There are three key stakeholders for any technology in software development industry, the developer, the development firm and the client. So it’s imperative to understand each of their perspective and meeting their expectation.

The Developer: Any fresh graduate always finds herself in a crossroads once she steps out of her university campus. The reason is very simple which path to adopt. Whether following a particular career path offers good job opportunity, growth, and security always forces a developer intensely think and decide. Though a developer’s job profile/ core technology changes once she progresses on her career path but most often they stick to a technology they start with. A Java developer remains a java developer and cherishes that as their first love and sometimes first as well as last.

A developer always feels comfortable with a technology which is stable, which has regular updates and there is continuous support. A developer spends a lot of time learning a technology, and while working he has to spend more time resolving issues specific to that technology. In case she does not get sufficient projects to work on that technology then all her life investment goes in vein. So a fresher usually go for few conventional but stable technologies where she will have free development edition and sufficient training material to understand and take hold of that technology.

The Development Farm: A development farm uses technologies as a marketing tool to push for new products, features and even upgrades. Technology cost and technical resource availability are always paramount on development farms.

The Client: Out of all three stakeholders the client is the one who foots the entire bill and the most important decision maker. Among his concerns value for money and technology support plays out.

Microsoft’s steady progress and continuous investment in its sole IDE is reflected in the wealth of features and developers’ trust. Microsoft is the frontrunner among technology companies with a vast product range. Windows operating systems, Office Bundle, SQL-Server database, Azure, and Visual Studio make Microsoft most attractive technology with endless possibilities for seamless integration and new discoveries in unexplored domains.

Microsoft Visual Studio

Microsoft Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs, as well as websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. Visual Studio uses Microsoft software development platforms such as Windows API, Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Store and Microsoft Silverlight. It can produce both native code (e.g. C and C++) and managed code (Java and all .Net languages need an interpreter such as .Net).

Visual Studio includes a code editor supporting the code completion component IntelliSense as well as code refactoring. The integrated debugger works both as a source-level debugger and a machine-level debugger. It accepts plug-ins that expand the functionality at almost every level including adding support for source control systems like Subversion and Git.

Visual Studio supports 36 different programming languages and allows the code editor and debugger to support (to varying degrees) nearly any programming language, provided a language-specific service exists. Built-in languages include C, C++, C++/CLI, Visual Basic .NET, C#, F#, JavaScript, TypeScript, XML, XSLT, HTML, and CSS. Support for other languages such as Python, Ruby, Node.js, and M among others is available via plug-ins.

The most basic edition of Visual Studio, the Community edition, is available free of charge. The slogan for Visual Studio Community edition is “Free, fully-featured IDE for students, open-source and individual developers”.

Microsoft .Net

In 2014, Microsoft open sourced a new version of .NET, and named it .NET Core which is managed by Microsoft and the open source community. Until .NET 5 there were two versions of .NET, .NET Framework and .NET Core. Going forward, there is going to be only one version of .NET and that is the latest and a single unified platform for .NET 5. .NET 5 takes the best of .NET Core, .NET Framework 4.8x, Xamarin, and Mono to provide libraries, APIs, and run-time to build applications for Windows, Web, Mobile, and IoT devices.

A developer with more than 30 odd years of experience who started working with GW BASIC or Visual Basic can still reconnect, recollect and resonate with .Net. That’s the job security a technology offers to a developer with repeat trust. The below picture illustrates a clearly laid down future roadmap for .Net.

A .NET developer should always stay assured that learning this technology is a good investment and it has a good future. .NET is one of the popular and most used frameworks in IT industry and used by most of the fortune 500 companies. Most importantly .NET is a full stack development platform, the go-to technology for any software solution, the single-window all in one service.