms including Linux and Mac. So, if you are on Linux or Mac, you can use Visual Studio Code, and there’s also Visual Studio for the Mac for building .NET Core or Xamarin-based applications. We also found that .NET Core’s containerization capabilities help speed deployment.
• Performance—We also agree that what the world is saying about improved performance is also true. ASP.NET Core provides excellent support for utilizing asynchronous programming patterns. Async is now implemented in all common .NET classes and in most third-party libraries. All this enhances the framework’s performance. In fact, it can serve 23 times more requests than the older (non-Сore) version of ASP.NET MVC and is approximately five times faster than NodeJS. All of this, combined with the refined Sitefinity output cache mechanisms in 14.4, makes your project performant.

Benefits of .NET Core to Our Development Team

Our development team was excited to take advantage of the many benefits of .NET Core, including the open-source and cross-platform framework, multi-tiered architecture and decoupled approach to the presentation layer.

Our NetOps team has also experienced the productivity benefits of .NET Core, including:

• Streamlined upgrades
• Tighter system security
• Increased reliability
• Simpler structure
• Instant startup

The stand-alone frontend application with .NET Core’s decoupled architecture also requires less resources to manage, run and deploy.

Advantages of .NET Core to Our Marketing Team

The advantages to our marketing team were clear as well. With the new .NET Core page building experience, we were able to build pages quickly and easily and it has nearly eliminated any need for development help. Adding page layouts and widgets is very easy with the new editor. Instead of having several widgets based on content type or content function, like with OOB widgets for MVC, .NET Core rolls all of those into one, which makes for a cleaner and simpler user experience when building out pages. There are styling options that are built into widgets, like spacing, which is helpful for content editors who don’t know Bootstrap classes but still want the option to add a CSS class to a widget in advanced settings.

Related Article: Develop .NET Core Widgets Documentation with Application and File Structure Examples

With all these .NET Core features, especially features like section presets, we’ve cut down our page building by at least half the time it took our team to build new pages in MVC.

Migrating Our Sitefinity-Based Website to .NET Core

Since we redesigned our site only a few years ago, we decided to transition to .NET Core without rebuilding our site from scratch on the new framework. Having both MVC and .NET Core pages within the same project allowed us to keep our existing site running smoothly without any interruption to site visitors while our team rebuilt each page in .NET Core.

.NET Core was chosen for lots of reasons. The ability to mix MVC pages with .NET Core pages as we transitioned to 100% .NET Core was a big factor.

Third-Party Integrations

While making the transition to .NET Core, we also wanted to upgrade some site features like site search and form CAPTCHA.

First, we integrated Cludo’s intelligent search which has greatly improved our site search experience without requiring time from our developers.

We also wanted to reduce spam form submissions without sacrificing user experience. We landed on Cloudflare Turnstile which is a CAPTCHA-free way to ensure visitors are real and legitimate site visitors. Adding this feature has virtually eliminated spam form submissions.

We are excited to start building websites for our customers on .NET Core and have learned a lot with this migration process. There’s also a lot of great synergy between Sitefinity and .NET Core.

Like us, we’re confident you’ll find that the advantages of .NET Core will be experienced throughout your organization with technology, architecture and productivity benefits to IT, marketing and development teams.