Essentials For .NET

Background

This article takes you a walkthrough of becoming an expertise .NET developer with all essential tools and measures and makes you move up to the ladder towards the Architecture role and more. This article will explore all the key essentials for a .NET developer with powerful IDEs, Tools, Interfaces, forums, skills, and solutions.

Here is a very common question have with all the new software developers in the corporate world that are

1. What are the essential skills for a .NET developer?
2. How to become an expertise .NET developer?
3. What are the key skills to grow up to the ladder with an Architecture role and more?
4. What are the powerful tools that are used by experienced .NET developers or Architect teams?
5. How to keep ourselves up-to-date on technology in the world?

The above five points are very common to hear from most Freshers and Intermediate developers in the corporate world. These essential skills will drive you to take up to a great role and gets you a lot of opportunities to learn further and explore with a wider team. That builds you to become very sound in .NET platforms.

The Essentials for .NET
 

1. Integrated Development Environment (IDE)

• Microsoft Visual Studio: Microsoft Visual Studio is an integrated development environment from Microsoft. It is an IDE for .NET and C++ developers on Windows and macOS. It is used to develop computer programs, as well as websites, web apps, web services, desktop apps, and mobile apps.
• JetBrains Rider: JetBrains Rider is a cross-platform .NET IDE based on the IntelliJ platform and ReSharper. The IDE supports the programming languages C#, Java, Python, C++, JavaScript, and more. It is a more powerful IDE to work on very large projects without hanging the IDE and gives great productivity on development activities.
• Microsoft Visual Studio Code: Visual Studio Code is a source-code editor made by Microsoft for Windows, Linux, and macOS. Features include support for debugging, syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, snippets, code refactoring, and embedded Git.
• Android Studio: Android Studio is the official integrated development environment for Google's Android operating system, built on JetBrains' IntelliJ IDEA software and designed specifically for Android development.

2. Version controls tools

• SVN: SVN is a Subversion client, implemented as a Microsoft Windows shell extension, that helps programmers manage different versions of the source code for their programs. It is free software released under the GNU General Public License.
• Git: Git is a free and open-source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency
• TFS/Azure DevOps Server: Team Foundation Server (Microsoft TFS) helps manage teams and their code. It's because TFS offers a combo of version control, issue tracking, application lifecycle management, project management (for both agile software development and waterfall teams), automated builds, testing, and release management capabilities. It covers the entire application lifecycle and enables DevOps capabilities.

3. Performance tools

• JetBrains dotTrace: dotTrace helps you detect performance bottlenecks in a variety of .NET and .NET Core applications: WPF and Universal Windows Platform, ASP.NET, Windows services, WCF services, and unit tests. Mono and Unity applications are supported as well. It shows the detailed time breakdown on each function calls and give a quick hot spot area to optimize it.
• JetBrains dotMemory: dotMemory allows you to analyze memory usage in a variety of .NET and .NET Core applications: desktop applications, Windows services, ASP.NET web applications, IIS, IIS Express, arbitrary .NET processes, and more.

4. Refactoring tools

• JetBrains Resharper: ReSharper is a renowned productivity tool that turns Microsoft Visual Studio into a much better IDE. Both individual .NET developers and teams rely on ReSharper to write and maintain code in a more manageable and enjoyable way, adopt the best coding practices, and deliver higher quality applications faster.
• JetBrains dotPeek: dotPeek is a free-of-charge standalone tool based on ReSharper's bundled decompiler. It can reliably decompile any .NET assembly into equivalent C# or IL code. The decompiler supports multiple formats including libraries (.dll) and executables (.exe)
• JetBrain dotCover: JetBrains dotCover is a .NET unit test runner and code coverage tool that integrates with Visual Studio and JetBrains Rider.
• Microsoft FxCop: FxCop is a free static code analysis tool from Microsoft that checks .NET managed code assemblies for conformance to Microsoft's .NET Framework Design Guidelines.
• Microsoft StyleCop: StyleCop analyzes C# source code to enforce a set of style and consistency rules. This extension allows analysis to be performed on any project opened in Visual Studio without modifying the project.

