Author: Abhishek Nag

  • Top Five Technology Trends To Watch Out For In 2022

    Top Five Technology Trends To Watch Out For In 2022

    Technology in today’s times is evolving quickly, thus, enabling rapid change and high progress. This is the result that is leading to an accelerated rate of change in the technology world. According to a report, latest technology trends show the digital market size is likely to grow from $521.5bn in 2021 to $1247.5bn by 2026 at a CAGR of 19.1%.

    It is not just the technology that is changing, even the world after the outbreak of the COVID pandemic has seen an immense change in the world. The IT professionals have realized the dynamics of changing technology, needs, and their roles in the pandemic hitten world. They are constantly learning, unlearning, and evolving based on the requirements to keep up with the changing times. Technology has significantly helped us to get through the pandemic and continues to redesign the way we work, live, and interact. It is crucial to keep a close watch on the emerging technology trends in 2022 to stay ahead of the competition.

    Top Technology Trends 2022

    Let’s check out some of the top technology trends that can rule the coming year 2022 and impact the growth of technology in the world.

    1. Robotic Process Automation (RPA): Just like AI and ML, RPA is another technology that will assist in automating jobs, business processes like interpreting applications, transactions processing, and data handling.RPA technology will reduce the burden of doing the repetitive jobs done by people by automating them. It also offers great career opportunities that would include developers, project managers, business analysts, solution architects, and consultant roles. According to a report, the global RPA market is likely to reach $7.64bn by 2028 at a CAGR of 25% from 2021 to 2028.

    2. Edge Computing: With major players like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud platforms dominating the market, cloud computing is becoming the mainstream. Cloud computing’s adoption continues to grow with the businesses migrating to the cloud solution. Edge computing is becoming a growing technology nowadays. With the increase in the data quantity, organizations are now shifting to edge computing to overcome the latency-related issues and get the data for processing to the data center. This new technology is expected to grow, creating numerous job opportunities for software engineers. Based on research, the edge computing market is likely to grow from $36.5bn in 2021 to $87.3bn by 2026, at a CAGR of 19.0%.

    3. Quantum Computing: Next technology that can see remarkable growth in the coming year is quantum computing. It is a type of computing that takes the advantage of quantum phenomena such as superposition and quantum entanglement. Quantum computing technology is capable of querying easily, monitoring, analyzing, and acting on the data, irrespective of the source. The use cases of this technology can be seen in banking and finance that manages credit risk, for any high-frequency trading and fraud detection. According to a report, the quantum computing market is most likely to reach $1.76bn by 2026 at a CAGR of 30.2% during the period 2021-2026.

    4. Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality: The next exceptional technology that can make a great impact in 2022 is virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). VR is known to involve the user in an environment completely whereas AR usually works in enhancing that environment. This technology is mostly used by the gaming industry as of now, it has also been used by other sectors gradually. In 2022, VR and AR technology can be seen integrated more and more into our lives. It has great potential in the training, entertainment, education, and marketing sectors. According to research, the augmented and virtual reality market size is most likely to reach $454.7bn by 2030, at a CAGR of 40.7%.

    5. Internet of Things (IoT): Several things are now being developed with Wifi connectivity or that can be connected to the internet as well as to each other. The Internet of Things is the new future, it has already empowered devices, home appliances, cars, and other things to remain connected and exchange data with the help of the internet. Its use cases can be seen from locking the doors remotely to tracking our fitness on the Fitbits, it is being utilized in various sectors already. It seems like we are at the initial stages of this new technology trend. The growing demand for IoT can lead the global IoT market to grow from $381.3bn in 2021 to $1854.7bn in 2028, at a CAGR of 25.4% based on a report.

    As technologies are constantly evolving and emerging all around the world, it is very important to keep a close watch on the top evolving technologies. To give your business promising growth and reshape the careers of IT professionals, you should not neglect the technologies that have the potential to positively rule the world. So, there is a lot to focus on in the coming year and adopt the technologies based on your requirements. As technologies are constantly evolving and emerging all around the world, it is very important to keep a close watch on the top evolving technology trends. To give your business promising growth and reshape the careers of IT professionals, you should not neglect the technologies that have the potential to positively rule the world. So, there is a lot to focus on in the coming year and adopt the technologies based on your requirements.

  • Why Modernize The .NET Applications With AWS?

    Why Modernize The .NET Applications With AWS?

