The Complete Microsoft Technology Stack For Businesses

• The .NET Framework
• MS SQL
• Microsoft Office 365
• Microsoft SharePoint Framework
• Microsoft Azure Stack
• Microsoft Visual Studio Platform
• Web API Framework
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM
• Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)
• ASP.NET And Web Forms
• Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)

Microsoft is a technology giant that imparts services to businesses, beginners, and even seasoned digital veterans to develop and deploy enterprise projects. Once a business has decided on an application, the next biggest thing on the list is determining a tech stack. 

In this ever-changing digital era of technological breakthroughs, the Microsoft technology stack has remained popular, especially for large enterprise projects.  Most enterprise-grade applications trust Microsoft’s technology stack for its dependable performance. The global community support of Microsoft technology stack has led to a solid foundation for enormous application development projects. 

Microsoft Technology Stack – The Best Of Both Worlds

Microsoft technology stack is a powerhouse that plays a tremendously huge role in shaping benchmarked applications and software products that are developed by tech-breathing developers and businesses!

Microsoft has well-adapted to the current technology changes and trends. Microsoft has proven its ability to work with modern frameworks and languages. Additionally, taking into account its experience in the development industry over the decades, Microsoft can be considered the best of both worlds. 

Unique Value Offered To Businesses

The group of products Microsoft offers is enormous. It consists of a wide array of platforms and frameworks. Let us walk you through some of the key technologies of the Microsoft Stack that is crucial for developers as well as businesses to learn about.

The .NET Framework

What is .NET Framework

The .NET framework is a software development framework to create both form-based and web-based applications. Application development with Microsoft .NET framework involves web applications, web services, Windows mobile and desktop applications, web and windows services, as well as console applications. 

What is .Net Used For?

Microsoft’s .NET framework can be used to build different types of applications that include web, console, mobile as well as windows-based applications. 

The core of the .NET framework has been made available under an open-source license and can be used on all operating systems as well. Microsoft .NET has emerged as the leading and proven front-end application development framework. The ASP.NET development services have gained high levels of popularity by its capability to make use of the framework in any way by addressing various form factors as well as User Interfaces. 

The ability of this framework to create robust and complex applications with ease inspires developers to code without tremendous effort. The ability of the .NET framework to combine native development and managed code makes it stay out-of-the-box and in demand.

The .NET framework consists of a multitude of ready-to-use components and is readily accessible through popular APIs utilized by developers globally. Making itself available even on non-windows systems, .NET API is consistent, very well-documented, and utilized by millions. 

The feature-rich .NET framework has a knowledge base available via official Microsoft documentation, StackOverflow, MSDN, and many other blogs and forums. 

MS SQL

What Is MS SQL?

SQL Server is Microsoft’s relational database management system that provides reliable server security using encryption. A standard set of procedures of the MS SQL makes the processes of fetching, recovering and restoring of data easily.

What Is MS SQL Used For?

MS SQL is used to handle various crucial processes such as data fetching, restoration, data recovery, storage and so on. The easy to install procedure of MS SQL makes the installation process simple to decipher, learn, and perform.  

Organizations vary in their need for databases. Some may require large volumes of data to be stored and some require to handle complex data. The Microsoft SQL Server comes in varying editions. Each edition of Microsoft SQL has its specific pricing plan and features. Be it a small, medium or large, every business can leverage benefits from MS SQL by choosing the edition tailor-fit for your business model.

Microsoft Office 365

What Is Office 365?

Microsoft Office 365 is a (SaaS) solution that is adopted by businesses to access a suite of Microsoft services that includes applications such as Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and other enterprise-scale Microsoft Office applications. 

What Is MS Office 365 Suite Used For?

MS Office 365 suite can be utilized efficiently especially for businesses that have employees working in multiple remote locations. The Microsoft Office 365 suite provides desktop facilities that let businesses use their cloud-based applications more conveniently. 

Additionally, for the workforce to collaborate and work together on various tasks, real-time updates are a key feature of the MS Office 365 suite. This avoids redundant copies.

The advantage of being flexible enough to scale your business by using Office 365, custom solutions can be created. This avoids the need to adopt new tools or change to a new ecosystem entirely. Flexibility and scalability features offered by Microsoft Office have prompted organizations to adopt cloud-based models.

The technique of versioning is involved which provides the functionality to go back to an older version whenever required. 

