Best Practices in Architecture and .NET Development

Best practices represent proven methods and approaches that have established themselves in professional software development. They embody the collective knowledge of the developer community and help create high-quality, maintainable, and performant code.

In the .NET Ecosystem

This collection covers best practices across various areas including code quality with Clean Code and SOLID principles, architecture with design patterns and scalable solutions, testing strategies like TDD and quality assurance, DevOps practices with CI/CD pipelines and Azure DevOps automation, performance optimization techniques, and security-by-design approaches.

Best practices are not rigid rules but context-dependent guidelines that evolve with technology and should be critically evaluated.

.NET CLI 10 – Microsoft Finally Realizes DevOps Exists

The .NET CLI? Reliable. Boring. You run dotnet build, dotnet test, dotnet publish, done. Real DevOps work happens in Dockerfiles, CI/CD configs, and specialized tools. The CLI does its job but was never built for actual operational workflows.

.NET 10 changes this. Four additions that sound minor but fix real problems I’ve hit in production pipelines for years: native container publishing, ephemeral tool execution, better cross-platform packaging, and machine-readable schemas. Not flashy. Not keynote material. But they’re the kind of improvements that save hours every week once you’re running them at scale.

Will they replace your current workflow? Depends on what you’re building. Let’s look at what actually changed.

Why Your Logging Strategy Fails in Production

Let me tell you what I’ve learned over the years from watching teams deploy logging strategies that looked great on paper and failed spectacularly at 3 AM when production burned.

It’s not that they didn’t know the theory. They’d read the Azure documentation. They’d seen the structured logging samples. They’d studied distributed tracing. The real problem was different: they knew what to do but had no idea why it mattered until production broke catastrophically.

Stop Typing: The .NET CLI Tab Completion You've Been Missing

One command to transform your .NET CLI workflow—tab completion so responsive you’ll wonder how you survived without it Finally, a productivity boost that’s actually worth your time

Power of Ten Rules: More Relevant Than Ever for .NET

Gerard Holzmann’s Power of Ten rules prevented spacecraft failures and exposed Toyota’s fatal throttle bugs. Four rules transfer directly to C# with superior enforcement. Three become irrelevant thanks to the managed runtime.

The verdict: These principles aren’t just valid. They’re finally enforceable without heroic manual effort.

Code Metrics and Configuration: Beyond the Numbers Game

Code metrics have become a standard feature in modern development environments, yet their implementation and interpretation often leave much to be desired. While Visual Studio and .NET provide comprehensive code metrics analysis, the way these metrics are configured, presented, and (more critically) acted upon reveals a fundamental disconnect between measurement and meaningful improvement.

What code metrics actually measure, how to configure them properly, and (more importantly) why blindly following thresholds without understanding context is, frankly, a recipe for misguided refactoring efforts that waste your team’s time and actively damage your codebase.

.NET 10: Timing Is the New Technical Debt

2025 reshapes the .NET ecosystem with faster release cycles and shared responsibility. Discover why migrating to .NET 10 by Q1 2026 — and supporting your dependencies — turns timing into sustainable ROI.

.NET 10 and the Release Cycle Paradox

.NET’s yearly rhythm has become a symbol of stability — yet also a source of pressure. The release cycle paradox describes the tension between predictability and exhaustion: a release schedule that keeps the ecosystem healthy, but teams constantly catching up.

With .NET 10 on the horizon, developers must learn to navigate this rhythm rather than fight it.

Stop Breaking Multi-Targeting Builds with String Comparisons

String-based TargetFramework conditions fail silently in multi-targeting builds. IsTargetFrameworkCompatible() understands framework semantics and prevents production nightmares.

PackageDownload: NuGet's Forgotten Power Tool

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.

Stop Parsing the Same String Twice: CompositeFormat in .NET

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.

How SearchValues Saved Us From Scaling Hell

How SearchValues<T> Saved Us From Scaling Hell

While you’re busy optimizing database queries and adding cache layers, thousands of string searches per second are quietly eating your CPU budget. The problem isn’t visible in your APM dashboard because it’s distributed across every request. But it’s there. Compounding. Scaling linearly with load.

I discovered this the hard way when a log processing API started choking under production traffic. The bottleneck? String validation and sanitization. The fix? A .NET 8 feature that delivered a 5x performance improvement and let us shut down servers instead of adding them. And it’s gotten even better in .NET 9 and 10.

Clean Code: A Lip Service, Not a Standard

Clean Code is often praised but rarely practiced effectively. This article explores how misunderstood ideals and over-engineering harm .NET systems, how to recognize such failures early, and which C# best practices and official guidelines truly support maintainable software.