Promoting Good Software Design through Decoupling — I’ve previously written at length about various application architecture styles such as Onion Architecture and Clean Architecture. Like many other architectural styles, they emphasise centralising business value and logic at the very core, while pushing infrastructural concerns to the edges. Both are excellent patterns when it comes to developing maintainable…

How vulnerable are these services in a data breach? — Recently, a very popular password management service by the name of LastPass has suffered from a security breach. The breach originally took place in August of 2022, and the attacker managed to obtain backup copies of LastPass’ user vaults. That’s not great, but not terrible. Millions of people rely on…

Build a blazingly fast API, step by step — There’s no hiding the fact that I’ve been a staunch advocate for C# for many years. It’s been my go to programming language for over a decade, and in recent years both the language itself and its peripheral frameworks have come a long way. One of the less attractive aspects…

Can .NET finally Come Close to Go’s Simplicity? — When the all-singing, all-dancing ASP.NET Core launched in 2016, .NET suddenly became a strong contender in performance benchmarks. Traditionally, the ASP.NET ecosystem was considered sluggish, enterprise-y, and definitely not something you’d pick for performance. The launch of ASP.NET Core shook things up. Suddenly, there was a sensible default for Dependency…

Write Maintainable Software by preventing external dependencies from polluting your application core — The Onion Architecture was first introduced by Jeffrey Palermo around 2008. At its very essence, the architecture focused on modeling business logic and entities at the application’s core, without any notion of the outside world. Because the business has no notion of the outside world — for example, it doesn’t…

Architecting for event-driven applications — Architectural paradigms have shifted dramatically with the transition from monolithic applications that shared code to more message-based approaches. While the three-tier architecture was the virtual go-to architecture for monolithic applications, it turned out to be a less than ideal fit for applications that are event driven. The shift from monolithic…

Turn web pages into structured data — Even though C# has established itself as a reliable programming language, mostly in the realms of back-end applications, it isn’t the first language that comes to mind when you’re looking to build a web scraper. While C#’s rigid type system may feel inflexible when dealing with seemingly arbitrary structures found…

COVID has changed the way we work forever. What constitutes a good place to work in the 2020's? — As The Great Resignation continues, many companies are confronted with the fact that COVID has changed the way we look at work forever. Over the past few years, employers have gradually been losing ground to their employees. This means that the dynamics of an employer-employee relationship are shifting. …

Store, Query and Restore Historical Data directly using SQL Server and Entity Framework Core — Time is the ever present dimension not only in our lives, but often times in our applications too. We store timestamped events in our database, schedule actions to be executed at a specific point in the future, or even keep track of a customer’s changing shipping address. The world changes…