151 articles.
When I first published Beyond Boundaries: Networking Programming with C# and .NET, I knew it would need to evolve. Networking doesn’t stand still, and neither does the .NET platform. What I didn’t…
An order summary page renders in 40 milliseconds against your development database. The same page takes eleven seconds in production. You open the profiler, and the controller method looks clean. You…
Somebody told you never to call Add() in a loop. Maybe it was a senior developer during code review. Maybe it was a Stack Overflow answer with four hundred upvotes. Maybe it was a blog post that…
The Code You Already Wrote Every .NET team has at least one of these in production. It looked fine in review. It passed unit tests. It worked in staging against the seed data. Then real traffic hit…
The Function Everyone Has Written, Nobody Loves If your codebase has a method called something like SyncProducts(), RefreshMetrics(), or UpdateFromFeed(), it probably looks something like this: It…
The Import Job Nobody Wants to Own Every team has one. It might be called an import service, a feed processor, or a sync job. The name varies. What stays constant is the shape of the problem: a large…
Picture this. Your inbox lights up at 7:14 AM. A supplier just pushed 50,000 product records to your endpoint. Half are new. The other half are updates to products already sitting in your database.…
Forms are where server-rendered apps either feel sharp or feel clunky. A date field that drops you into a raw text box, a category selector that needs a client-side widget and three npm packages, a…
The first post in this series made a clean case for keyset pagination over Skip/Take. Readers on LinkedIn pushed back with a fair question I’d dodged: what about sortable grids where the user picks…
If you’ve built an ASP.NET Core API or list view backed by Entity Framework Core, you’ve almost certainly written something like this: It works. It matches the page-number UI most users expect. Every…
This post is sponsored by ZZZ Projects. You have written this loop. Every .NET developer has. It looks fine in a code review. It passes unit tests. It works against your local database with 200…
Most posts about ReSharper for VS Code want to convert you. This one doesn’t. I write most of my .NET in Rider. I’m not moving. What changed for me back in March 2026, when JetBrains shipped the…
An interactive playground, a live theme builder, SignalR, and a Kanban board, all on .NET 10 with no breaking changes. htmxRazor v2.0.0 is out today. The six features in this release span three…
This post is sponsored by ZZZ Projects. The Code Every Developer Has Written and Regretted Most EF Core performance disasters are not exotic edge cases. They get written in the first sprint, look…
v1.4.0 ships today with seven features built around a single theme: the interaction patterns real production applications actually need. Real-time content streaming, multi-step workflows, immediate…
v1.3.0 lands today with six features organized around a clear theme: production patterns for .NET developers building server-rendered UIs that work correctly for everyone, including keyboard users…
The first feature release after htmxRazor hit 1.1 is here, and it targets the three complaints I hear most from .NET developers building server-rendered apps with htmx: “I need toast notifications,”…
Leader election and leases answer a comforting question: who should be in charge right now. They do not fully answer the dangerous question: who can still write right now. A node can lose its lease…
Here is an uncomfortable truth the ASP.NET Core community has been avoiding for too long: server-rendered web development should not require you to adopt React, Vue, or Angular just to get a decent…
Indefinite locks belong to a world where processes never crash and networks never split. That world does not exist. In a distributed system, “I hold the lock” can mean…
If your service runs on more than one node and still has a single instance assumption, you already have leader election. You just do not have it on purpose. Leader…
Distributed systems rarely fail because you picked the wrong cloud service. They fail because two nodes believe they are in charge, both act, and both are “correct” from…
Distributed systems do not fail because you missed a feature. They fail because responsibility is unclear. Two nodes act, both think they are right, and your data…
If your default move for “modern UX” is a SPA, you are paying a tax you do not need. You pay for it in build pipelines, duplicated validation rules, fragile client…
If every controller in your system does its own authentication, logging, and error handling, you do not have an architecture. You have a crowd of small frameworks…
If a single endpoint pulls half your database just to render a small card on a mobile screen, your problem is not the database. Your problem is that you are afraid to…
If one customer quietly turns into three different in-memory objects during a single request, your domain is already lying to you. You see it when: - Different parts of…