5. Fundamentals of programming skills

• SOLIDS principles: The Five key design principles, single responsibility principle, open-closed principle, Liskov substitution principle, interface segregation principle, and dependency inversion principle. All five are commonly used by software engineers and provide some important benefits for developers to build better software.
• Object Orientation programming: OOPs is a concept of modern programming language that allows programmers to organize entities and objects. Four key concepts of OOPs are abstraction, encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism. These four pillars are very much essential to develop a well software.
• Common Design patterns: It is a solution for common problems in software design. They are like a blueprint that helps to customize the recurring design problems in your code/application. These common design patterns solve a lot of design issues and build the software in modularisation, extensity, and reliability in cost during the maintenance phase.

6. Common programming languages

• C#, Java, Python
• XML, JSON, XAML
• XSLT
• Typescript
• Javascript
• Node js
• Angular
• HTML, CSS
• SQL, Mongo DB

7. Database tools

• SQL Server Management Studio
• SQL Developer
• Mongo DB Compass
• Studio 3T

8. API Building and Testing tools

• Postman: Postman is an API platform for building and using APIs. Postman simplifies each step of the API lifecycle and streamlines collaboration so you can create better APIs. The platform allows developing the common scripts that help to reuse the script and automate the APIs. Postman can make HTTP calls using GraphQL, an open-source data query and manipulation language for APIs, in addition to REST.
• Swagger: Swagger is an Interface Description Language for describing RESTful APIs expressed using JSON. Swagger is used together with a set of open-source software tools to design, build, document, and use RESTful web services. Swagger includes automated documentation, code generation, and test-case generation.

9. Cloud platforms

• Microsoft Azure: It is a cloud computing service operated by Microsoft for application management via Microsoft-managed data centers. It provides software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and supports many different programming languages, tools, and frameworks, including both Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems.
• AWS: Amazon Web Services is a platform that offers flexible, reliable, scalable, easy-to-use and, cost-effective cloud computing solutions. It provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis. AWS is a comprehensive, easy-to-use computing platform offered by Amazon. The platform is developed with a combination of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and packaged software as a service (SaaS) offerings.

10. CI/CD platform

• Jenkins: It is an open-source automation server in which the central build and continuous integration process take place. It is a self-contained Java-based program with packages for Windows, macOS, and other Unix-like operating systems. With hundreds of plugins available, Jenkins supports building, deploying, and automating software development projects.
• TeamCity: It is JetBrains’s build management and continuous integration server. TeamCity is a continuous integration tool that helps build and deploy different types of projects. TeamCity runs in a Java environment and integrates with Visual Studio and IDEs. The tool can be installed on both Windows and Linux servers, supports .NET and open-stack projects.
• GitLabs: GitLab is a suite of tools for managing different aspects of the software development lifecycle. The core product is a web-based Git repository manager with features such as issue tracking, analytics, and a Wiki. GitLab allows you to trigger builds, run tests, and deploy code with each commit or push.

11. Technology updates and contributions

• Twitter: Subscribe to the news feeds on some technology updates like Microsoft, Visual Studio, Java, C#, .NET, Azure, SQL, Python, and more. It makes us keep up-to-date on technology updates and upcoming trends.
• C# Corner: A Community for Developers and IT Professionals to share any Ideas, Articles, Blogs, current affairs, upcoming events, and open questions. There are large numbers of contributors with expert skills and backgrounds. C# Corner encourages and motivates to share the posts with the wider forum and gets a good learning platform for everyone and rewarded with different levels of awards as a token of appreciation.
• Stack overflow: Stack Overflow is a question and answer website for professional and enthusiast programmers. It is the flagship site of the Stack Exchange Network. The website serves as a platform for users to ask and answer questions, and, through membership and active participation, to vote questions and answers up or down. 
• Code project: Code Project is a community for computer programmers with articles on different topics and programming languages such as web development, software development, C++, Java, and other topics.
• Newsletters: The other best way, subscribe to the newsletters from different open web sources like Google Alert, Twitter, LinkedIn, and many more.
• Learning platforms: There are several video learning platforms to explore various technologies. Here are the few portals like LinkedIn Learnings, PluralSight, YouTube, C# Corners, and more.

I hope this article helps you to understand the .NET essentials tools and measures to have the complete skill set on the .NET software platform. Item No. 5 and 11 adds more value to your career, learning, and opportunities to a wider area. Thanks for reading an article and soon will get a few more interesting articles.