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.NET 5 Upgrade Benefits: Five Key Ways to Boost Your Business
Apprising your clients of when to migrate or upgrade their technology stack is one of the most important values you can bring to the table
In the world of software development, a major responsibility of any development team is to know when it’s time for a software upgrade—keeping our clients happy means ensuring that their technology stack is up to standards, and this requires the latest and greatest software updates, such as the latest .NET 5 ecosystem.
As McAfee Blogs has well stated, upgrading your software and migrating to .NET5 includes “critical patches to security holes. They can also improve the stability of your software and remove outdated features. All of these updates are aimed at making the user experience better.
Recently, we had the opportunity to make a recommendation to a major client in the food and beverage manufacturing industry about upgrading to Microsoft’s latest .NET framework version. In a nutshell, migrating to .NET 5 Framework continues a software evolution over 20 years.
It now brings together the latest .Net Framework version, .Net Core, and Xamarin into one unified framework called .NET 5 Framework, which was released in November 2020.
In a nutshell, the enhancements in .NET 5 encompass a whole framework of solutions and services to ensure compatibility with the digital transformation era – including the latest IoT and AI innovations.
More than getting into the technicalities of .NET 5, we wanted to use this upgrade recommendation to share some significant best practices that lead to better productivity, lower costs, and, ultimately, happier clients.
These elements showcase precisely how we provide value to our clients. More specifically, they demonstrate how a major software upgrade, even though very difficult and time-consuming, can help us show innovation while avoiding production roadblocks and tons of rework for our teams.
Therefore, Let’s dig into five key advantages of upgrading to .NET 5 and why it was important for our valued client. In the process, we’ll show why these are good best practices to keep in mind no matter what software upgrades you encounter in the future.
.NET 5 Features: 1- Enhance Technical Value and Drive Business Results
An important sign of a good and reliable software vendor and partner is one that has your back and can provide essential software recommendations.
It’s a company that can look ahead in order to save your company resources, time, and effort. This implies what Jonathan Fries calls the relationship between “technical” and “business” value:
When software developers are focused on sound design and taking the time to build a system the right way, they are focused on delivering business value for their customers or stakeholders. They want good design because they know that a system with good design is easier to support and extend in the medium and long-term.
This has clear business value — you can do more new stuff (features) for less money, and you can fix problems (bugs) for less money. More stuff for less money is good business value. This way, technical value (sound design and elegant coding) is business value.
As technologies grow faster and faster, it’s easy for everyone to fall behind. How do you know when to proceed with a software upgrade and which technology do you adopt? Being able to answer these questions for a client is of immeasurable value. It goes beyond just the tactical aspects of the day-to-day coding that is already expected in a client-vendor relationship.
Enhancements in .NET 5: 2- Boost Scalability and Performance
One of the key reasons for helping our client with migrating to .NET 5 was scalability and the use of reduced resources. With .NET 5, the client could serve 100% more concurrent users with the same servers.
.NET5 is a heavy migration, and professionals suggest taking it slow. But this is still a vital tradeoff from having to backtrack in two years. Some key scalability benefits emerge from migrating to .NET 5:
.NET 5 memory usage could be decreased by approximately 50%
The client could double the number of users with the same efficiency but at reduced overall cost
.NET 5 is a cross-platform framework which means that it can be deployed on Linux servers as well as Microsoft Azure servers
Migrating to .NET 5 introduces significant improvements in user performance and major security improvements. These are some of the few reasons to upgrade to .NET 5.
This makes .NET 5 an optimal solution for serving more concurrent users more efficiently. Organizations can expect up to 25 to 30% performance gains from this migration alone.
The following graphs show the performance improvements that .NET 5 offers for most of the APIs used by our client. In some cases, .NET 5 will decrease the time significantly, as shown in the below charts; this leads to better scalability as the load per API is lower.
.NET 5 Upgrade Benefits: 3- Unlock Long-Term Value
While migrating to .NET 5 is not known to be “a walk in the park,” the long-term benefits make this path important and worthwhile. The most compelling reason is that Microsoft will not release updates and enhancements for the .NET framework 4.8. That much should be clear at the outset.
