Troy Hunt·1yHave I Been Pwned 2.0 is Now Live!
The revamped Have I Been Pwned website has been launched, introducing new features, improved search functionality, and a dedicated breach page with targeted advice. Email verification is enhanced, domain search is refined, and a new central dashboard consolidates user features. The site maintains the same API while adopting modern web technologies for better performance. A merch store is also available as part of the new offerings.
.NET Blog·1yWhy we built our startup in C#
Tracebit chose C# for building their B2B SaaS security product due to its productivity, cross-platform capabilities, popularity, rich standard library, expressive language features, and excellent tooling. Despite its reputation as a stable language without much buzz in the startup community, C# provides advantages such as a large talent pool, quality libraries, robust documentation, and fewer unexpected roadblocks. Its performance and open-source nature further enhance value for startups looking for a solid development foundation.
Tech World With Milan·1yRecommended learning resources for C# and .NET in 2025.
In 2025, the .NET ecosystem continues to grow with the release of .NET 9 and C#. This post offers a curated list of learning resources for various levels, from beginners to advanced, including courses, books, and YouTube channels. Key focus areas include C#, .NET, ASP.NET, and software engineering principles. Additionally, it mentions essential tools and guides for .NET developers looking to stay ahead in their careers.
Milan Jovanović·1yUnderstanding Microservices: Core Concepts and Benefits
Microservices are independently deployable services centered around business domains, offering flexibility, adaptability, and targeted scaling. They enable parallel development, technology diversity, and organizational alignment but introduce challenges like distributed system complexity, operational overhead, and data consistency issues. Effective microservices adoption often starts small and evolves over time, focusing on the most beneficial parts of the existing architecture.
Visual Studio Blog·27wVisual Studio 2026 is here: faster, smarter, and a hit with early adopters
Visual Studio 2026 is now generally available with significant performance improvements, including 50% fewer UI hangs and faster startup times. The release introduces AI-native features through GitHub Copilot integration, including new C# and C++ agents for debugging, profiling, and app modernization. Over 5,000 bugs were fixed and 300 feature requests implemented based on community feedback. The IDE now decouples from build tools, allowing updates without affecting .NET or C++ compilers, and maintains full compatibility with Visual Studio 2022 projects and over 4,000 extensions.
This is Learning·51wTips for Improving API Performance in ASP.NET Core
Performance optimization techniques for ASP.NET Core APIs include using proper async/await patterns, implementing pagination for large datasets, utilizing AsNoTracking() for read-only operations, enabling response compression with Gzip or Brotli, implementing caching strategies with IMemoryCache or distributed cache, and avoiding overfetching by using DTOs. The guide provides practical code examples and warns against common pitfalls like blocking calls with .Result or .Wait().
Collections·44wBuilding MCP Servers and Clients From Scratch: A Comprehensive Guide
Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a communication framework for AI client-server interactions built around four components: tools, resources, prompts, and samplings. The guide covers building MCP servers and clients using TypeScript with Node.js, including integration with GitHub Copilot and debugging with MCP Inspector. It also explores .NET 10's native MCP support for creating AI assistant extensions, featuring weather and random number tools, with streamlined publishing to NuGet for community distribution and dependency management.
Tech World With Milan·1yWhy C#?
C#, a programming language developed by Microsoft, is known for its modern, multi-paradigm capabilities and has continuously evolved to include features like object-oriented programming, generics, lambdas, LINQ, and async/await. It benefits from a robust .NET ecosystem, excellent tooling like Visual Studio, and a vast library collection via NuGet. C# is suitable for developing cross-platform applications across web, mobile, desktop, and cloud environments, supported by extensive documentation and a vibrant community.
Awesome·49wC# is cool again and you can't avoid it anymore...
C# has evolved significantly from its enterprise-focused origins into a modern, cross-platform language with features like records, pattern matching, nullable reference types, and async/await. The .NET ecosystem has been transformed with .NET Core (now simply .NET), offering cross-platform support, modular architecture, and excellent performance. Modern C# includes minimal APIs for quick web development, LINQ for database querying, source generators for compile-time code generation, and frameworks like Blazor for frontend development and MAUI for cross-platform mobile apps.