If a single business operation calls SaveChangesAsync three times, you do not have a transaction. You have a sequence of partial commits that you hope never fails in the…
If DbContext shows up in every corner of your codebase, you do not have a domain model. You have a thin layer of LINQ wrapped in HTTP. You see it when: - Minimal API…
If every interesting class in your system secretly knows a connection string, your domain is not a model. It is a thin layer of code on top of a data access layer. You…
Sometimes, your domain is really just rows in a table. You have a Customers table with Id, Email, and CreditLimit. You load a row, tweak a field, and write it back. That…
This is my post for the 2025 C Advent. Check out all the great posts! I want to wish you a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, and, finally…
Open a typical ASP.NET Core project, and you will often see the same shape: - Controllers that validate input, construct entities and call several repositories - Direct…
Look at a typical enterprise ASP.NET Core application, and you often see the same pattern: - Controllers validating requests, calculating totals, and applying discounts…
Picture this. Product wants a minor discount tweak: if an order total is below 100, no discount. You open an endpoint, add a conditional, save and push. Ten minutes, job…
Most enterprise systems already use patterns from Martin Fowler’s Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. The twist is that many teams use them without naming…
Walk into almost any long-lived enterprise codebase, and you will find the same pattern: - Controllers that know about routing, JSON, SQL, and domain rules -…
I am excited to share some big news. In the second half of 2026, my new book, titled Software Architecture Made Simple: A 'Simplicity-First' Approach to Software in the…
Genetic Algorithms are often associated with engineering, scheduling, or optimization problems, but their potential extends into the domain of art and design. When…
Genetic Algorithms (GAs) are a powerful optimization strategy inspired by the principles of natural evolution. But they are far from the only technique in a developer's…
Tuning hyperparameters for machine learning models like neural networks can be tedious and time-consuming. Traditional grid search or random search lacks efficiency in…
Even well-written Genetic Algorithms can fail. You might see little improvement over generations, results clustering around poor solutions, or a complete stall in…
Genetic Algorithms (GAs) are flexible and powerful tools for solving optimization problems. However, their effectiveness relies heavily on the correct tuning of…
Genetic Algorithms are inherently stochastic. Mutation introduces randomness. Crossover combines genes in unpredictable ways. Selection strategies often rely on…
To build flexible and maintainable genetic algorithm solutions in C, a modular architecture is critical. Yesterday, we focused on designing a pluggable GA framework.…
As you reach the final week of our Genetic Algorithms series, it is time to shift from experimentation to engineering. Instead of writing one-off implementations…
As your genetic algorithms become more sophisticated, it's no longer enough to simply observe the final output. Monitoring the evolutionary process in real time provides…
As your genetic algorithm workloads grow in complexity, compute-intensive tasks like evaluating large populations or running many generations can exceed what a single…
As problem complexity grows, so does the cost of evaluating and evolving populations in genetic algorithms. When each individual's fitness computation becomes expensive…
Traditional genetic algorithms (GAs) excel at global exploration across large search spaces. However, they can struggle to fine-tune solutions with high precision due to…
As we extend our use of genetic algorithms (GAs) beyond single-objective problems, we enter the realm of multi-objective optimization, where trade-offs must be made…
In many real-world problems, a single fitness function is insufficient to capture the complexity of the solution space. Applications in engineering, logistics, finance…
To conclude Week 3, let’s address one of the most common questions developers ask when learning about genetic algorithms: How do they perform compared to brute-force…
Genetic algorithms are powerful optimization tools, but real-world problems often involve constraints that cannot be ignored. In scheduling, routing, resource…
Scheduling is a classic example of a constraint satisfaction problem that often becomes too complex for brute-force or greedy solutions. Whether you're designing class…
One of the most effective ways to understand the progress of a genetic algorithm is to visualize its evolution. When solving the Traveling Salesperson Problem, a…
Genetic algorithms thrive on randomness and gradual improvement, but randomness alone often leads to slow convergence. While global search is essential to explore the…
The Traveling Salesperson Problem, also known as TSP, is one of the most extensively studied combinatorial optimization problems in computer science. Given a set of…