Shared calendars, team chat, etc are other benefits. The latest versions are made readily available, thus avoiding compatibility issues with all team members using the same version. Since MS Office 365 operates on the cloud, it helps in substantially saving costs by eliminating the need for capital and energy spends. 

The built-in security features offered by MS Office 365 include (ATA) Advanced Threat Analytics that makes use of machine learning techniques, prevention of any data losses, message encryption, management of mobile devices, etc. 

Microsoft SharePoint Framework

What Is SharePoint?

The SharePoint framework is a web-based collaborative platform that fully supports client-side as well as server-side development. This framework supports a page-and-part model that offers easy integration and with the support of Microsoft Graph for open source tooling. The SharePoint framework enables usage of the same technology and tools for building responsive and mobile-ready applications.

What Is SharePoint Used For?

Microsoft Sharepoint lets developers follow a structured approach to develop modern applications that are end-to-end and not dependent on .NET or beyond. This framework is made available to the existing sites. 

It also offers the ability to host client-side web parts that are developed within the new Sharepoint framework with existing pages. This allows for extended support of new open-source opportunities with the existing tools and solutions. Its iterative experiences in build-testing with Gulp and the scaffolding of projects with Yeoman make it a powerful development framework. 

The new SharePoint page structure allows developers with varying skills to develop mobile-ready and responsive applications right from day one. SharePoint has become the most preferred collaboration platform to build the next generation of solutions. 

Microsoft Azure Stack

What Is Azure?

Microsoft Azure is a set of cloud services that allow users to build, test, deploy, and manage applications and services on a global network, via Microsoft-managed data centers. Azure is a consistent cloud platform where you can run applications in an on-premises environment. 

What Is Azure Used For

Microsoft Azure provides hybrid cloud use cases for on-premise applications such as financial reporting, global audits, expense reporting and so on. 

Microsoft Azure offers services, containers, microservice and serverless architectures that can be utilized either to build new applications or to update existing ones. DevOps processes can be consistently made use of across the Microsoft Azure platform in the cloud as well as Azure Stack on-premises. This is performed for the rapid modernization of mission-critical applications.

With the Azure stack architecture, it lets you build Azure services for remote locations as well. These include services with intermittent connectivity and even while it is disconnected from the Internet. For this, hybrid solutions are created to process data locally in the Azure stack and then gathered in Azure for continued processing and analytics. 

Microsoft Azure provides the ability to be installed on-premises and hence regulatory requirements for deploying cloud applications on-premises without having to change code, are met easily. 

It also provides an integrated delivery experience that runs quickly with its integrated systems from the Azure Stack. The Stack can be integrated easily into the data center via the Nagios extension or the System Center Operations Manager Management Pack.

Microsoft Visual Studio Platform

What Is Visual Studio?

Microsoft Visual Studio is an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) which is an efficient platform for developers to code, debug, and test their applications with great accuracy. 

Microsoft Visual Studio can perform database development with SQL Server Data Tools to coding Android and iPad applications using Xamarin. Microsoft Visual Studio offers a consistent development experience with a great user interface. Microsoft Visual Studio also avoids the complexities involved in a distributed cloud infrastructure. 

What Is Visual Studio Used For?

Microsoft Visual Studio is used to develop computer programs, websites, web applications, web services, and mobile applications. 

Visual Studio as an ideal IDE is widely used to develop GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces), web console, and mobile applications along with cloud and web services. Creating managed as well as native code is a simple task with Visual Studio.

Visual Studio makes use of various platforms of Microsoft application development software such as Windows API, SilverLight, Windows Store, and so on. 

Visual Studio is not a language-specific IDE. Hence, it is used to code in 36 different programming languages and is available for Windows as well as Mac OS.

Microsoft Visual Studio makes itself available in three different editions. They are the Community Edition which is a free version for developing free, paid, .NET, and web applications. The Professional Edition of Microsoft Visual Studio is the commercial edition that supports XML and XSLT editing and also includes tools such as Server Explorer. It also supports the integration of Microsoft SQL Server. The third edition is the Enterprise Edition which is an integrated end-to-end solution to develop highly scalable and quality software solutions. 

Web API Framework

What Is Web API?

Microsoft Web API is an easy-to-use web development framework that provides information from the server which works on protocols such as HTTP, WebSockets, SSL, JSON, and XML, and can be invoked by the mobile, desktop or web applications. 