But in reality, there are many reasons why adopting and shipping new .NET 5 features will lead to more efficiency and stability in your workflows and longer-term happiness for your clients. Some of the most important benefits of migrating to .NET 5 are:
Easier integration into using the newest technologies (i.e., cloud, microservices, etc.) · Ability to use more robust APIs such as Entity Framework Core, etc.
Cross-platform
.NET 5 is a tested, stable framework
Migrating future features written in .NET 5 to .NET 6 will be more seamless and less disruptive
.NET 5 Compatibility: 4- Upgraded Entity Framework
In addition to costs, performance, and scalability improvements, upgrading to .NET 5 supports the latest C# version and allows our client to utilize the latest Entity Framework (EF) Core 3 package. EF Core 3’s benefits include:
Faster reading and writing of data from and to the database
Ability to use third-party libraries.
Documentation that displays the main operations performed and the performance improvements per operation.
.NET 5 Ecosystem: 5- Reducing Costs
Any time you save your clients money, that’s good. We have not heard of any clients complaining about lower costs. One of the most prominent features of the software that makes it cost-efficient is the cross-platform .NET 5 compatibility.
This means you could switch from Windows Servers to Linux Servers and reduce costs while still servicing more concurrent users. Moreover, cross-platform allows you to manage, orchestrate, and scale container-based applications in the cloud more seamlessly and cost-effectively.
Another approach to this .NET 5 migration question is considering it from the opportunity cost perspective. By not migrating now, what do you forfeit – one year, two years, or five years from now – in terms of code refactoring, maintenance, and rework that you’ll need to accomplish down the road?
Accelerate Your Roadmap to Success with .NET 5 Performance Improvements
To make the most of the .NET 5 benefits, we developed a migration plan for our client that involved a go-forward strategy (as opposed to a backward migration which we deemed to be too costly). Our high-level recommendation plan consisted of the following steps.
01 Preparation/Transition to Ready the Team
- Gain familiarity with .NET 5
- Architecture and design of new API application
- Upgrade all APIs
- Group all commonly used APIs under a single mobile application
- Familiarize developers with .NET 5
- Use the API test automation platform to test new APIs
02 Building New Features with .NET 5
By implementing this migration plan, we are preparing our client with the tools, resources, and technologies they need to be successful. This establishes a pattern of trust and goodwill and ensures that our client will gain the best ROI on their investments – both in the short-term and long-term.
Choosing .NET 5 for Projects: How Long Does It Take to Build a Successful Self-Organized Team?
Building a high-quality team that is self-organized, efficient, and a high performer takes time.
Our project management experts suggest that it takes about six months to understand their strengths and weaknesses after hiring a new engineer. Bringing on a new person is always a risk because there are apparent unknowns beyond the interview; someone who interviews extremely well may still mask certain red flags in their work ethic or character.
A good rule of thumb is to count on at least a year for an engineer to settle into their new environment and to allow time for adjustments, tweaks, and mentoring to prepare that person for success fully.
At Integrant, we are proud of our hiring track record. Fortunately, we’ve had very high retention rate over the years. This indicates a solid ability to identify outstanding team players who combine the right blend of experience, mindset, and soft skills.
What Now?
Software upgrades are an inevitable part of any vendor-client relationship. However, we have noticed that vendors do not infrequently approach them as an “add-on” or aberration from the normal software development lifecycle.
On the contrary, taking a client through a migration plan from start to finish demonstrates good business value and strong technical value. Software upgrades are not easy and may be easily dismissed as not critical. But at the end of the day, upgrades are an essential but often missed opportunity to expand cost savings, achieve better performance, and improve security.
In the present use case, we took our food and beverage client through a migration plan by migrating to .NET 5 on the premise that this platform will lead to superior capabilities, products, and features
We provided a strategic and compelling list of reasons why an upgrade can significantly reduce costs, increase scalability and performance, and enable a company to achieve better business outcomes.
If you’re an organization looking for more than just an application to be built, you’ve come to the right place. We believe the key to any partnership is protecting the client and setting them up for success at each step of their journey.
If you want to gain deep traction in your market, call us today for a demo of our work! Learn how we can partner together on your next project. Subscribe below or contact us to see the strategic impact we can make for you and your business.