    In one of our previous blogs, we talked about how you can select .Net Core with React in Digital Product Engineering to build a robust and scalable product. Nowadays, many organizations want to modernize their legacy .Net framework applications to achieve better agility, scalability, and save the cost of their cloud-native applications.

    To make things a little easier, we again on one of our previous blogs have given a step-by-step guide to migrate applications from the .Net framework to .Net Core. Before we go ahead and talk about modernizing applications in offshore software product development with .Net Core using AWS, let us first try and understand the concept of modernization.

    What Is Modernization?

    Modernization refers to the re-platforming of applications that are majorly legacy enterprise ones by bringing together the latest infrastructure, architecture, and various organizational patterns. It will help you to increase your application’s resilience, engineering efficiency, agility in terms of business, and operational excellence.
    If we look at the.NEt platform, it has evolved greatly from the .NET framework to .NET Core and then to .NET 5. If you wish to modernize your .NET legacy applications, you can do that anytime and then take full benefits of the application’s performance and robustness.

    Why AWS?

    To modernize your legacy .NET Core apps on AWS you should first understand the importance of AWS to carry out this process. AWS is a platform that will rightly empower your .NET developers to go beyond the limits and build .NET applications for the future. These apps can be developed on the innovative AWS Cloud. You can easily develop high-performing .NET apps by leveraging AWS’s services and solutions especially in Machine Learning, serverless, databases, containers, etc. AWS offers certain tools to the .NET developers to make it more productive with .NET on the AWS platform. To take more advantage of your AWS’s performance you can ask your .NET 5 and. NET developers leverage Linux, this will help you save more cost.

    Before, we analyze the why part of modernizing the .NET applications with AWS, let’s look into some of the major challenges that IT organizations face when it comes to modernizing the applications.

    Major Modernization Challenges Faced By IT Organizations

    • Pressure to raise the innovation velocity
    • High cost of maintaining the legacy applications
    • Scaling related challenges to fulfill the business needs
    • Monolithic architectures facing high technical debt
    • Security and operational resilience-related maintenance
    • Challenges related to dynamic scaling

    Why Modernize Legacy .NET Applications With AWS?

    AWS is the only major cloud provider that allows .NET 5 to run on the ARM64 architecture system. When this collaborates with AWS Graviton2, the clients will be able to get a better price and high performance over the current generation of x86-based instances.

    The other benefit of moving your .NET Framework applications to a .NET on Linux in comparison to other platforms is because of more overlap in the existing APIs and packages. To avoid the efforts required to re-write the applications, AWS came up with a Porting Assistant for the .NET tool. The purpose of this tool is to assist you in quickly porting the .NET applications to Linux.

    So, before you choose AWS as your cloud platform, it is quite important to know the reasons before you make the decision.

    Why Choose AWS As Your Cloud Platform during application engineering and modernization?

    • Location: AWS is available in 44 multiple zones and 16 geographical locations. The servers are easily accessible from any country.
    • Recovery System: It has a strong and well-defined disaster recovery system comprising a plan for organizations of any size.
    • Enhanced Security: Offers better security to protect the virtual things hosted on it. The data centers, as well as the servers, are made up of various layers of operational security.
    • Scalability: With its auto-scaling and elastic load balancing tools the scaling is made easier while your application delivers high performance. It has a huge infrastructure that offers computing resources based on the user’s requirements.
    • Flexibility: With the flexibility, it has to offer, any user can select the operating system, programming language, web application platform, database, and other services based on the requirements.
    • Cost-Effective: It offers pay-as-you-go pricing models and the user is not asked to pay large subscription fees for the resources that they don’t intend to utilize.

    With .NET Core cross-platform functionality, enhanced performance, unification of development models, new health checks API, integrated dependency injection, and more features that it has to offer. You can modernize your application on the cloud platform with AWS easily. In our next blog, we will talk about how you can implement or carry out the process of modernizing the .NET applications by leveraging AWS. We will explain the entire process in our upcoming blog. Till then, stay connected.

  • Choosing An Experienced Design Company For Your Software Product Development

    Choosing An Experienced Design Company For Your Software Product Development

    In today’s digitally transforming world building an extraordinary product highly depends on the design feature. We are at that stage where product design dominates the other features. This is what differentiates the organization from others by setting it apart and giving it a competitive edge in the market.

    At some point in your software product development idea, you would require the right team to turn that idea into reality. Bringing an idea into reality can be challenging, scary, and exciting at the same time. There are times when many organizations lack the development skills like user experience web designing and other designing-related skills. In such a situation, you inevitably require a software development team who would think from the aspect of your user experience design thinking. Taking your carefully nurtured idea and then giving it into the hands of others is like taking a big step. But, on the other hand, it is essentially important also to do so if you want your product’s design to be cut above. In this blog, we will focus on the aspects to consider while onboarding an experienced design company for your software product development.