Utility Of Microsoft Web API

The Web API is used as an effective tool to push data to the server which is then processed by the server code or can be saved in any of the persistent layers. 

The Web API developed can be utilized by the Interface application to fetch information that needs to be portrayed to the users. Additionally, Web API does not pose any limitations to use just a single interface or technology for interacting with its users.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM

What Is Microsoft Dynamics CRM?

Microsoft’s Customer Relationship Management system is a category of integrated data-driven software solutions. This software package streamlines the marketing, sales, and customer service domains efficiently.  

What Is Microsoft Dynamics CRM Used For?

Microsoft CRM applications can be used to meet the various requirements of a specific business. In addition to being extensible and scalable, Microsoft Dynamics CRM software helps enterprises manage their operations, improves growth, streamlines workflows and increases efficiency and productivity of the workforce significantly.

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)

What Is WCF?

The WCF is a secure service used to process business transactions. It is designed as a manageable approach in being able to create web services as well as web service clients.

What Is WCF Used For?

The WCF framework is used for building service-oriented applications. This is performed by sending information in the form of synchronous and asynchronous messages from one service endpoint to another. The WCF complies with modern industry standards for Web service interoperability. 

Another use case of WCF involves the support of publishing service metadata in formats such as WSDL, XML schema as well as the WS policy standards over the HTTP, HTTPS, or the Web service metadata exchange standard. 

It ensures security by encrypting messages via authentication via standards such as WS-SecureConversation or SSL. 

To learn how technology giants implement Microsoft technology stack for positive business outcomes, call our strategists right away! 

ASP.NET And Web Forms

What Is ASP.NET?

Being an open-source server-side framework for developing web applications, ASP.NET is developed by Microsoft for the development of dynamic web applications, and services. The successor to Microsoft’s ASP or Active Server Pages technology, ASP.NET allows coders to build ASP.NET applications that use any .NET supported language as it is built on Common Language Runtime or CLR.

What Is ASP.NET Used For?

ASP.NET is used to develop dynamic web pages. ASP.NET has an extension framework called the SOAP that permits ASP.NET elements or components to process SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) messages.

The successor of ASP.NET is termed as ASP.NET Core framework, which is a re-implementation of the modular web framework in conjunction with some of the other frameworks such as the Entity Framework and MVC. ASP.NET Core uses an open-source .NET compiler platform, known as Roslyn and is also cross-platform as well.

What Is ASP.NET Web Forms?

 WebForms is a web application framework supported by Microsoft technology to be written in any programming language that supports the CLR (Common Language Runtime). 

What Is Web Forms Used For?

WebForms are formed from server controls, which are the building blocks that act as reusable components to render HTML markup and to respond to events. The 2 basic methodologies of Web Forms include a website format and the other a web application format.

Microsoft lets a model named the code-behind model to deal with dynamic program code which is automatic in Visual Studio as well as in other APIs as well. WebForms can be used to build applications that can involve separate presentation logic and content. 

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) 

What Is WPF?

The WPF is a graphical subsystem of Microsoft. Also known as Avalon that was first released as part of the .NET framework version 3.0, it is a consistent programming model to develop applications. The user interface stands separated from the business logic with WPF.

What Is WPF Used For?

The Windows Presentation Foundation is used to render user interfaces in Windows-based apps. WPF makes use of an XML-based language, known as XAML, for linking different interface elements.

The WPF applications that are deployed as standalone applications unify various elements such as 2D, 3D rendering, documents, runtime animation, typography, and so on. These elements are then linked depending on various events and data binding features. The characteristic utility of WPF includes Direct3D used to render graphics and desktop items such as windows, Data Binding, TemplatesImaging, Animations, Media Services, Effects, etc.

What Is Microsoft Win Forms?

Microsoft Window Forms is a GUI class library that helps in writing applications for desktop, tablets, and so on. It is an event-driven application that provides easy access to native Windows UI common controls.

What Is Microsoft WinForms Used For?

Microsoft Window Forms are used to display data and handle data inputs. It can also be used to deploy applications securely and easily.

That’s A Lot! How Do You Know What You Need?

It’s best to leave that part to the software developers as they are the ones dealing with the tech stack on a daily basis and the right technologies should be selected based on the requirement.