Series · 15 parts
An Attendance Platform in ASP.NET Core
Badge gates, WFH timers and shift allowances - the shape of a seven-project intranet attendance platform, the onion it almost is, and the roadmap for fourteen more parts.
Topic
.NET
221 articles filed under this topic.
Series in .NET
Series · 4 parts
An Attendance Platform — The Frontend Chapters
A 6.23 MB JavaScript bundle loaded on every page, a manifest that minifies CSS but concatenates JS, and two copies of jQuery - the first of four frontend chapters the attendance series skipped.
Series · 9 parts
Archive-on-Delete with ArchiveKit
Hard deletes destroy the audit trail; soft deletes clutter live tables forever. Introducing ArchiveKit, a .NET library that intercepts deletions and stores immutable archive snapshots with TTL policies and cascade archiving.
Series · 8 parts
Contract Testing with Pactify
Unit tests mock what you assume, end-to-end tests tell you too late - consumer-driven contract testing closes the gap, and a small open-source .NET library called Pactify is the clearest way I know to learn how it works. Part 1 of a series.
Series · 8 parts
Convey — The Missing Chapters
The 22-part Convey series read the packages; it never once walked the sample system that ships with them. Opening the missing chapters with the trip an order takes through Orders, Pricing and Deliveries — and what the samples quietly teach that no package README does.
Series · 10 parts
Entity Versioning with VersionKit
Rename a property, change a type, ship the release - and every payload you stored last year stops deserialising. Introducing VersionKit, a .NET library that declares schema history as attributes and migrates old data on read.
Series · 17 parts
FastEndpoints in Depth
Controllers grow sideways and Minimal APIs grow into soup. FastEndpoints bets on a third shape - one class per endpoint - and this series reads its source to see how the bet is implemented. Part 1 of FastEndpoints in Depth.
Series · 12 parts
FastEndpoints — The Missing Chapters
Seventeen parts of reading FastEndpoints and the series never once mentioned mappers - the entity-translation layer half the endpoint base classes exist to serve. The Missing Chapters opens with the biggest gap: where mappers live, how they are found, and why they are secretly singletons. Part 1 of FastEndpoints — The Missing Chapters.
Series · 22 parts
Microservices with Convey
Every team's fifth microservice ships with the same four hundred lines of bootstrap code as the first four. Opening a deep-dive series on Convey, the open-source .NET toolkit that turned that boilerplate into thirty composable packages.
Series · 10 parts
Multi-Tenancy in .NET with EF Core
Database-per-tenant, schema-per-tenant, or packed into a shared database? Kicking off a series on building a multi-tenant platform where one EF Core codebase supports all three isolation strategies behind a single control plane.
Series · 15 parts
Nine Services and a Message Bus
DShop is one e-commerce shop stamped out as nine microservices over RabbitMQ - this series reads the real source to see how the topology holds together and where it drifts. Part 1 of Nine Services and a Message Bus.
Series · 11 parts
Real-Time Feeds with FeedR
A guided tour of FeedR, DevMentors' open-source .NET microservices sample for real-time data feeds - six services, Redis pub/sub, Apache Pulsar and a gRPC stream, and the two-tier eventing model that makes it worth reading. Part 1 of a source-level deep dive.
Series · 9 parts
Sagas with Chronicle
Split one database into five services and the transaction you deleted does not disappear - it goes feral. On sagas, compensation, process managers, and Chronicle, the small open-source .NET library this series reads line by line.
Series · 8 parts
Service Discovery Without a Service Mesh
Dozens of Azure Functions and Logic Apps need each other's URLs and keys, and there is no Kubernetes, no sidecar, no mesh to hand them out. How a small .NET library turned one Key Vault and a naming convention into a working discovery layer - the consumer side of a registry made of secrets. Part 1 of a new series.
Series · 13 parts
The Convey Consumer Tax
Convey sells a microservice in thirty lines, and Pacco builds ten of them - this series reads the whole estate to price what the framework compresses and what every consumer pays for by hand. Part 1 of The Convey Consumer Tax.