    Things to consider while choosing the design partner

    • About the company: You must do proper research before related to the company’s profile like its history and track record. Look for the company’s strength if in case a team member is absent, there is someone to fill his/her position so that the project doesn’t go on hold
    • Company’s repeat business: When a customer gets the desirable results, they always come back. Ask your design partner the percentage of their customers who selected them again and then cross-check it
    • Company’s potential to cater to larger clients: This shows that the design company or the design partner can attract, engage, and deliver to a company big in size, highly experienced, and a little tough to attract
    • Company’s available references: Check the client’s references listed by the company on their website and their feedbacks also
    • Company’s product development and delivery history: This is an important aspect to check for the design company’s total number of successful market-ready products delivered in the past. Before onboarding, the design partner, be assured that they have the right expertise and experience to cater to your requirements

    The next thing to do is to check whether the design company has the right set of skill sets based on your requirements to deliver your tech product end-to-end. To have clarity on the skill sets, critically look for the following areas:

    • User Experience: A modern term comprising of user interface design that includes the actual drawing and graphic designing. Always look for the previous projects delivered by the design company to check the user flow and whether the design looks clean and modern. Involve the people who know the designs in your company while selecting an experienced design partner
    • Graphic Designing: If the design company has options to cater graphic designing services apart from the products and UX, do not miss out on the chance of exploring the other materials as well. Suppose you require an eCommerce website UI design, check whether they develop the graphics themselves or have external designers
    • Development: Look for the company’s ability to leverage technologies that would be beneficial for your project. Not only this, check for their programmer’s skills by depending on their experience level and projects they have undertaken in the past
    • Testing: Ask them their testing methods and about the team who does the testing. If the team is a specialist one, ISEB or equivalently team of qualified testers. Check for their testing approach, whether they go for automated testing or a manual one. During testing, what do they consider as passing and the failing bugs?
    • Early live support: Do not forget to check for the warranty and its validity period. Cross-check with their past clients to have a clearer understanding of support hours

    Thus, before selecting an experienced design partner to develop your product and take it to a next level it is advisable to check for the points mentioned above. There are times when once the product is completely built, deployed, and in use, the relationship with your design partner tends to fade away. To avoid this, give a thought to how you will continue with them and try to specify those terms in the contract. To avoid any confusion in the future, have a good relation with your design partner and keep all the terms and conditions properly listed once the product development is finished.

  • Selecting An Offshore Tech Development Partner – Six Steps to consider

    Having the right offshore software product development partner is very crucial for a business. Many organizations have started outsourcing software product development services looking at the various advantages it has to offer. Cost-saving was an important reason until 2009. Since 2010 the core purpose of offshoring is more from the logic of distributed teams, ensuring on-time deliverables, with exposure to the latest talent and quick scalability. Selecting a tech partner based on cost factors either resulted in a negative or not-so-positive experience. Undoubtedly, the offshore partner will help in reducing the in-house cost, but be sure that you don’t jeopardize your tech product’s quality over cost.

    Always look for an offshore tech partner who understands your product properly, adds value, works as an extended team located in different locations, and is genuine. Outsourcing helps the business to access the top industry talent based on their requirements, access to new technologies and tools, and professional problem solvers. Well, managing a long-distance relationship with your tech partner is not at all difficult. All you have to do is to onboard the right tech partner. Now, the question arises how to find the one who aligns with your product’s vision? To find the right match, we have curated a list of key points that an organization can check out before choosing a software development partner for their product.

    Six Steps help you choose the right tech partner:

    1. Do a background check of your potential partner: With the various option available for an offshore development tech partner, choosing the right partner can turn to challenge at times. Every outsourcing company portrays itself as having the ability to deliver successful results and matching up with the expectations of the client. Thus, it is advisable to narrow down and identify the potential partners based on your requirements. Carry out an extensive background check to know their competencies. Things that you should observe include company portfolio, reviews, as well as testimonials from their previous client. With all these data you can measure the offshore tech partner’s competencies, professionalism, and work quality.

