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Real-Time at Last: SSE and SignalR in ASP.NET Core |
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In Part 1, we walked through the pre-real-time era of server status updates: full page refresh, XMLHttpRequest, Ajax and fetch(), and short/long polling. What all of that machinery was really reaching for is a way for the server to simply tell the client when something happens, the moment it happens. That's what this post covers: Server-Sent Events (SSE) and SignalR, the two mainstream ways to get genuine server push in ASP.NET Core. |
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Posted On : 23 Sep 2026 |
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From Page Refresh to fetch(): The Pre-Real-Time Era of Status Updates in ASP.NET Core |
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Almost every non-trivial web application eventually needs to answer a simple question: something is processing on the server, and the user needs to know when it's finished (or how far along it is). Generating a large report. Processing an uploaded video. Running a batch import. Training a model. Provisioning a resource. These operations may take longer than you want a single HTTP request to remain open, so the browser can't just wait around for a response — the user needs a way to check back in. |
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Posted On : 16 Sep 2026 |
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One Language to Rule Them? LINQ, Abstraction, and What's Next |
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In Part 1, we traced how .NET's data formats each grew their own query language, and how LINQ emerged as Microsoft's attempt to paper over the fragmentation. In Part 2, we walked through that fragmentation format by format — and kept bumping into the same fact: sooner or later, almost everything gets funneled into objects, and queried with LINQ. |
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Posted On : 19 Aug 2026 |
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A Field Guide to .NET Data Formats |
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In Part 1, we made the case that every data format grows its own language because the shape of the data dictates what kind of navigation makes sense. This part is the reference you actually bookmark: a walk through the formats a .NET developer runs into, the native language each one speaks, and a small idiomatic snippet for each so you can see the shape of the code, not just the theory. |
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Posted On : 12 Aug 2026 |
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The Many Languages of Data: How .NET Learned to Speak in Formats |
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It's a Tuesday afternoon and you're debugging a feature that touches four different pieces of data. First, you write a SQL query to pull a customer record from the database. Then you filter an in-memory list of orders using LINQ. Then you parse a JSON payload from a third-party API, reaching for dot-notation and the occasional JSONPath expression. Finally, you open a legacy XML configuration file and, out of muscle memory, write an XPath query to find the node you need. |
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Posted On : 05 Aug 2026 |
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Refactoring as an Act of Care |
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Refactoring is usually described as improving code without changing its behavior. That's technically accurate, but it misses something important. Refactoring is ultimately an act of care — for the teammate who inherits your code, for the on-call engineer debugging it at 2 a.m., and for your own future self, who will have forgotten every clever shortcut you took today. |
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Posted On : 22 Jul 2026 |
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Backward Compatibility as an Act of Compassion |
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Somewhere right now, a developer is opening a .csproj file that targets net48. Not because they love it. Because the app inside it quietly runs a hospital's billing system, or a manufacturing plant's inventory, or a client's business that has survived three recessions on this exact codebase. Nobody on that team is asking, "Should we rewrite this in .NET 9?" They're asking, "Will this still compile next year?" And the answer, almost certainly, is yes. |
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Posted On : 15 Jul 2026 |
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The Fasting Developer: Memory Discipline and GC Awareness in .NET |
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There is a quiet assumption baked into most .NET codebases: the Garbage Collector will always clean up. And technically, it will. But the cost of that cleanup — paid in latency, in CPU time, in unpredictable pauses — is what most developers never stop to measure. |
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Posted On : 08 Jul 2026 |
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You Are Learning. But Are You Enjoying It? |
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There is a question that rarely gets asked in software development, buried beneath tutorials, roadmaps, certifications, and course recommendations: Are you actually enjoying what you're learning? Not Are you keeping up? Not Are you learning the latest framework? Not Have you completed another course? |
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Posted On : 01 Jul 2026 |
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The Quiet Codebase: What Vedanta and Yoga Taught Us About Software |
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This is Part 2 of a two-part article. In Part 1, we traced the parallel between the growing complexity of modern human life and the growing complexity of modern software — and asked why both seem so difficult to simplify, even when we genuinely want to. Here, we look for answers in an unlikely place. |
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Posted On : 24 Jun 2026 |
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