Series · 18 parts
The Database Is the Message Bus
Five executables, zero queues - how an attendance platform coordinated a web app, three Azure Functions and a console job through one SQL database, and what that choice bought and cost. Part 1 of the series.
Series · 16 parts
The Framework Before the Framework
DShop.Common is the shared library nine microservices were built on - and the rough draft of a framework its authors later shipped as Convey.
Series · 15 parts
The Order That Choreographs Itself
Nobody in Pacco approves an order - a vehicle reservation does. A tour of DevMentors' parcel-delivery estate, the domain it models, and the fifteen-part series it earns.
Coming soon in .NET
The Dashboard You Get for Free
Wire four services into a .NET Aspire AppHost and run it once - traces, logs, health and environment variables for the whole system, before you have written a single line of observability code. Part 1 of a series on Aspire in production.
Standalone articles
Getting Transactions Right with EF Core
SaveChanges is already a transaction, until it isn't enough. A tour of explicit transactions, TransactionScope, execution strategies and the failure modes that only show up in production.
The Ecosystem Around the Chassis
Convey did not appear from nowhere and it does not stand alone. DShop, Pacco, Ntrada, Chronicle, Pactify — the DevMentors constellation the toolkit grew out of and feeds into, which repo to study for what, and the close of both series.
From Clone to Chassis: The Onboarding Path
There is no dotnet new template and no CLI — Convey's onboarding is docs, samples and source. Reading the repo-of-repos layout and its packing scripts, then walking the actual path: build your first service from an empty project, one config section at a time.
An Agent Card for Your API
FastEndpoints.A2A publishes an agent card at a well-known URL and answers agent-to-agent calls through a JSON-RPC 2.0 dispatcher written entirely by hand - implementing exactly the slice of the A2A protocol it can do honestly. The final missing chapter, and the close of both series. Part 12 of FastEndpoints — The Missing Chapters.
Testing a Service Built on a Chassis
Twenty-two parts of source reading and not one about tests. How Convey's design choices land on your test suite: handlers that fake beautifully, an exposed host builder for integration tests, config flags as test infrastructure, and conventions that deserve a pin.
Your Endpoints Are Now Tools
FastEndpoints.Mcp exposes opt-in endpoints as Model Context Protocol tools - schemas generated from your DTOs and enriched from your validators, a synthetic HttpContext that runs the real pipeline, and a visibility model that deliberately ignores your REST auth. Part 11 of FastEndpoints — The Missing Chapters.
The Compose File Is the Architecture Diagram
Three toy services, ten infrastructure containers. Reading Convey's docker-compose stack as the honest bill of the chassis: what each container is for, which volumes actually persist, the per-OS variants, and what I would cut in 2026.
Rules That Plan Commands
FastEndpoints.CommandRules sounds like a Roslyn analyzer and is nothing of the sort - it is a small rules engine that turns an input into planned commands and dispatches each one now or onto a job queue. A close read of the newest package in the repo, capability matrix and all. Part 10 of FastEndpoints — The Missing Chapters.
Two Outboxes, One Interface
The parent series covered the outbox pattern; it never compared the implementations. Entity Framework gets a real transaction, Mongo gets sessions you can switch off, expiry is three different mechanisms — and the processor that drains them all is a fire-and-forget timer.
Four Ways to Generate an API Client
FastEndpoints will hand you a typed client four different ways - NSwag-generated C# or TypeScript, or Kiota clients built over either OpenAPI stack - served as a download endpoint or produced by a run-then-exit build mode. The lineages, the seams, and one version pin that tells a story. Part 9 of FastEndpoints — The Missing Chapters.
The Object Store in the Corner: Convey and OpenStack Swift
Convey.Persistence.OpenStack.OCS is the package the whole first series skipped — a hand-rolled Swift object-storage client with Keystone auth, an operation-result pattern, a server-side COPY verb, and a re-authentication habit worth learning from.
