I’m Martin, CTO at Integrated Worlds GmbH in the Stuttgart region. I’ve been building .NET systems for nearly 20 years—since Framework 2.0 when SOAP was cutting-edge and ORMs were controversial.
Today I lead technology strategy for cloud-native solutions on Azure. Before this, I was Director Consulting Services at CGI, working with enterprise teams on architecture and transformation. I’m a Microsoft Certified Trainer and IHK-certified instructor, and I maintain several open-source NuGet packages.
As CTO, I don’t just make decisions from a distance. I write code, review PRs, debug production issues, and mentor teams. Technology leadership means staying hands-on and feeling the consequences of your choices.
As a trainer and mentor, I focus on fundamentals that outlast framework hype. Static analyzers, testing strategies, performance patterns, maintainable architecture—the stuff that actually prevents production fires.
As an open-source maintainer, I publish packages that solve problems I’ve hit repeatedly in real systems. When strangers depend on your code, you write better tests and clearer docs.
Almost two decades means I’ve made every mistake: over-engineered systems, bet on Silverlight and WCF (oops), built “flexible” architectures that were just complicated, shipped code I’m not proud of.
Here’s what stuck:
Quality isn’t optional – Analyzers catch bugs in milliseconds, tests prevent regressions, and both are faster than firefighting
Fundamentals outlast frameworks – Patterns and principles survive; specific tools don’t always
Context beats dogma – “Best practices” depend on your team, domain, and constraints
Evidence beats opinion – Measure, benchmark, validate before deciding
Pragmatism wins – Good-enough architecture that ships beats perfect architecture that doesn’t
I share perspectives from production systems and real teams. I’m skeptical of buzzword-driven development and allergic to cargo-cult practices. If a trend lacks substance or a pattern doesn’t hold up under pressure, I’ll say so.
This blog is for developers, solution architects and operators who maintain production systems and care about quality, not just shipping fast.
Modern .NET introduces powerful throw-helper methods such as ArgumentNullException.ThrowIfNull and ArgumentException.ThrowIfNullOrEmpty to simplify defensive programming.
However, many projects still target older frameworks where these APIs are missing.
This article explores how the NetEvolve.Arguments library delivers a unified, backward-compatible API that brings modern guard clause patterns to every .NET version, ensuring consistent validation, maintainability, and multi-framework compatibility.
It begins like many stories in software: a well-intentioned developer joining a project, determined to do things properly. You arrive at a codebase that has grown organically, perhaps even chaotically. You decide you will bring order. You set up unit testing, you configure continuous integration, you measure code coverage. You write dozens or hundreds of tests. Every public method is touched, every branch is at least executed. The dashboard lights up green. You feel, quite frankly, on top of things.
PackageDownload arrived in NuGet 4.8 to solve a niche but genuine problem: downloading packages without adding assembly references. It works. But its version syntax requirements and complete disregard for Central Package Management reveal the messy reality of platform evolution.
Let’s be honest: health checks are the broccoli of .NET projects. Everyone says they have them, but nobody’s excited to eat their greens. What starts as a humble SELECT 1 in a try/catch quickly explodes into a wild jungle of scripts, copy-pasted connection strings, and endpoints that only half the team remembers. Sure, it works—until it doesn’t. And when it breaks, it’s never at a good time.
Every time you call string.Format() with the same format string, .NET parses it again. And again. And again. CompositeFormat changes that: parse once, reuse forever. The result? Up to 30% faster formatting, fewer allocations, and a one-line code change. Here’s why this matters and how to use it.
