What tech stack to choose for your next web app development project? In its annual survey, Stack Overflow asked nearly 65,000 developers about their technologies of choice. Combined with Leobit’s years of experience in the field of web app building, here’s a brief overview of why we believe the Angular + .NET Core combination to be the optimal solution for 2021 and the next 5 years.

Why Consider Angular for Front-end Web App Development

The history of Angular started in 2009 when Google engineers created a framework that laid a foundation for current front-end development. It was officially released in 2010, and contributed greatly to building scalable and high-performing web applications. The Angular framework was designed with a particular purpose to simplify the process of creating user interfaces and overcome the restrictions of other existing technologies in one integrated package. The list of popular web applications powered with an Angular framework can be endless. Here are some of the Angular apps: Office 365, Forbes, Xbox, Google Cloud Blog, Ryanair, Mixer, NBA, JetBlue, iStock Photo, Upwork, Freelancer.

Nowadays Angular projects have millions of supporters. 25 % of Stack Overflow respondents admitted Angular is their preferred web framework. Thousands of companies provide education, deliver courses, and create Angular libraries. In the near future, Angular is predicted to keep flourishing with new features and Angular core import capabilities. A crucial step in Angular evolution is the launch of Angular Ivy, which is a new Angular renderer. It is going to change how the framework internally works, focusing on speed improvements, size reduction, and increased flexibility of Angular applications.

6 Benefits of Using Angular Framework for Building Web App

Angular Benefit #1: Component-based Structure

The component-based architecture of the Angular framework is responsible for the decomposition of the design into individual logical components. Every component is a self-sufficient piece of UI, screen, or route, and contains elements with related functionality. This structuring provides additional features and speeds up application creation and delivery.

 Angular Benefit #2: Two-way Data Binding

Angular provides a feature of immediate and automatic synchronization of data that happens between the  Data Model and the View. So whenever the data store updates, the user interface updates as well. It significantly reduces development time as there is no need to write additional code for continuous View and Model synchronization.

Angular Benefit #3: Easy-to-use Forms

Accepting user inputs is one of the most important functions of any Angular app. Angular makes it easy to build forms and provides good support for them. It is highly beneficial especially when it comes to building large-scale enterprise applications where numerous forms are used to perform countless data-entry tasks.

Angular Benefit #4: Dependency Injection

Dependency injection (DI) is a technique whereby one object supplies the dependencies of another object. The angular framework utilizes DI mechanism through injectors to make code less coupled. For example, you can import injectables from Angular core in Visual Studio Code. Dependency injection helps in unit testing, simplifies extending the application, and increases source code reusability.

Angular Benefit #5: Community

One more thing that makes Angular projects powerful and reliable in the market is a strong community. It is guaranteed that a strong code base will provide the necessary support to the application at any stage of development. The Angular framework is also supported by all modern IDEs: Microsoft Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ WebStorm, etc.

Angular Benefit #6: Fast Development Process

The Angular framework uses a lot of ready-made components and supports Angular core import, which significantly reduces the time for the development of Net Core web applications. It also provides almost all common architectural solutions out of the box.

Why Angular Might Not Suit Your Needs

Of course, just like any other platform, Angular comes with some limitations. Before choosing Angular for web application development, businesses should consider the following two scenarios that might require a different front-end tech stack for their planned app.

Case #1: When You Need High Flexibility for Third-party Components

As far as Angular third-party libraries are used more and more often, the need for tweaking the out-of-the-box behavior is also growing. Changing initial behavior or morphing components into something different is not so straightforward and may be a challenge for an inexperienced user. Well-designed software architecture and having an experienced engineer on your Angular project will mitigate the risk, so you might consider investing a bit more time and budget into the discovery and software architecture design first.

Case #2: When Your Team Needs Keeping Dependency Up to Date

Angular updates its version twice a year. So it might be a bit complicated to keep the knowledge and source up to date, in particular for full-stack developers. In addition, some breaking changes between versions require more effort than expected to migrate an Angular app. In this case, engaging an agency specializing in Angular development might be a better choice over in-house development. Usually, the agencies adopt the new versions much faster than internal teams due to the sheer volume of different projects they face, and a well-developed internal community that naturally forms in a specific tech-focused company.

Taking into consideration all the pros and cons of Angular, it can be rightly called one of the best front-end development frameworks for large-scale enterprise solutions and Angular apps with dynamic content.

Why Consider .NET Core for Back-end Web App Development

.NET Core, an open-source cross-platform framework, can be considered a true revolution in Microsoft’s approach to application development. It was released in 2016 as a modern replacement of .NET Framework with some additional and enhanced features.