In genetic algorithms, the fitness function is not just a scoring system. It is the definition of success. Your entire evolutionary process hinges on how well the…
Now that you’ve built the complete set of genetic algorithm components, chromosomes, fitness functions, mutation, crossover, selection, and a configurable loop, it’s…
A genetic algorithm is only as effective as the loop that drives it. While selection, crossover, mutation, and elitism form the backbone of a genetic algorithm (GA), it…
Natural selection favors the survival of the fittest, but evolution in the wild is not always efficient. In genetic algorithms, we can bias the process toward faster…
In yesterday’s post, we explored the importance of mutation in genetic algorithms. Mutation helps maintain genetic diversity, prevent premature convergence, and enable…
In biological evolution, mutations are rare, random changes in DNA that introduce new traits. While many mutations are neutral or even harmful, some spark evolutionary…
So far, we’ve explored one-point and two-point crossover strategies, which split chromosomes at predefined positions. These methods are effective for maintaining gene…
In the evolutionary process, crossover is the mechanism by which parents pass on their traits to offspring. In genetic algorithms, crossover plays the same role…
By now, you’ve learned the foundational components of genetic algorithms: chromosomes, genes, fitness functions, mutation, crossover, and selection. Today, it’s time to…
Once you’ve calculated the fitness of each chromosome in your population, the next step in the genetic algorithm lifecycle is selection—deciding which chromosomes get to…
In the natural world, organisms survive and reproduce based on their ability to adapt to their environment. This principle of natural selection is central to the…
Now that we’ve explored the concept of genes and chromosomes in the context of genetic algorithms, it’s time to write some real code. Today’s goal is to design a…
At the heart of every genetic algorithm lies the concept of evolution, and at the heart of evolution lies DNA. For software developers, the equivalent building blocks…
At their core, genetic algorithms are built on five foundational principles that closely resemble biological evolution: In biology, genes are units of information, and…
What if you could write code that evolves? Not just code that runs, but code that iteratively improves its own solutions to complex problems without requiring you to…
What if your code could evolve like life itself, adapting, optimizing, and learning over time? Welcome to the AI-inspired world of Genetic Algorithms, where we blend…
Day 42, and here we are. Six weeks of learning Rust from the perspective of a C developer. We covered the basics, wrestled with ownership, danced with traits and…
Welcome to Day 41, and we are almost done! Today, we are putting Rust’s performance reputation to the test. Rust has a reputation for being fast. But how fast? If you…
Day 40, and today we are looking at how to package and release your Rust CLI app. You have written the code, added argument parsing, handled the logic, and even written…
Onward to Day 39. Today, we're discussing testing in Rust. If you are a C developer, you have probably spent time with xUnit, NUnit, or MSTest. You know the usual…
Welcome to Day 38. Today, we're getting our hands dirty with file I/O. Reading and writing files is one of those tasks every app must perform at some point. If you have…
It's day 36, and today, we are shifting gears from theory to practice. It is time to roll up our sleeves and build something. If you have ever built a command-line tool…
We are up to Day 37, and today, we are continuing to build out our Rust CLI app. Last time, we set up a simple command-line tool using the clap crate. Now, it is time to…
You've made it to Day 35, and we're wrapping up Week 5. This week was all about Rust’s generics, contracts, and lifetimes. If your brain feels like it has been doing…
Welcome to Day 34, and today we are taking a stroll through one of the most satisfying parts of Rust. If you're a C developer who loves LINQ, this will feel like home…
Welcome to Day 33, and today we are jumping into closures. If you have been writing C for a while, you are no stranger to lambdas, delegates, and maybe even expression…
Day 32, and today we are stepping into one of Rust’s most talked-about features. If you have heard scary stories about lifetimes, do not worry. This is your first…
Welcome to Day 31. Today, we're diving into generics. If you are coming from C this is probably familiar ground. You know and love List , Dictionary , and all the…
Welcome to Day 30 and today we are going to explore how Rust handles dynamic dispatch with trait objects. If you are used to the world of C this is the part where you…
Welcome to Day 29 where we are stepping into one of Rust’s most powerful features. If you are a C developer think of traits as interfaces but with some serious upgrades.…
Day 28 marks the end of Week 4 and it is time to pause for a quick reflection. We have covered a lot of ground this week from organizing Rust code with modules and…