Medium·1yBuilding AI Agents with Google ADK (Agent Development Kit) and MCP (Model Context Protocol) with Gemini 2.5 Pro
Discover how to build intelligent AI agents with Google’s Agent Development Kit (ADK) and integrate them with external tools using the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Gemini 2.5 Pro. This comprehensive guide walks through the core concepts of ADK, its agent types, and tools, along with step-by-step implementation instructions for creating and managing agents, using MCP servers for real-world API interactions, and troubleshooting common issues.
This is Learning·27wWhy I Use JetBrains Rider for .NET Development
A detailed comparison of JetBrains Rider versus Visual Studio for .NET development, highlighting Rider's cross-platform support, performance advantages, and built-in tooling like ReSharper-level code inspections, integrated Git support, HTTP client, and database explorer. Covers practical workflow improvements, hidden features like dynamic code analysis and .editorconfig integration, GitHub Copilot support, and honest drawbacks including licensing costs and extension ecosystem limitations.
Milan Jovanović·1yCQRS Pattern the Way It Should've Been From the Start
This post explains how to implement CQRS in .NET without relying on MediatR, providing a guide for building a lightweight setup using simple interfaces, decorators, and dependency injection. Explore the benefits such as better control over CQRS infrastructure, predictable dispatching, simplified debugging, and improved testability. Learn how to define command and query interfaces, add decorators for logging and validation, and register everything using Scrutor for a clean and extensible CQRS pipeline.
Auth0·27w.NET 10: What’s New for Authentication and Authorization
.NET 10 introduces significant authentication and authorization improvements including built-in passkey support in ASP.NET Core Identity for phishing-resistant authentication, C# 14 extension members that simplify claims management with cleaner syntax, new observability metrics for tracking authentication events and performance, and a breaking change where API endpoints now correctly return 401/403 status codes instead of redirecting to login pages. The release also includes enhanced documentation for securing Blazor Web Apps with OpenID Connect.
Milan Jovanović·30wThe Interview Question That Changed How I Think About System Design
An interview question about optimizing a 5-minute report generation process reveals a fundamental shift in thinking: the solution isn't making the code faster, but redesigning the system to be asynchronous. Instead of blocking users with synchronous requests, the better approach uses background workers, job queues, and notifications to keep the UI responsive while processing happens independently. This architectural change improves user experience, enables fault tolerance with automatic retries, and allows the system to scale under load without holding open connections or locking up resources.
Milan Jovanović·25wVertical Slice Architecture: Where Does the Shared Logic Live?
Vertical Slice Architecture offers flexibility but creates challenges around shared code placement. The article proposes a three-tier framework: freely share technical infrastructure (logging, database connections), push domain logic into entities and value objects, and keep feature-specific logic local within feature folders. Cross-feature sharing should be minimized—most cases are actually data access in disguise. The key principle is that duplication is often cheaper than premature abstraction, and code should be organized by its nature (domain, infrastructure, or cross-cutting) rather than forced into a common junk drawer.
Nick Chapsas·32wWhy Startups Don't Use .NET and C#
Explores why startups favor JavaScript, TypeScript, and Python over .NET/C# despite modern improvements. Key factors include persistent stigma around .NET, faster MVP development with JS/Python ecosystems, easier hiring due to larger talent pools, and better AI tooling support. While .NET offers strong performance and complexity management for mature products, startups prioritize speed-to-market and product validation over code quality. The author, running a .NET-based startup, recommends choosing .NET only if teams already know it, as learning curves and hiring challenges outweigh benefits for early-stage companies. Microsoft's recent organizational shift placing .NET under AI platforms signals deeper AI integration coming to the ecosystem.