According to the aforementioned Stack Overflow’s annual survey,  .NET Core for the second year in a row holds the third position among most popular non-web frameworks. What’s more, .NET Core community has already accepted contributions from over 60,000 developers and 3,700 companies. There is no doubt that .NET Core has an extremely promising future. All further investments in .NET are expected to be related to .NET Core. 

4 Benefits of Using .NET Core Framework for Building Your Web App

.NET Core Benefit #1: Easy and Reliable Maintenance

.NET Core in a combination of C# & F# requires less coding as compared to many other languages, which makes it more readable and straightforward. As a result, developers can structure and optimize the code for better performance. Less coding also means easier maintenance. What’s more, .NET applications have guaranteed support of Microsoft that makes them fully compatible with all Microsoft products, safe, and reliable in a long term perspective.

.NET Core Benefit #2: High Performance

One of the main benefits of .NET Core is its modularity. New memory allocation concepts, high community efforts, and Microsoft support made it much more lightweight and multiple times faster. Adding the core libraries and optimizing the tools helped developers to write efficient and high-performing code. It led to easier upgrades, faster development release cycles, making .NET Core one of the best web frameworks available on the market.

.NET Core Benefit #3: Open-source

Compared with the .NET framework, .NET Core is an open-source one. The flexibility of open-source software provides users with a lot of benefits. Each developer can contribute to projects, suggesting ways to fix them, offering corrections and improvements. Thanks to the huge open-source community support, you can also easily adjust the existing solution if it’s not suitable enough for your needs. For example, you can visit the GitHub repository and submit an issue for review. Thousands of developers will then investigate your code, track a bug, and help improve the quality of your code and an application overall.

.NET Core Benefit #4: Cross-platform

While the .NET framework was created to run only on Windows, .NET Core can be deployed on any operating system, depending on your preferences. It is a big advantage, as you can easily reuse any existing environment and reduce development costs.

Why .NET Core Might Not Suit Your Needs

Although .NET Core is considered an extremely powerful programming environment for server-side development of flexible and dynamic web apps, it has one insignificant disadvantage that has to be mentioned.

Incompatible with Outdated .NET Library

.NET Core is a great platform for any OS, but it is not as mature as most programming platforms. While .NET framework includes a large class library, not all of them were optimized for .NET Core. That’s why the only downside of .NET Core is that it is relatively fresh and it doesn’t have a sufficient number of up-to-date libraries. However, this insignificant drawback can be easily overcome with the help of its .NET Core community that offers constant support to the members.

Considering .NET Core high performance and cutting-edge features, this framework is definitely the future of web development. It is gaining popularity among developers and businesses for its robust industry solution. So if you are planning to create a successful application that can be easily deployed on different platforms, .NET Core is the right option for you.

4 Reasons To Build the Web App Using .NET Core + Angular Combination

Choosing Angular for the front-end and .NET Core for the back-end side of your web application will allow you to get the most out of these extremely powerful web application frameworks.

Reason #1 for .NET Core and Angular: Decoupled Codebase

When you create an Angular application with the .NET Core back-end, your Angular code doesn’t depend on the .NET code. You can host it in another repository in case you change your mind to combine it later on. This feature might be also useful if you decide to develop a mobile application in the future since you’d already have the server side in place.

Reason #2 for .NET Core and Angular: Fast Development

Angular and .NET Core stack is also a great solution if you need to develop a successful Net Core web application quickly. Both frameworks have tons of open-source and proprietary libraries that allow you to speed up the development process. It is worth admitting that Angular is written in TypeScript that is a strongly typed language similar to C#. Syntax of TypeScript is also very similar to C#. Such similarity results in fewer bugs and ensures you can use the same classes with just small modifications.

Reason #3 for .NET + Angular: Cost-effectiveness 

Language similarity of Angular + .NET Core results in one more beneficial feature – decreased development costs. You can hire a full-stack developer who will be responsible for every step of development, starting from the server-side and ending with elements users directly interact with.

Reason #4 for .NET + Angular: UI Stack Plasticity 

The flexibility of the latest ASP.NET Razor with the assistance of certain modules from a set of available libraries gives you the possibility to combine even native ASP.NET MVC UI with Angular. This significantly shifts functionality from client to server, in case you prefer back-end development over front-end. In combination with server-side rendering, it provides the ability to achieve the ultimate speed for the first-page load.

Of course, there is no silver bullet that is suitable for all projects regardless of their business needs and specifications, but the stack combination of Angular and .NET Core covers 99% of cases. Angular will improve your app with its asynchronous nature, modular structure, and the templating system, and .NET Core will enhance its effectiveness when it comes to speed, and security.