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Google App Engine Adds .NET Support

.NET developers now have another option for the streamlined creation of cloud apps, now that Google App Engine has announced support for the Microsoft developer stack.

Google wants to make sure that .NET developers don't dismiss its app engine outright and in fact, wants its cloud offering to be a legitimate option among the many. It's doing that by adding native .NET support to its Google App Engine.

In a nutshell, Google App Engine, or GAE, is Google's cloud computing platform for developing and hosting Web apps via Google datacenters, with services for apps being able to be automatically scaled as needed. If there's any comparing to be done in the cloud, GAE would be third among with cloud behemoths Amazon Web Services (at the top) and Microsoft's Azure Cloud platform (runner up).

And that's how GAE differentiates itself from competitors. Where those services provide fairly comprehensive tools and a third-party ecosystem that allows for the ultimate in app customization, that customization comes at the cost of flexibility. Instead, GAE alleviates the many layers of infrastructure administration that are common with those services, particularly when creating apps to scale up or down as needed, paired with its simpler and less expensive overall costs for resource usage.

GAE now has support for ASP.NET Core as well as PHP 7.1, along with its original support for a variety of Web-friendly languages: Node.js, Ruby, Java 8, Python 2.7 or 3.5, and Go 1.8.

GAE's support for ASP.NET Core means that it's now "a great choice for developers building web applications with C# and .NET Core who want to enjoy the benefits of running on App Engine," writes Justin Beckwith, Google Product Manager, in a blog post announcing the offering this week.That support means that .NET developers can write C# and .NET Core apps as if native. To simplify the process even further, Google also offers its Google Cloud Tools for Visual Studio, an extension for streamlining development of GAE-bound apps from within the VS IDE. (It's currently available in the Visual Studio Marketplace for VS 2015 only, though, and there are no indications whether it will support VS 2017.)

Google also provides Google Cloud Client Libraries for .NET, which is a set of APIs for tying into various Google Cloud services, such as storage, the query engine and the publishing subsystem. These AP libs are part of a larger set of tools contained in the Google Cloud SDK.

Google App Engine is currently in beta testing, and developers can find out more by starting at the documentation here.