Life After NSwag
Buried in the FastEndpoints package props is a comment marking NSwag for deprecation - and a whole second OpenAPI stack built on Microsoft.AspNetCore.OpenApi already ships beside it. Transformers instead of processors, AOT export via MSBuild tricks, and a golden-master test suite. Part 8 of FastEndpoints — The Missing Chapters.
One appsettings.json, Read Top to Bottom
Convey's real manifest is not Program.cs — it is the config file. Reading the Orders sample's appsettings.json as a single artifact: the section-per-package convention, the fleet of enabled:false switches, and what the defaults quietly tell you about production.
IQueryable In, OData Out
FastEndpoints.OData is ninety lines that bolt Microsoft's OData query engine onto a REPR endpoint - a sealed Configure(), a fake ParameterInfo, and an endpoint filter that fishes the response out of HttpContext.Items. Reading it is a masterclass in integrating with a framework through its narrowest seam. Part 7 of FastEndpoints — The Missing Chapters.
Three Services, One Order: The Sample System the Series Skipped
The 22-part Convey series read the packages; it never once walked the sample system that ships with them. Opening the missing chapters with the trip an order takes through Orders, Pricing and Deliveries — and what the samples quietly teach that no package README does.
Health Probes Without an Endpoint Class
FastEndpoints.HealthChecks is the strangest package in the repository - it never references FastEndpoints. One extension method, an IStartupFilter, an always-healthy self check, and two probes Kubernetes understands. Part 6 of FastEndpoints — The Missing Chapters.
What Convey Got Right — and What Modern .NET Ate
Closing the series with an honest audit of the chassis - which of Convey's ideas still earn their keep in 2026, which ones the platform absorbed, and what I would build differently today.
The Resolver Behind Everything
Mappers, validators, processors, even the Resolve<T>() you call in a handler - almost none of it goes through your DI container the way you assume. A static ServiceResolver with two caches sits behind everything, and reading it explains both the speed and the sharp edges. Part 5 of FastEndpoints — The Missing Chapters.
Tracing a Message Through the Chassis
How Convey stitched one Jaeger trace across HTTP, a command handler and a RabbitMQ hop years before OpenTelemetry - and the six-line catch block in its tracing plugin that can silently eat your failures.
All Configuration Is Static
The Config object you lambda into UseFastEndpoints is a thin view over nine process-wide static option singletons - and its properties hide the most useful hooks in the library: endpoint filters, a global configurator, warm-up, serializer swaps and custom value parsers. Part 4 of FastEndpoints — The Missing Chapters.
Metrics Two Ways: AppMetrics and Prometheus
Convey ships two metrics packages that answer the same question from different eras - a push-flavored App.Metrics stack and a lean prometheus-net scrape endpoint - and the choice between them is a history lesson.
The Antiforgery Check That Fails at Boot
FastEndpoints ships a CSRF middleware that is opt-in per endpoint, only inspects form posts, and refuses to start your app if you wired it up wrong. It earned a single clause in seventeen parts - here is the whole story. Part 3 of FastEndpoints — The Missing Chapters.
The Logger You Configure Once
Convey's logging package turns a config section into a fully enriched Serilog pipeline - console, file, Seq, ELK and Loki sinks, a live log-level switch, and one middleware with a typo in its name.
Every Way to Send a Response
The Send facade is a struct, its methods return a fake Void, and every sender secretly marks the response started before writing a byte. A tour of the response surface the deep dive skipped - files, ranges, redirects, interceptors and all. Part 2 of FastEndpoints — The Missing Chapters.
Service-to-Service Trust: mTLS in the Chassis
Convey's certificate middleware authenticates machines instead of users - a forwarded-cert header, a subject ACL, and two defaults that look like security and aren't.
The Mapper in the Middle
Seventeen parts of reading FastEndpoints and the series never once mentioned mappers - the entity-translation layer half the endpoint base classes exist to serve. The Missing Chapters opens with the biggest gap: where mappers live, how they are found, and why they are secretly singletons. Part 1 of FastEndpoints — The Missing Chapters.