All Articles on .NET, Azure & DevOps Engineering

Browse our latest articles exploring the tension between innovation and stability in software development

Incremental Source Generators Done Right: The Equality Contract

Incremental Source Generators Done Right: The Equality Contract

IIncrementalGenerator exists for one reason: to run only when its inputs actually change. Most generators fail at exactly that, because somewhere in the pipeline a value is compared by reference and the cache silently misses. This is part 1 of a 4-part series on getting incrementalism right, and it starts where every broken generator starts: the equality contract, the ImmutableArray trap, and the EquatableArray that fixes it.
EF Core Plugins: Owning Migrations with ExcludeFromMigrations

EF Core Plugins: Owning Migrations with ExcludeFromMigrations

ExcludeFromMigrations() keeps plugin entities fully queryable in the host DbContext while stripping migration ownership of their tables. Combined with per-context migration history tables, IDesignTimeDbContextFactory, and an explicit application-layer data access pattern, it enables truly independent plugin schema evolution.
EF Core Plugins: When Migrations Go Wrong

EF Core Plugins: When Migrations Go Wrong

EF Core’s entity discovery is thorough by design. In a plugin architecture, that thoroughness becomes a liability: navigation properties pull plugin entities into the host migration, creating shared schema ownership that breaks plugin isolation, causes schema drift, and makes clean plugin uninstalls impossible.
Building an MCP Server in .NET Without Buying the Hype

Building an MCP Server in .NET Without Buying the Hype

MCP is JSON-RPC with conventions, not magic. This guide builds a Model Context Protocol server in .NET with the official SDK: stdio and Streamable HTTP transports, tightly-scoped typed tools, JWT authentication, prompt-injection defenses, OpenTelemetry tracing, and the production failure modes the demos never mention.