Welcome to Day 27, and let’s talk about how Rust handles logging the smart way. If you have been in the .NET world for any amount of time, you are probably used to…
Look at this! Day 26, and today we’re talking about one of my favorite things to not ignore: error messages. Because when things go sideways (and they will), your future…
Okay, we're on Day 25, and today we’re stepping into the world of failure again. But this time, it’s the catastrophic kind. We’re not talking about the "file didn’t…
Day 24... today we’re digging into one of my favorite "why doesn’t every language have this?" features in Rust: the ? operator. If you've spent any time in C, you're no…
Day 23... let’s talk about how Rust gets its packages! If you’re coming from the .NET world, you’re no stranger to NuGet. It’s been your trusty sidekick for pulling in…
Welcome to Day 22! After a week of wrestling with data modeling, it’s time to talk about something near and dear to every developer’s heart: keeping your code organized…
Three weeks into Rust, and if your brain isn’t at least a little bit melted, I applaud your resilience! This week was all about data modeling. But not just any…
Welcome to Day 20! Today we’re talking about failure, but in the best possible way. Because, let's be honest, things go wrong. Files go missing. Network calls timeout.…
Ah, nulls, the "billion-dollar mistake" that haunts just about every C developer. How many times have you chased down a NullReferenceException, muttering under your…
Welcome to Day 17! By now, we've covered some seriously cool Rust features, but today might be my favorite so far: the match expression. If you're coming from a C…
Welcome to day 17! Today, we're diving into Rust's enums—and spoiler alert—they're not your typical enums from C. Rust enums are powerful, flexible, and genuinely fun.…
Welcome back! After wrestling with Rust's strict ownership rules, let's ease into something a little more familiar (yet refreshingly different): structs. As a C…
It's official—week two of learning Rust has wrapped, and I've survived. Mostly. This week was all about ownership, borrowing, and wrestling with Rust's strict rules. And…
We've all been there. You're coding away, and suddenly you reuse a variable name without realizing it. If you're a C developer, your brain probably triggers a warning…
When you’ve spent years writing C, you get really comfortable with string being immutable, Span being your performance trick, and StringBuilder being your go-to hammer…
You think you’ve been writing safe code… until you meet the Rust borrow checker. Then suddenly, your once-proud instincts are being side-eyed by a compiler that’s not…
If you've been writing C for a while, you’ve likely crossed paths with ref, in, and out parameters. They allow you to pass variables by reference, enabling a method to…
Okay, so picture this: you're cruising along in your nice, type-safe Rust code, and suddenly... your variable vanishes. Not literally, of course. But the compiler throws…
Let’s get one thing out of the way: as a C developer, I’ve never had to think too hard about memory. The garbage collector (GC) is always there, lurking in the…
Seven days into learning Rust, and I feel like I’ve been through a developer bootcamp with a compiler that doubles as a personal trainer. It doesn’t let you slack, but…
When I first started exploring Rust, one of my instincts was to reach for a class. You know the drill. Need to model some data? Write a class, slap a few properties on…
Today’s Rust lesson hit a familiar note but with a twist. Writing functions in Rust feels almost like writing them in C. Until, of course, the compiler reminds you that…
So today, I ran head-first into a Rust design decision that made me pause and go, “Wait… really?” In C, I can declare a variable with var and change it later. No fuss.…
Let’s be honest—every new language journey begins the same way: with a humble "Hello, World!" It’s the developer's rite of passage. So today, on Day 3 of my 42-day Rust…
It’s Day 2 of my journey learning Rust as a longtime C developer, and today I took the plunge: I installed Rust and created my first project. The whole thing felt a bit…
The daily list of topics for the series is here: From C to Rust: A 42-Day Developer Challenge Today marks Day 1 of my 42-day challenge to learn Rust—with a twist. I’m…
I’ve spent over a decade writing C and building solutions on .NET. But for six weeks, we will step outside the managed world of garbage collection and runtime JIT to…
What will happen when you take a C developer, hand them a curly-brace language that loves safety and hates nulls, and give them six weeks to figure it out? You will…
What if you could go back in time and see exactly what your database looked like yesterday, last week, or even last year? Sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie…
Ever wished you could store semi-structured data in your database without dealing with complex table relationships? Good news! SQL Server has native JSON support, and…
Not everything in your database needs a primary key. Sometimes, you just want to query views, stored procedures, or raw SQL results without forcing a unique identifier…
