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.NET is an open-source, free, cross-platform that is developed by Microsoft and it can be extensively used for developing many applications, e-commerce stores, web apps, mobile apps, IoT solutions, and desktop apps. With .NET, many languages, libraries, and multiple editors can be used to create different apps.

Being an open-source platform, .NET adds an advantage over other walled-in options. .NET works on Windows, Linux, and Mac and provides speedy performance that works the best for e-comm websites.

If you are a .NET developer and looking for the best practices to use for developing a web store, do not worry, you have landed on the appropriate article. This article would help you in enchaining your .NET Skills so that your code becomes more organized.

Best .NET Practices for developing a web store

• Project Organization

Split the application into smaller projects. It is a very effective way of organizing projects. It also separates the concerns of the project. Try to separate the logics of entities, contracts, logging messages, email messages, database access and they should all be in separate .NET Core Class Library project.

Every small task in the application should contain numerous folders to organize the business logic better.

• Framework Version should be updated consequently

No matter an app on phone, or operating systems or app framework, UPDATING THE FRAMEWORK VERSION is one of the priorities that a .NET developer should keep in mind. Framework new versions are making improvements for end-user and developers.

For end-user, it may decrease the memory footprint or page-load time. It feels snappier, improves user experience, and also aids in the fast loading of the application.

New PIs or integrations are appreciated by developers. They allow the developer to maintain velocity and cleans codebase. That means more work is done in the budget.

It will not always be a sleek new user interaction or feature but it will keep the overall development cost down.

So think about it.

• Collection of Cache

Web server gets a lot of requests from clients and proxy which overloads the webserver with many requests. So it is quite wise to cache. It reduces the work of creating a response on the web server platforms.

Caching enables storing data in memory for rapid access and when data is again accessed, applications get the data from the cache rather than from the original source. Caching also makes data available in the case data source is unavailable. This increases performance and scalability.

Some caching techniques:

In-memory caching

Disturbed cache

Cache tag helper

Distributed cache tag helper

• Entity Framework for relational database

When writing a new ASP.NET core application involving relational data then the recommended way to access its data in Entity Framework Core (EF Core). EF core enables .NET developers to persists objects back and forth from a data source.

• Minimize the interaction with the data source

Data access time is reduced if we cache appropriately. And this overall reduces the time server takes to process to retrieve data calls. The time consumed in the process of accessing the data is reduced and becomes smooth.

• Blocking calls should be avoided

.NET Core apps are designed to process many requests simultaneously. Blocking asynchronous calls can cause performance problems in ASP.NET Core apps. Synchronous blocking of calls can lead to Thread Pool Starvation and affect response time.

Dos-    Turn hot code paths to asynchronous.

Call data access, long-run operations, and I/O APIs asynchronously if available. Controller, razor page actions should be made asynchronous.

• Optimization of code paths

To Increase the quality of user experience optimize frequently used code paths.  It is a simple idea: a commonly used method has two execution paths- one is very simple and common, the other one is longer to execute with more steps but does not happen that often.

But there is no proof that inlining big methods improve performance.

• Completion of lengthy tasks outside of HTTP requests

Web store applications are common to be stateless, and running long requests might be problematic. Long-running tasks tie up valuable Web server resources.

A polling mechanism and event manager class can be used to interchange messages between Web application and server.

This issue of long-running requests can make you think that it is not a big deal as Web Servers are multi-threaded. But it still can cause issues because of the resources involved in the Web server. Hence you can set up a process that requests the response of long tasks outside the HTTP response.

• Bundling and Minifying Client Assets

These two are two different performance optimization techniques but are used together, known as bundling and minification improve performance. These two reduce the number of server requests and the size of the requested static assets.

By combining multiple files into single file bundling reduces the number of server requests necessary for rendering a web asset like a web page.  Individual bundles can be created especially for Javascript, CSS, etc. This improves the first load page performance.

Minification removes unnecessary characters from code without changing the functionality which results in a very significant size reduction like in the case of javascript files and CSS Images.

• Optimizing data access

App performance can be improved by optimizing the data access logic. Most applications first fetch data, process it, and then display it. It can be more time consuming for the application.

• Call data access APIs asynchronously.
• Data that is not required immediately should not be acquired in advance.
• Filter and aggregate LINQ queries can be used. So filtering is performed by the database.

• Asynchronous querying and saving

It avoids blocking a thread during the execution of the query in the database. It is important for quick and responsive client applications.

Asynch Saving avoids a thread block while the database is being changed.

• Reducing responses or response compression

It is a technique used for file compression and decompression for fast network transfer. It gives a smooth experience to the end-user. In ASP.Net core, response compression is available as a middleware component.