Why Learn The Microsoft Stack

It’s common to ask yourself, “what language should I learn?” when considering learning to code. There are hundreds so it is important you are learning something relevant. Our Director of Instruction, Mike, talks more about the stack we teach in our full-time course and why we teach it.

I want to talk to you about our full-stack software development program. A very popular course that we offer here at devCodeCamp. Specifically, I want to talk to you about the Microsoft stack, which is the technology stack that we teach in this course.

The Microsoft stack has been around for a while now, and it’s continuing to grow in popularity. Companies still use it to build enterprise-level applications, it’s fantastic. C# is the programming language in there. You have ASP.NET for your platform for building out web applications, you have SQL server as well as some really great technologies here that are wrapped together. Now, when building out your backend for these applications, you’re talking .NET or .NET Core, which is the newer more popular version. Then you also have ASP.NET to build out the web application framework, which allows you to create awesome front-ends as well.

These front-ends could integrate with React or Angular, jQuery, or vanilla JavaScript to make them really pop and mobile responsive as well. SQL Server, is the database that we would use for the stack, a very popular, database. Very good for storing your data and managing your data. ASP.NET MVC being the MVC architecture pattern that we’re using to build out our full-stack web applications. You’re talking about your front-end, your back-end, and communicating with your database. You also can use ASP.NET for building out web APIs and creating this infrastructure for building out these web APIs that expose your web services as well, so that you can integrate with other applications out there.

The Microsoft stack is really the full package. It also has fantastic documentation. There’s the official MSDN documentation, put out by Microsoft which is very thorough. There’s also just a plethora of community-based documentation out there because it’s been around for so long and because it’s so popular and so many developers use it and so many companies use it. There’s just so much out there so much information and documentation. Even when you do run into issues, it’s pretty well-documented for all the different errors that you may run into.

Then also the IDE the development experience that you use to build out these applications, Visual Studio is the best out there, hands down, everyone I think would agree with that. There’s other great IDE’s out there as well for other stacks, but Visual Studio is constantly making improvements, and it’s so easy to use. There’s also visual studio code as well. These IDE’s make it so much easier to develop these applications.

So the Microsoft stack, which really consists of .NET and .NET Core, we have. ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET, Web APIs, and we have Microsoft SQL Server. These are the main technologies, but the other thing that makes the Microsoft stack so awesome, it’s very easy to test your applications. Unit test and built-in unit testing frameworks as well.

There’s so much to do with this. You can build amazing applications with the Microsoft stack. Growing in popularity, so many companies use this still and so many companies are looking for these .NET developers, .NET Core developers, and ASP.NET developers. That is why we use the Microsoft stack, and why we continue to teach it. I hope you come enjoy it and have fun.