Grouping data in Entity Framework Core (EF Core) used to feel a little… clunky. Sometimes, LINQ’s GroupBy() worked beautifully in-memory but got lost in translation when…
We’ve all been there—you’re halfway through a multi-step transaction, and boom! 💥 Something fails. You don’t want to roll back everything, just the part that went…
Not all database tables are created equal! Sometimes, you don’t need direct access to raw data—you need a refined, read-only version that makes querying easier. That’s…
Have you ever needed to store coordinates, track locations, or perform distance calculations in your database? Whether you're building a ride-sharing app, a…
If you've ever wondered why your EF Core queries feel sluggish or why your database is working overtime, you're not alone. Performance issues can creep in quietly, and…
Ever wonder who changed what and when in your database? Or maybe you’ve had that “uh-oh” moment where data was updated, but no one knows how? Good news: EF Core has a…
I love receiving feedback on my blog posts! After sharing "Batching Updates and Inserts: Making EF Core Work Smarter, Not Harder," I received some great comments…
Let’s talk about startup time. Not the Silicon Valley kind, but the time it takes for your EF Core app to boot up, stretch its legs, and actually start handling…
- Part 1: Why Every C Developer Should Explore Rust - Part 2: Exploring Programming Paradigms: C and Rust Side by Side - Part 3: Syntax Smackdown: Comparing Constructs…
- Part 1: Why Every C Developer Should Explore Rust - Part 2: Exploring Programming Paradigms: C and Rust Side by Side - Part 3: Syntax Smackdown: Comparing Constructs…
- Part 1: Why Every C Developer Should Explore Rust - Part 2: Exploring Programming Paradigms: C and Rust Side by Side - Part 3: Syntax Smackdown: Comparing Constructs…
- Part 1: Why Every C Developer Should Explore Rust - Part 2: Exploring Programming Paradigms: C and Rust Side by Side - Part 3: Syntax Smackdown: Comparing Constructs…
- Part 1: Why Every C Developer Should Explore Rust - Part 2: Exploring Programming Paradigms: C and Rust Side by Side - Part 3: Syntax Smackdown: Comparing Constructs…
- Part 1: Why Every C Developer Should Explore Rust - Part 2: Exploring Programming Paradigms: C and Rust Side by Side - Part 3: Syntax Smackdown: Comparing Constructs…
- Part 1: Why Every C Developer Should Explore Rust - Part 2: Exploring Programming Paradigms: C and Rust Side by Side - Part 3: Syntax Smackdown: Comparing Constructs…
NOTE - This post is an example from the book "Beyond Boundaries: Networking Programming with C 12 and .NET 8". For a deeper dive into socket programming and more…
NOTE - This post is an example from the book "Beyond Boundaries: Networking Programming with C 12 and .NET 8". For a deeper dive into socket programming and more…
NOTE - This post is an example from the book "Beyond Boundaries: Networking Programming with C 12 and .NET 8". For a deeper dive into socket programming and more…
NOTE - This post is an example from the book "Beyond Boundaries: Networking Programming with C 12 and .NET 8". For a deeper dive into socket programming and more…
NOTE - This post is an example from the book "Beyond Boundaries: Networking Programming with C 12 and .NET 8". For a deeper dive into socket programming and more…
NOTE - This post is an example from the book "Beyond Boundaries: Networking Programming with C 12 and .NET 8". For a deeper dive into socket programming and more…
NOTE - This post is an example from the book "Beyond Boundaries: Networking Programming with C 12 and .NET 8". For a deeper dive into socket programming and more…
NOTE - This post is an example from the book "Beyond Boundaries: Networking Programming with C 12 and .NET 8". For a deeper dive into socket programming and more…
NOTE - This post is an example from the book "Beyond Boundaries: Networking Programming with C 12 and .NET 8". For a deeper dive into socket programming and more…
NOTE - This post is an example from the book "Beyond Boundaries: Networking Programming with C 12 and .NET 8". For a deeper dive into socket programming and more…
NOTE - This post is an example from the book "Beyond Boundaries: Networking Programming with C 12 and .NET 8". For a deeper dive into socket programming and more…
NOTE - This post is an example from the book "Beyond Boundaries: Networking Programming with C 12 and .NET 8". For a deeper dive into socket programming and more…
Imagine you’re cooking dinner. You handle both tasks simultaneously instead of waiting for the water to boil before chopping vegetables. That’s the power of asynchronous…
Last September, I wrote about starting to write a book covering C 12 and .NET 8 for network programming. I had big hopes with a well-known publisher. It just did not…
I am thrilled to announce my new adventure into the world of book writing with my upcoming title, "Practical Network Programming Using C." A few months ago, I received a…
We are surrounded by data, but starved for insights. Jay Baer One of my passions is data! I love all forms of data and how to work with it. I am a .NET fanatic also and…
