Introduction: After more than two decades building enterprise applications on the Microsoft stack, I’ve witnessed every major evolution of .NET—from the original Framework through the tumultuous transition to Core, and now to the unified platform that .NET 10 represents. Released on November 11, 2025, this Long-Term Support (LTS) release marks a significant milestone in the… Continue reading
Category: Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, United States that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions. Established on April 4, 1975 to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800, Microsoft rose to dominate the home computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems.
Microsoft would also come to dominate the office suite market with Microsoft Office. The company has diversified in recent years into the video game industry with the Xbox and its successor, the Xbox 360 as well as into the consumer electronics and digital services market with Zune, MSN and the Windows Phone OS. The ensuing rise of stock in the company’s 1986 initial public offering (IPO) made an estimated three billionaires and 12,000 millionaires…
Building Cloud-Native Applications with .NET Aspire: A Comprehensive Guide to Distributed Development
Introduction: Building distributed applications has always been one of the most challenging aspects of modern software development. The complexity of service discovery, configuration management, health monitoring, and observability can overwhelm teams before they write a single line of business logic. .NET Aspire, Microsoft’s opinionated framework for cloud-native development, fundamentally changes this equation. After spending months… Continue reading
The IDE Wars Are Over: How Visual Studio 2025 and Modern Developer Tools Changed Everything
Remember when developers would argue passionately about whether Visual Studio, VS Code, JetBrains, or Vim was the “right” choice? Those debates feel almost quaint now. After two decades of watching IDE evolution—from the heavyweight Visual Studio 2003 that could barely run on 512MB of RAM to today’s AI-powered development environments—I can confidently say we’ve entered… Continue reading
The Evolution of .NET: Why Modern C# Development Feels Like a Different Language
If you’ve been writing C# for more than a decade, you’ve witnessed something remarkable: the language you learned in the early 2000s bears only a superficial resemblance to what we write today. This isn’t just about new syntax sugar or additional libraries—it’s a fundamental shift in how we think about building applications. After twenty years… Continue reading
Azure Machine Learning: A Solutions Architect’s Guide to Enterprise MLOps
The journey from experimental machine learning models to production-ready AI systems represents one of the most challenging transitions in modern software engineering. Having spent over two decades architecting enterprise solutions, I’ve witnessed the evolution from manual model deployment to sophisticated MLOps platforms. Azure Machine Learning stands at the forefront of this transformation, offering a comprehensive… Continue reading
Azure Cosmos DB: A Solutions Architect’s Guide to Globally Distributed Databases
Throughout my career architecting distributed systems, few database decisions have proven as consequential as choosing the right globally distributed data platform. Azure Cosmos DB represents Microsoft’s answer to the challenge of building planet-scale applications—a fully managed NoSQL database service that delivers single-digit millisecond latency anywhere in the world. After implementing Cosmos DB across numerous enterprise… Continue reading
Azure Functions and Serverless Architecture: A Solutions Architect’s Guide to Event-Driven Computing
After two decades of building enterprise applications, I’ve witnessed the evolution from monolithic deployments to microservices, and now to serverless architectures. Azure Functions represents a fundamental shift in how we think about compute—moving from “always-on” infrastructure to truly event-driven, pay-per-execution models. This transformation isn’t just about cost savings; it’s about building systems that scale automatically… Continue reading
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS): A Solutions Architect’s Guide to Enterprise Container Orchestration
After two decades of deploying and managing containerized workloads across enterprises, I’ve watched Kubernetes evolve from a complex orchestration tool into the de facto standard for container management. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) represents Microsoft’s fully managed Kubernetes offering, and having architected dozens of AKS deployments, I can share the patterns and practices that separate successful… Continue reading
Azure DevOps Pipelines: A Solutions Architect’s Guide to Enterprise CI/CD
After two decades of building and operating CI/CD systems across enterprises of every scale, I’ve watched Azure DevOps evolve from Team Foundation Server into one of the most comprehensive DevOps platforms available. The platform’s strength lies not just in its individual components, but in how seamlessly they integrate to create end-to-end delivery pipelines that scale… Continue reading
.NET 9: A Solutions Architect’s Guide to the Modern .NET Ecosystem
After two decades of building enterprise applications on the Microsoft stack, I’ve witnessed every major evolution of .NET—from the original Framework through the tumultuous transition to Core, and now to the unified platform we have today. .NET 9, released in November 2024, represents the maturation of a platform that has finally delivered on the promise… Continue reading