    2. Set up your goals: Just sit with your team and draft a coherent and detailed account of your business goals. You should be thoroughly aware of the things that you expect or want out of your business or your software product. Most of the time, the offshore development partner has to go through the burden of explaining their offerings, the working method, and what makes them an ideal partner. However, if we look at the real scenario, the organization onboarding a tech partner should equally be responsible for explaining their requirements and expectations thoroughly. If you wish to achieve successful results, then make sure that you are examining the requirements properly to send out a clear message to the outsource tech team.

    3. Inspect the tools used for source control and track bugs: You should examine the tools that your offshore partner uses to control and check the source and bugs. Get in a detailed discussion with your partner to understand the exact functioning of the tools that are used by them. If for example, you are collaborating with an offshore web development tech partner, then inquire about the tool used to control the source and bugs. Tracking the changes made in the source code is usually of great help at the time of project maintenance. With the help of a bug tracker tool, your offshore partner will be easily able to track, discover, log, and fix the bugs found during a web development process. Thus, a source code tool and bug tracking tool are highly critical for a development project.

    4. Communication is the key: Try to communicate with your offshore partner effectively and often to stay in the loop. Especially during critical projects when communication plays an important role, as it requires a lot of back and forth engagement of both parties. And, this is only possible by communicating in the right way. Conduct daily meetings and ask for weekly status reports to stay updated on the status of the project. This helps in keeping across the points easily when you communicate on a daily basis, this will ensure that you all are on the same page.

    5. Flexibility: There might be times when your project will get complicated, in such situations the approach of your offshore development partner should be flexible. The partner should be flexible enough to adjust effectively on the basis of the project’s requirements. Any long-term partnership will have a scaling process, thus, the ability to scale up when required and being able to deliver the quality within time is very important. Even the development methodology used by the offshore partner is crucial. The agile development approach surely creates more room for flexibility via the development.

    6. Check the pricing model: The main reason to opt for an offshore software development tech partner is cost. Many organizations look for partners who are capable of providing them the required software services at an affordable price. So, before you select your offshore partner, check out the pricing models for as many partners as possible. Look for a partner who is able to provide a team of experienced and dedicated engineers within your budget. Check for the tech partners who match the requirements of your financial expectations.

    Therefore, before you choose an offshore tech partner, keep the points mentioned above handy to achieve better results. We, at EmbarkingOnVoyage, work as an offshore technology partner and have enabled a good amount of organizations with successful software product development. Highly skilled engineers who hold nearly two decades of development and delivery experience in various domains.

    As an offshore software product development partner, we first understand our client’s challenges and give our best to address their challenges. Help clients staying focused on their core business. Thus, we always make a point as a team that our client considers us like their extended team at a different location. And, we highly believe in aligning ourselves with our client’s ideas and vision.

  • How To Migrate Application From .Net Framework To .Net Core ? 11 Step by Step Guide

    How To Migrate Application From .Net Framework To .Net Core ? 11 Step by Step Guide

    .Net Core is a free and open-source development platform maintained by Microsoft. It is a well-known and developed framework considered as a new version of the .NET Framework that contains various major updates. Thus, making it stable and technologically advanced.

    .Net Core runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems which makes it a cross-platform framework. You can leverage .Net Core to build various applications for mobile, desktop, Cloud, IoT, Machine learning, web, microservices, etc. It consists of certain core features that assist in running a basic .Net Core app successfully. Let’s check out some of the features of Net Core as mentioned below:

    • It can implement modern development paradigms like asynchronous programming.
    • Performs highly with tiered compilations and intrinsics.
    • It is highly consistent across every supported platform.
    • Command-line tools can be included.
    • Can be easily integrated in your app.

    Now, let’s move to the most exciting part, where we will take you through the procedure of migrating .Net Framework to .Net Core.

    How to Migrate?

    Once you’ve decided to migrate to .Net Core, here’s a quick guide to carry out the procedure without much difficulty:

