.NET Core 3

.NET Core is a free and open-source managed computer software framework for the Windows, macOS and Linux operating systems. It consists of CoreCLR, a complete runtime implementation of CLR, the virtual machine that manages the execution of .NET programs. CoreCLR comes with an improved just-in-time compiler, called RyuJIT. .NET Core also includes CoreFX, which is a partial fork of FCL. While .NET Core shares a subset of .NET Framework APIs, it comes with its own API that is not part of .NET Framework. Further, .NET Core contains CoreRT, the .NET Native runtime optimized to be integrated into AOT compiled native binaries. A variant of the .NET Core library is used for UWP. .NET Core's command-line interface offers an execution entry point for operating systems and provides developer services like compilation and package management.

.NET Core 3.0 supports for Windows Desktop applications, specifically Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Framework (WPF), and UWP XAML. There are many benefits that .NET Core will bring for desktop applications. Some of them are mentioned below.

• Performance improvements and other runtime updates
• Easy to use or test a new version of .NET Core
• Enables both machine-global and application-local deployment
• Support for the .NET Core CLI tools and SDK-style projects in Visual Studio

New features in .NET Core 3.0

• Side-by-side and App-local Deployment: The .NET Core deployment model is one the biggest benefits that Windows desktop developers will experience with .NET Core 3. In short, you can install .NET Core in pretty much any way you want. It comes with a lot of deployment flexibility. Deployment of .NET Core desktop applications can either use a global install of the .NET Core runtime (similar to how .NET Framework is deployed), or side-by-side deployment so that each application uses its own version of the runtime.
• Easily convert existing Desktop applications to .Net Core 3: The conversion of existing desktop application to .NET Core 3.0 will be pretty straightforward.
• Improvement to Project Files: The .Net Core has adopted the SDK based project structure as it offers many advantages like:
  
  • Much smaller and cleaner project files
  • Much friendlier to source control (fewer changes and smaller diffs)
  • Edit project files in Visual Studio without unloading
  • NuGet is part of the build and responsive to changes like target framework update
  • Supports multi-targeting
• Continue to support Controls, NuGet Packages, and Existing Assembly References: Desktop applications often have many dependencies, maybe from a control vendor, from NuGet or binaries that don’t have a source any more. .NET Core 3.0 will continue to support dependencies as-is without requiring developers to rewrite functionalities.

Splunk

Over the last decade, due to growing number of machines in the IT infrastructure and use of IoT devides there is an exponential growth in machine data. This machine data has a lot of valuable information that can drive efficiency, productivity and visibility for the business. Splunk was founded in 2003 for one purpose: To Make Sense Of Machine Generated Log Data. Splunk  captures, indexes, and correlates real-time data in a searchable repository from which it can generate graphs, reports, alerts, dashboards, and visualizations. Splunk's mission is to make machine data accessible across an organization by identifying data patterns, providing metrics, diagnosing problems, and providing intelligence for business operations. Splunk is a horizontal technology used for application management, security and compliance, as well as business and Web analytics.

Splunk's core collects and analyzes high volumes of machine-generated data. It uses a standard API to connect directly to applications and devices. It was developed in response to the demand for comprehensible and actionable data reporting for executives outside a company's IT department.

Splunk Enterprise Security (ES) is a security information and event management (SIEM) solution that provides insight into machine data generated from security technologies such as network, endpoint, access, malware, vulnerability and identity information. Its a premium application that is licensed independently from Splunk core.

Splunkbase is a community hosted by Splunk where users can go to find apps and add-ons for Splunk which can improve the functionality and usefulness of Splunk, as well as provide a quick and easy interface for specific use-cases and/or vendor products. Splunk apps and add-ons can be developed by anyone, including Splunk themselves.

Real time processing is Splunk’s biggest selling point, the other benefits with implementing Splunk are:

• Your input data can be in any format for e.g. .csv, or json or other formats
• You can configure Splunk to give Alerts / Events notification at the onset of a machine state
• You can accurately predict the resources needed for scaling up the infrastructure
• You can create knowledge objects for Operational Intelligence