If .NET Core is good enough for Bing, it's good enough

With the recent release of version 2.1 and introduction of many new features, .NET Core is becoming more mature. However, many developers are still skeptical about the framework. They wonder, what major organisations have adopted the technology and did it provide much benefit to them? They have heard that even Microsoft, who created the technology, is unwilling to use it in its Exchange servers and Azure infrastructure.

However, Microsoft has decided to eat its own dogfood after all and received enormous benefits from doing so. Quite a big chunk of Bing engine is now powered by .NET Core 2.1 and it has received 34% performance boost compared to old .NET Framework components that it has replaced.

On its own, the current version of .NET Core has everything that a web app needs. You can even deploy it in cloud as a collection of microservices. The apps can also be easily hosted inside Docker containers and scaled accordingly. But the biggest advantage of .NET over it's predecessor is the fact that it can be compiled and deployed on almost any operating system, allowing the distributed software to run across many cheap devices with lightweight distribution of Linux running on them.

From developers' perspective, .NET Core is much more pleasant to work with compared to .NET Framework. With new SDK project file format, there is no more unnecessary verbosity in the XML for MSBuild. The content of an average .csproj file would probably fit on a single screen. Likewise, there is no longer any need to unload and reload projects if such file needs to be edited. SDK files can be modified while keeping the rest of project files accessible.

The fact that .NET Framework still dominates the bulk of Bing functionality is not a problem either. With .NET Standard 2.x, .NET Core apps can communicate with a wide range of .NET Framework API's, excluding some strictly Windows-specific ones. This allows .NET Framework components to be seamlessly replaced by .NET Core components within the same ecosystem.

So, if Microsoft is willing to use .NET Core in one of its flagship customer-facing products and doing so resulted in a significant improvement of performance, it is no longer possible to say that .NET Core isn't a mature enterprise-grade framework.

Of course, if software is intended to only ever run on Windows and heavily relies on Windows-specific functionality, .NET Framework is still the obvious choice. However, in almost any other case, .NET Core would provide a much better solution.