    1. Use portability analyzer tool once the .Net solution is ready for migration. It will give you an idea regarding the labor-intensive porting from one platform to another.
    2. If your existing solution has used NuGet packages, just be sure regarding its compatibility with .Net Core. Use the NuGetPackageExplorer tool to check for compatibility.
    3. Changes of .csproj file format simplification into ASP.NET Core includes: Inclusion of files explicitly isn’t necessary for the project; it reduces the risk of XML merging conflicts when you work on large teams. File readability is improved due to the absence of GUID-based references. You can edit the file without uploading it in the visual studio.
    4. Update the namespace by deleting all the uses of the System.Web and then replace it with Microsoft.AspNetCore.
    5. Now, instead of using the global.asax, configure your Startup.cs file. ASP.NET Core will load the app. As the app’s entry point is Startup, so there isn’t any dependency on Global.asax file. Middlewares will get registered in the app by startup and then the startup should incorporate the configure method. Add the required middleware to the pipeline in configure.
    6. You might come across some issues in Startip.cs that I feel you should pay heed to before executing the next step. Please go through the issues as given below:
    • Issues while configuring the middleware for your MVC and WebAPI requests
    • You will come across multiple collisions during the porting procedure, so set up the exception handling in your development environment. With UseDeveloperExceptionPage, just add the middleware to catch exceptions.
    • In the MVC routing, the registration for new routes has been amended. So, instead of your RouteCollection the IRouteBuilder is used to register restrictions in IActionConstraint.
    • Update the filters MVC/WebAPI following the ASP.NET Coe’s new implementation.
    • Formatters of MVC/WebAPI and binding models.
    • Don’t forget to include Area in an ASP.NET Core app. Then add a regular route to your Startup.cs file.

    7. Now, migrate the HTTP handlers along with your HTTpModules to Middleware using the built-in DI. Next, you should use       the WebAPI project Compatability shells.

    8. You will see a porting application configuration, just port the static content to wwwroot and EntityFramework to EF Core.

    9. Now you should remove all the HttpContext references. Just replace the obsolete classes and change the namespace too.

    10. You will see an authentication and authorization update. The JS/CSS will be updated.

    11. Finally, you will see the porting being carried out. And, with this, the migration of .Net framework to .Net Core is carried out   successfully.

    With this, the process of migrating the .Net framework to .Net Core is carried out successfully. As you are already aware of the fact that .Net Core is here to stay and is a future for multi-platform applications. It also offers new native features that are usually not supported by the traditional framework. So, as a final word, you should constantly review your app’s functionality and then choose the migration approach. Choose the platform that would suit the context appropriately for your existing applications.

  • CI/CD : Few things to remember

    Today, CI/CD pipeline is hailed as one of the most important and beneficial practices for DevOps teams when it comes to delivering the code changes in a more reliable and quicker manner. Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) refer to a set of operational principles, or basically a culture of following certain practices that enables development teams to deliver changes in the code more frequently and in a more reliable fashion.

    CI/CD is an irreplaceable part of any development approach, irrelevant of what framework you are using, the tech stack or what your development practices are. The value addition of CI/CD is faster delivery, less deployment overhead to your development team. It enables you to deliver value in a quick, safe, and repeatable manner.

    Purpose of CI/CD

    Continuous Integration is a coding philosophy and group of practices. Their purpose is to enable the development teams to make small changes to the code and serves as a mechanism to integrate and validate those changes.

    The purpose of CI is to automate your build pipeline. It is dependent on the tech stack that you are using. However, it enables your development teams to integrate your features, development changes in an automated way. It helps them to increase code quality, reduce errors and potential conflicts & deliver more value in less time.

    Continuous Delivery comes into play where continuous integration exits the scene. It automates the process of application delivery to infrastructure environments. Basically, CD enables your operation team to integrate the end result over multiple environments. This way you can test your changes in multiple phases and make sure that we are getting value out of it. CD enables us to operationalize log aggregation, monitoring and other components. This is required for making sure smooth working of our end result.

    CI Approach:

    1. Improve the code quality: We can run the test cases and make sure that our code coverage is up to the par. We also can use static code analysis tools like sonarQube and codecy. This will be helpful to make sure that coding standards are maintained throughout the development process
    2. Avoiding the code maintenance issues: One of the efficient ways to do this is to merge your code in the main/master branch frequently. This way, we can avoid last minute maintenance issues in code
    3. Make sure that we enable automated testing and build deployment processes in the initial environments. This makes sure that we catch the issues early and improve the quality of code at faster pace.

    CD Approach:

    1. It’s best to follow a  fail fast strategy in lower environments. This enables us to catch issues early on which increase stability in higher environments
    2. Set up release & rollback strategy for each environment build. Things go wrong and we need to make sure that we have a plan in handy. In most of the cases, solution is move back to previous build artefacts .

    CI/CD: Conclusion

    So, we can see that CI/CD and its implementation requires the operations teams and the development teams to properly collaborate. This means they have to come together on technologies, priorities and practices. The different teams will have to build a consensus on which approach and technology they want to choose for their business. This is essential in order to make sure there is uniformity in following practices once CI/CD is in place.

    If you would like to know more about CI/CD at EmbarkingonVoyage, please get in touch with us at info@embarkingonvoyage.com. We will be happy to help!