ASP.NET Blog·29wIntroducing Custom Agents for .NET Developers: C# Expert & WinForms Expert
Microsoft released two experimental custom agents for GitHub Copilot targeting .NET developers: C# Expert and WinForms Expert. C# Expert provides guidance on modern C# best practices, code integrity, and testing workflows. WinForms Expert specializes in UI design patterns, event-driven programming, and protects designer.cs files from corruption. Both agents can be downloaded from the awesome-copilot repository and integrated into projects via the .github/agents folder, with support across Copilot Coding Agent, VS Code Insiders, and upcoming Visual Studio 2022 v17.14.21.
.NET Escapades·23wTrying out the Zed editor on Windows for .NET and Markdown
Zed editor on Windows offers impressive speed and smoothness compared to VS Code, with adequate support for .NET development through the OmniSharp extension. However, it falls short for Markdown editing, lacking key features like keyboard shortcuts for formatting, code folding, IntelliSense for links, and synchronized preview scrolling. While .NET editing works well (except for Razor files), the missing Markdown conveniences and intrusive autocomplete suggestions make it not yet ready to replace VS Code for writing documentation. The author remains optimistic about future improvements given Zed's rapid development pace.
Medium·1yHTTP Client in C#: Best Practices for Experts
This guide explores advanced best practices for using `HttpClient` in C#. It covers the creation of `HttpClient` instances using various methods like constructors, static instances, `IHttpClientFactory`, named, typed, and generated clients. The article also discusses middleware techniques, resilient handling of HTTP requests using timeout, retries, and circuit-breakers, and efficient ways to issue requests and handle responses while optimizing performance to avoid common pitfalls like port exhaustion and DNS changes.
ASP.NET Blog·23wMicrosoft Learn MCP Server Elevates Development
Microsoft introduces the Learn Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, which provides GitHub Copilot with up-to-date Microsoft documentation, code samples, and learning resources. This integration addresses the problem of AI models lacking knowledge about recent technologies by connecting Copilot to current Microsoft Learn content. The server offers improved code suggestions, context-aware documentation, and faster problem-solving directly within development environments. It's available as a built-in feature in Visual Studio 2022/2026 and can be installed as an extension in VS Code, Copilot CLI, and Copilot Coding Agent through straightforward configuration steps.
Milan Jovanović·1yScaling Monoliths: A Practical Guide for Growing Systems
Scaling monoliths can be achieved through various strategies such as vertical scaling, horizontal scaling, database scaling, caching, and using message queues. Vertical scaling involves adding more resources to a single machine, while horizontal scaling involves running multiple instances behind a load balancer. Database scaling can be done using read replicas, materialized views, and database sharding. Effective caching can reduce database load, and message queues can help manage traffic spikes by deferring heavy tasks. The key is to implement the right solution based on specific bottlenecks and system requirements.
DevBlogs·39wA C# Guide with Ollama
GPT-OSS is OpenAI's first open-weight model since GPT-2, offering developers powerful AI capabilities without cloud dependency. The guide demonstrates how to build a local AI chat application using C# and Ollama, leveraging Microsoft.Extensions.AI libraries for unified abstractions. The 20B model runs on just 16GB of memory, making it accessible for local development. The tutorial covers setting up a console app, adding necessary NuGet packages, implementing streaming chat with conversation history, and preparing for advanced scenarios like function calling and agentic applications.
Community Picks·1y.NET Project Setup From Scratch Using These 6 Best Practices
Learn six essential best practices for setting up a .NET project from scratch using Visual Studio. This guide covers adding an ASP.NET Core web API project, setting up code style enforcement, build configuration, centralized package management, code quality checks, containerization with Docker, and continuous integration using GitHub Actions.
DevBlogs·27wOpenAPI.NET: The Biggest Update Ever
Microsoft released OpenAPI.NET v2 and v3, the library's biggest updates since 2018. Version 2 adds OpenAPI 3.1 support with 50% faster parsing and 35% less memory usage through System.Text.Json integration. Version 3 introduces OpenAPI 3.2 support with enhanced media types, hierarchical tags, and extended parameter options. These updates impact major .NET tools like Swashbuckle, NSwag, and ASP.NET Core's native OpenAPI support in .NET 10.
