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
348 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 · 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.
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.
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 · 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.
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.
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 · 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Coming soon · 1 part
Preview
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.
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
26 Apr 2025
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.
Everything in .NET
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
JWTs and the Blacklist Problem
Convey's auth packages in two acts - a JWT layer that turns one config section into token issuing and validation, and the uncomfortable question every stateless system meets on logout day.
Secrets Before Configuration: Convey and Vault
How Convey's Vault package loads secrets into IConfiguration before the container exists, turns dynamic database credentials into ordinary config keys, and renews leases in the background - plus the secret-zero problem it cannot solve.
Discovery and Load Balancing Before the Mesh
How Convey wires Consul registration, health-gated deregistration and client-side balancing - and why Fabio exists to take the balancing decision back out of your process.
Typed Clients Over One HTTP Door
Convey's HTTP story in two layers - a hardened IHttpClient with retries, masking and correlation headers, and RestEase interfaces on top that turn a service name in config into a typed client.
Persistence as a Registration: Mongo and Redis
What you get when a chassis reduces MongoDB to one builder call and a named collection - a generic repository, paging, camelCase conventions, a seeding hook - and the transactions and indexes it deliberately leaves on your desk.
Commands and Events on the Wire
Convey's broker-CQRS bridge is seventy lines of code that make the same handler serve local dispatch and RabbitMQ delivery — one line per subscription, correlation context riding along for free.
The Outbox That Keeps Your Events Honest
Save the order, publish the event, crash in between - the dual-write problem, and how Convey's outbox and inbox turn at-least-once messaging into something you can build a business on.
Retries, Dead Letters, and the Plugin Chain
What Convey's RabbitMQ subscriber actually does when your handler throws - fixed-interval retries, an exception-to-message escape hatch, a dlx- safety net, and one plugin that can quietly defeat all of it.
A Message Broker Behind an Interface
Convey's messaging abstraction is two interfaces and an attribute - and the naming conventions underneath them quietly turn your C# class names into a public wire contract.
RabbitMQ by Convention
How Convey's RabbitMQ package turns a class name into an exchange, a routing key and a queue - two eager connections, a channel per thread, and a topology you never declare by hand.
Documenting an API That Has No Controllers
Delete your controllers and Swashbuckle goes blind. Convey rebuilds the OpenAPI document by hand from its endpoint registry - a document filter, a naming convention, and a few spec violations it hopes you won't notice.
From Route to Handler with No Controller in Between
Convey.WebApi.CQRS wires HTTP verbs straight to command and query dispatchers - one line per endpoint - and publishes your message catalog at /_contracts. A source read of the thinnest HTTP layer I've shipped to production.
Minimal APIs Before Minimal APIs Existed
Convey.WebApi threw away controllers, replaced every MVC formatter with its own, and bound route values into immutable commands by writing to compiler-generated backing fields. A source read of a routing layer built years before .NET shipped the same idea.
The Decorator Seam: Logging Handlers You Didn't Write
How Convey wraps every command and event handler with template-driven logging using one attribute, a Scrutor decoration — and a reflection trick against Scrutor itself that I admire and would never ship.
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.
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.
The Microservices Chassis You Were Going to Write Anyway
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.
Reading the Redis and Mongo Providers
Chronicle ships two persistence integrations, and reading them against the contract is a masterclass in provider sharp edges: a Redis key built from Type.GetHashCode() that changes on every restart, a Mongo delete-then-insert, and messages that may not survive the round trip.
When a Saga Library Is Overkill
Eight parts of source-reading later, the honest retrospective. What Chronicle gets right, the timeout-shaped hole at its centre, how it stacks up against MassTransit and NServiceBus and durable execution - and the cases where a status column beats every saga framework ever written.
Where a Saga Keeps Its Memory
Chronicle's persistence surface is two interfaces - a state repository and an append-only log - and the defaults behind AddChronicle() are two Lists. What the contracts really demand, why the in-memory implementations are sharper than they look, and how to write a provider that holds up.