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.
Identity Done Mostly Right, Secrets Done Wrong
The Identity service gets the hard parts of auth genuinely right - issue, refresh, revoke - and then commits its signing key to source control and ships a CORS policy the spec forbids. Part 13 of Nine Services and a Message Bus.
Every Error Is a 400 and Says Too Much
DShop.Common's error middleware maps every exception to HTTP 400, computes a safe message, then throws it away and serialises the raw exception text to the caller.
One Attribute, a Scanner, and a Registry
How ArchiveKit wires itself up - the [Archivable] attribute's three knobs, an assembly scanner that fails fast at startup instead of quietly at delete time, the static registry behind every lookup, and the AddArchiveKit configuration surface. Plus an honest note about the source generator that doesn't exist yet. Part 5 of the Archive-on-Delete with ArchiveKit series.
A Channel Between the Endpoint and the Loop
How FeedR's quotes feed decouples a microsecond HTTP endpoint from an hours-long price generator: System.Threading.Channels as a command queue, marker records as the protocol, and an Interlocked flag for idempotent start/stop. Part 3 of the FeedR deep dive.
Four Products, One Truth
A single product identity is represented four ways across four DShop services - owner, replica, cart snapshot, order snapshot - each on its own refresh discipline, and nothing masters the set. Part 12 of Nine Services and a Message Bus.
Three Marker Interfaces and a Service Scope
Convey's CQRS layer is small enough to read in one sitting — commands, queries and events as empty interfaces, Scrutor scans to find handlers, and a scope-per-dispatch decision with consequences worth knowing before production.
Writing to the Backing Field
DShop.Common stamps a server-generated Guid into an immutable command by reflecting into its compiler-generated backing field - immutability the type system only pretends to enforce.
When Attributes Aren't Enough
Splitting a name field, converting a string to a bool, deriving a flag from a total - some migrations are code, not metadata. This part covers VersionKit's three escape hatches and the sharp edges each one carries. Part 5 of the Entity Versioning with VersionKit series.
The Version-Skew Time Capsule
One DShop service targets a different framework, references a frozen NuGet package, and calls an API that no longer exists in the repo - so its Debug configuration cannot compile, and it only builds in Release. Part 11 of Nine Services and a Message Bus.
How a Message Finds Its Saga
Correlation is the part of the saga pattern that fails silently. SagaId, SagaContext, the Empty-context trap that starts a new saga per message, and the one-method override that routes messages by their own content.
A Load Balancer With Amnesia
DShop.Common's Consul registry tracks which service instances it has used to spread load evenly - then registers as transient, discarding that memory on nearly every request.
The Endpoint That Pretends to Be a Result
Every FastEndpoints route is mapped as a Minimal API whose handler returns the same singleton IResult - and that one weird trick is the door into the whole per-request pipeline. Part 3 of FastEndpoints in Depth.
CQRS Across a Service Boundary
Storage subscribes to almost every event in DShop, serves read-only queries, and owns nothing it cannot rebuild - the read side of a CQRS split that runs across a service boundary instead of inside one. Part 10 of Nine Services and a Message Bus.
Three Load Balancers Behind One Config String
DShop.Common picks client-side discovery, a router, or a static address from one word in JSON - and self-registers each service into Consul with a heartbeat lease.
Provisioning Tenants at Runtime
A signup click becomes a real PostgreSQL database or schema in seconds. Running CREATE DATABASE from application code feels illegal until you contain it — identifier validation, quoted DDL, idempotent steps, and a status machine that admits when provisioning fails.
Idempotency Aspired, Not Enforced
DShop runs competing consumers over an at-least-once bus with no message-id dedup, so a redelivered reservation decrements stock twice - the estate aspires to idempotency and enforces none of it. Part 9 of Nine Services and a Message Bus.
One HTTP Client, Two Calling Conventions
Azure Functions want their key in an x-functions-key header; Logic App workflows want a SAS signature in the query string. How a discovery record's type field became a calling-convention discriminator, and how one small HTTP service hid that difference from every caller in the estate. Part 3 of Service Discovery Without a Service Mesh.
The Fluent Handler That Explodes on Success
A reusable try-catch-finally wrapper in DShop.Common awaits a null-conditional delegate - so the success path throws a NullReferenceException the failure path avoids.
The Consumer Writes the Contract
A walk through Pactify's PactMaker fluent API - the two-interface builder trick that hides Build() from you, why the consumer test always passes, and the uninitialized-object surprise inside WithBody<T>().
One Orchestrator Subscribes to Everything
Operations subscribes to every command and event in the estate by reflection and routes them through two open-generic handlers - a neat trick with one dead limb the wiring can never light. Part 8 of Nine Services and a Message Bus.
Hand-Rolled MediatR in Thirty Lines
DShop.Common ships its own in-process command and query dispatch - marker interfaces, a handler triple, and one dynamic double-dispatch standing in for a library.
An Archive Table That Outlives Its Source
The storage design behind ArchiveKit - typed queryable columns and a jsonb payload from a single write, why the archive's EntityId is an index but deliberately not a foreign key, and the reflective model configuration that builds every archive table from one method call. Part 4 of the Archive-on-Delete with ArchiveKit series.
One Front Door for Five Services
FeedR's API gateway is a YARP reverse proxy whose entire routing table lives in appsettings.json - prefix-stripping routes, per-environment cluster overrides, and a one-line transform that starts every distributed trace. Part 2 of the FeedR deep dive.
One Builder, Thirty Packages: Inside IConveyBuilder
The hundred lines of code that let an entire microservices toolkit compose from one fluent chain — a named registry, a list of build actions, and two hard lessons about doing work at startup.
A Saga With a Memory
A stateful DShop saga remembers when a customer signed up and grants a discount only if their first order lands within 24 hours - a genuinely stateful process manager whose reward turns out to be a Console.WriteLine. Part 7 of Nine Services and a Message Bus.