Although I have led architecture across a variety of different ecosystems, an alarming proportion of my hands-on coding work has been in the .Net ecosystem. The tooling is always excellent, though the frequent changes of direction can leave engineering teams nursing a lot of legacy code.
18 December 2018
Azure Functions only provides direct support for a narrow range of authentication providers. If you want to use an external token provider or custom solution, you’ll have to create the plumbing yourself.
27 November 2018
ArchUnit is a java library that provides a fluent API for creating self-testing architectures via unit tests. A similar library can be written for .Net Standard that acts on compiled assemblies rather than raw code.
28 October 2018
Development shops that have invested heavily in WCF have been left high and dry by the emerging .Net Core ecosystem. There are a number of good reasons why WCF for .Net Core is unlikely to make it onto any official roadmaps…
12 September 2018
Service Fabric does support container-based applications, but it still feels more like an application server than a container orchestrator.
12 August 2018
Twelve factor apps provide a methodology for building apps that are optimised for modern cloud environments. It’s only been achievable in the Microsoft world since the advent of .Net Core.
12 January 2018
The compatibility shim was added to .Net Standard to make it easier to reference libraries compiled using the .Net Framework. That just leaves you with the problem of missing APIs…
3 September 2017
Although .Net Core does not directly support creating Windows Services there are several different ways of creating applications that can be registered and run as services.
26 May 2017
Recently released toolsets for AWS Lambda and Azure Functions are finally making serverless application development available to C# developers.
12 April 2017
Using Docker with .Net Core is initially straightforward, but to get beyond basic image building you will need to handle more than the simple scenarios demonstrated in quick-start guides.
10 March 2017
Although .Net Standard does provide a mechanism for sharing assemblies between .Net Core and .Net Framework applications, as ever, you’re still very much constrained by your dependencies.
9 August 2016
Migrating existing applications to .Net Core is not a trivial undertaking so you need to be certain of the potential benefits before you start.
12 June 2015
As with any deployment automation, there’s a fair amount of duct tape and chicken wire involved in deploying a Windows Service remotely.
3 November 2014
Many developers confuse asynchronous operations with parallel execution. The essential difference is that an asynchronous operation is concerned with which resources you consume while parallel execution is more concerned with how many.
26 June 2014
There are some techniques for improving the performance of bulk inserts in the entity framework, but the most optimal approach will always be to use a different library altogether.
23 September 2013
The promise of garbage collection can lull .Net developers into a false sense of security. They are still vulnerable to memory leaks and have a responsibility to keep an eye on what’s going on under the hood.