Wednesday, February 4, 2026

Playwright v1.58 brings a token efficient, agent friendly Skills CLI along with UI Mode and Trace Viewer polish, plus a new Speedboard timeline for merged reports that makes .NET E2E testing feel smoother. This post also highlights breaking selector removals and a devtools launch change, and adds an isLocal flag for CDP, helpful for keeping ASP.NET Core pipelines speedy and green.

Rishabh Gupta turns Clean Architecture from buzzword soup into a practical guide for .NET Web APIs. This post shows how the dependency rule and a clean four layer split keep your domain independent of frameworks, with code examples and pitfalls that explain why testing and swaps like EF to Dapper get much easier. He also calls out when this approach is overkill so you use it where it truly pays off.

Jeffrey Palermo sits down with Maddy Montaquila, Senior Product Manager on the .NET Aspire team and former MAUI PM, to unpack the latest .NET update and what it means for building cross platform and cloud native apps. This podcast explores where Aspire and MAUI are headed, lessons from the Xamarin to MAUI journey, and practical guidance that can simplify your tooling and app architecture.

Why Azure Maps returns both a view coordinate and a routing coordinate for the same place, and how that split keeps your pins pretty and your directions accurate. In this post you will learn when to use the view coordinate for display and the routing coordinate for ETAs and turn-by-turn, plus which API fields identify each. If you have ever routed to the middle of a building or the wrong side of a divided road, this will help you fix it.

Karen Payne shows how a custom IDisplayMetadataProvider turns FirstName into First Name across your ASP.NET Core views. This post contrasts it with the Display attribute, walks through simple Program.cs wiring and dynamic model discovery, and shares a sample repo that pairs the provider with FluentValidation to keep your UI clean and consistent.

Chris Ayers gives a practical tour of the Aspire CLI for building and running distributed apps across .NET, Python, and JavaScript. If you want less config glue and an easier path to adding databases and caches, this post offers a clean workflow and the why behind it.

Gregor Suttie shares a practical architecture for deploying AI-enabled apps on Azure Web Apps, treating the app as an orchestrator for Azure OpenAI rather than a model host. This post focuses on managed identities instead of API keys, private endpoints, Key Vault backed configuration, and observability with Application Insights, plus a Bicep example that keeps infra clean and auditable.

William McLean walks through building a minimal MCP server in C# that plugs Gemini CLI into Firestore, then iterates by adding new tools directly from the CLI. This post focuses on why MCP makes .NET a solid fit for AI workflows language independence, a simple stdio transport, and Firestore backed tools that enable a real inventory scenario. It is a friendly blueprint for moving from local validation to cloud ready patterns.

Steven Giesel kicks off the year with a free, open source .NET Toolbox built entirely client side to smooth out everyday dev tasks, especially for newcomers to web work. This post highlights a visual Middleware Designer that teaches common ASP.NET pipelines, flags pitfalls like authorization before authentication, and lets you simulate requests, plus a Package Centralizer that generates Directory.Packages.props from your csproj files to simplify version management.

Michael Maurice lays out eight pragmatic steps for building a maintainable CRUD REST API in .NET 10 using Clean Architecture and DDD. This post walks a tiny Products API through domain, application, infrastructure, and API layers so business rules live in the domain, EF Core stays in infrastructure, and controllers remain calm. If your last API grew into a ball of EF queries and if statements, these patterns show how to keep it testable and ready to grow.

John Reilly shows how to wire up end-to-end static typing between an ASP.NET Core Web API and a React TypeScript client by pairing Microsoft.AspNetCore.OpenApi with openapi-ts. He explains why OpenAPI 3.1 surfaces C# nullability more accurately than older tooling and how a couple of schema transformers tame number|string oddities, delivering a lean client and smaller bundles. If keeping front end and back end in sync without hand-written glue sounds good, this post maps out a pragmatic path with scripts you can drop into your workflow.

Mukesh Murugan shows how to build a minimal .NET API that enables S3 bucket versioning, lists an object's history, restores older versions, and recovers deletes by handling delete markers. You will learn how version IDs and delete markers work under the hood, plus practical guardrails like IAM permissions, lifecycle policies to keep costs in check, and MFA delete for critical data. The patterns for audit trails, rollback to last known good, and scheduled cleanup make it easy to bake resilience into real apps.