Enterprise-grade web apps and APIs with ASP.NET Core

At Microbians, ASP.NET Core is not just another framework in our toolbox — it is the foundation we build on. After evaluating every major web framework available today, we chose ASP.NET Core because it delivers the best combination of raw speed, developer productivity, and industrial-grade reliability across every project we ship.

Let's talk about performance. ASP.NET Core consistently benchmarks as one of the fastest web frameworks in the world — often an order of magnitude faster than Node.js for equivalent workloads. It handles millions of requests per second on modest hardware, and its true asynchronous and concurrent runtime means it excels not just at I/O-bound operations but also at heavy CPU-bound workloads. Unlike single-threaded runtimes that fake concurrency with event loops, ASP.NET Core leverages the full power of the operating system's thread pool, giving you genuine parallel execution. This is why it powers some of the largest sites on the internet — Stack Overflow, Bing, Azure, Visual Studio Marketplace, GoDaddy, and countless enterprise platforms that demand uncompromising throughput.

Despite its muscle, ASP.NET Core is surprisingly easy to get started with. The idea that .NET is hard to learn is a relic from an era when it was closed-source and Windows-only. Today, a new developer can scaffold a full API in minutes using the CLI, and the built-in dependency injection, logging, configuration, and middleware pipeline mean you spend less time wiring up infrastructure and more time building features. The learning curve is gentler than most people expect — and the ecosystem of NuGet packages (over 400,000 libraries) means you almost never have to build anything from scratch.

We also love that ASP.NET Core is fully open source under the .NET Foundation, with an active community on GitHub and transparent development. It runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS — so your team can develop on any platform and deploy anywhere: containers, bare metal, serverless, or any cloud provider. The cross-platform story is no longer an afterthought; it is the default.

And it is backed by Microsoft — one of the biggest hitters in the tech industry. That means enterprise-grade support, decade-long support policies, security patches that arrive on a predictable cadence, and a roadmap shaped by the needs of the world's most demanding software systems. When you build on ASP.NET Core, you are building on a platform with serious institutional weight behind it.

So why is ASP.NET Core less common in startup environments? That is an outdated stigma from the pre-open-source, pre-cross-platform era — when .NET was expensive, Windows-only, and tightly coupled to proprietary tooling. That version of .NET no longer exists. The ASP.NET Core of today is free, open, runs everywhere, and is faster than virtually any alternative. Startups that overlook it are leaving performance and productivity on the table.