News

Amazon Cloud Adds C# Support to Lambda Service

• By David Ramel
• December 8, 2016

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) announced that its AWS Lambda tool -- providing serverless functionality for projects such as app back-end services -- now supports Microsoft's C# programming language.

AWS said developers using the Lambda service can run their code without having to worry about provisioning or managing servers, using a pay-as-you-go pricing model.

"Using the new, open source .NET Core 1.0 runtime, you can easily publish C# code to AWS Lambda from a variety of popular .NET tools," AWS spokesperson Bryan Liston said in a blog post last week. ".NET developers can now build Lambda functions and serverless applications with the C# language and .NET tools that they know and love. With tooling support in Visual Studio, Yeoman, and the dotnet CLI, you can easily deploy individual Lambda functions or entire serverless applications written in C# to Lambda and Amazon API Gateway."

With the addition of C#, four languages are now supported by AWS Lambda, including Java, JavaScript (Node.js) and Python. Developers using those languages can now take advantage of the growing serverless approach, concentrating on supplying business logic instead of maintaining and scaling the supporting infrastructure.

"Until today, .NET developers were not able to take advantage of this model," Liston said. "We're excited to add C# to the list of supported languages and enable a new category of developers to take advantage of Lambda and API Gateway to create serverless applications."

In the latest programming language popularity report from TIOBE, C# was ranked No. 6 (with Java No. 1, Python No. 4 and JavaScript No. 8). It held the same position in a recent ranking from IEEE, and almost always appears in the top 10 of other such rankings.

In other news related to the .NET framework from Microsoft, Liston announced two new project templates to the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio. The new AWS Lambda Project template creates a simple project with just one C# Lambda function, while the new AWS Serverless Application template creates a small AWS serverless application, adhering to the AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM).

He also discussed cross-platform development using the .NET Core CLI.

"We're excited to open up AWS Lambda for C# applications through the .NET Core runtime," Liston said. "You can find more information on writing C# Lambda functions in the AWS Lambda Developer Guide. Download the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio to get started or check out the Lambda extensions to the dotnet CLI."