.NET

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.

Start with part 1 → ≈ 92 min total

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.

Start with part 1 → ≈ 28 min total

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.

Start with part 1 → ≈ 45 min total

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.

Start with part 1 → ≈ 48 min total

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.

Start with part 1 → ≈ 50 min total

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.

Start with part 1 → ≈ 55 min total

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.

Start with part 1 → ≈ 83 min total

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.

Start with part 1 → ≈ 63 min total

Series · 15 parts

Five Modules, One Database Each

Inflow is a modular monolith whose modules agree on their boundaries and disagree about everything inside them - a four-project onion next to a single feature-sliced assembly. Part 1 of a series reading the money-moving half of the estate.

Start with part 1 → ≈ 102 min total

Series · 18 parts

GroupFlights — Tactics in Three Dialects

A teaching repo that implements one airline-charter domain three ways on purpose - CRUD, CRUD-plus-rich, and Clean Architecture - and persists it three ways to match. Part 1 of a source-reading series.

Start with part 1 → ≈ 109 min total

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.

Start with part 1 → ≈ 120 min total

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.

Start with part 1 → ≈ 50 min total

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.

Start with part 1 → ≈ 85 min total

Series · 13 parts

No Coding Whatsoever

A 2018 API gateway promises that routing, auth, validation and messaging need no code at all - this series reads the source that makes the promise true, and the places where it is not.

Start with part 1 → ≈ 88 min total

Series · 14 parts

One Process, Three Modules

DevMentors' ModularMonolith sample packs three conference-system modules, a mini-framework and one deliberately broken contract into eighty-four C# files - opening a series that reads all of it, defects included.

Start with part 1 → ≈ 66 min total

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.

Start with part 1 → ≈ 73 min total

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.

Start with part 1 → ≈ 53 min total

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.

Start with part 1 → ≈ 42 min total

Series · 11 parts

Six Packages and an Empty Test Project

Reading a repository one project at a time hides everything that lives in the edges between them - and in this estate the edges are where the interesting failures are.

Start with part 1 → ≈ 85 min total

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.

Start with part 1 → ≈ 88 min total

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.

Start with part 1 → ≈ 105 min total

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.

Start with part 1 → ≈ 80 min total

Series · 15 parts

The Framework Underneath

Every modular monolith claims its modules are decoupled. Inflow proves it the only way that counts - by having no project reference between any two of them - and then has to build a whole mini-framework to make that survivable. Part 1 of a source-read through the shared layer.

Start with part 1 → ≈ 104 min total

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.

Start with part 1 → ≈ 96 min total

Series · 11 parts

The Repo Is the Lesson

Inflow ships an executable request collection - five .rest files, thirty-seven requests. On a fresh clone nine of them return a 2xx, and eight of those nine are in one file. This series reads the repository itself as the artefact.

Start with part 1 → ≈ 74 min total

Series · 15 parts

Trill — Reading the Services

Trill's Stories service is four projects with a dependency-free domain at the bottom. Its Users service is two projects with everything in one assembly - same author, same week, same estate, opposite answers to what a layer is.

Start with part 1 → ≈ 101 min total

Series · 15 parts

Trill — The Microservices Spine

The DevMentors Trill estate is a nine-service microservices sample spread over eleven sibling repositories with no README, no clone script and no bootstrap tooling - and the only artefact that names the whole system is a Visual Studio solution file.

Start with part 1 → ≈ 100 min total

Coming soon · 1 part

Aspire in Production

What .NET Aspire actually does for a real multi-service system - the AppHost model, service defaults, the dashboard, and the road from F5 to deployment.

In the works ≈ 1 min planned