The Curious Engineer

All blogs / C# / .NET

Aaronontheweb

aaronstannard.com

Software. Startups. Outer Space.

C# / .NETSoftware / engineering practiceEngineering management / careers

’10’15’20’25
Posts
199 from 14 May 2010 to 21 Aug 2026
Posting
monthly (7 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://aaronstannard.com/feed.xml

2026 6

  1. The .NET OSS Relicensing Panic Is an Incentives Problem
  2. Software 2.0: a Security-Critical Project Where I Don't Read the Code
  3. Escaping the LLM Coding Rat Race
  4. Software 2.0: Planning and Verifying a Greenfield Project
  5. Software 2.0: Code is Cheap, Good Taste is Not
  6. Why Your Software Sucks: Inheritance

2025 11

  1. Why Am I Paying $40,000 for the Birth of My Child?
  2. Stop Failing The `git clone && run` Test
  3. Your HTML Comments Are More Powerful Than You Think: Building Custom Validation Grammars with HtmlAgilityPack
  4. There Has Never Been a Better Time to be a Junior Developer - And It Won't Last Forever
  5. So Microsoft Deleted Some of Our Packages From NuGet.org Without Notice
  6. Deploying Docker Compose Applications with Tailscale and GitHub Actions
  7. Signing NuGet Packages Using Azure DevOps and Workload Identity Federation
  8. The Future of AI Belongs to Experienced Operators with Good Taste
  9. Software Falsehoods: you can build it cheap, fast, and good - pick two
  10. .NET OSS Projects: Better to Re-license or Die?
  11. Lessons Learned Over 10 Years of Bootstrapping Petabridge

2024 7

  1. Leaning into Weakness
  2. Frameworkism: Senior Software Developers' Pit of Doom
  3. Has Ruby-on-Rails-Style 'Gem Glue-Gunning' Come to .NET?
  4. Hate Your Own Work and Ship It Anyway
  5. Noticing Skill Issues is Not Gatekeeping
  6. .NET Developers Begging for Ecosystem Destruction
  7. How to Distribute Roslyn Analyzers via NuGet

2023 3

  1. Internal vs. External Accountabilities
  2. We're Rewriting Sdkbin
  3. DRY Gone Bad: Bespoke Company Frameworks

2022 3

  1. Why Self-Fulfilling Prophecies Come True
  2. Beware the Long 'YAGNI'
  3. Reflections on a Decade of Self-Employment

2021 9

  1. Professional Open Source: Extend-Only Design
  2. An Overview of Distributed Tracing with OpenTelemetry in .NET 6
  3. The Future of the .NET Foundation and .NET OSS
  4. On Generational Thinking
  5. IdentityServer relicensing five years ago
  6. Practical vs. Strict Semantic Versioning
  7. Professional Open Source: Maintaining API, Binary, and Wire Compatibility
  8. shared on Sdkbin was February 2021
  9. A Eulogy: the Tenacious Pursuit of Happiness

2020 7

  1. How to Play Software as a Team Sport
  2. You Have to Have Skin in the Game
  3. Introducing Sdkbin - The Marketplace for Software Developers
  4. Microsoft big-footing its own .NET OSS ecosystem
  5. the classic incentives problem that has always faced OSS maintainers and their commercial users
  6. How to Configure Visual Studio to Use SourceLink to Step into NuGet Package Source
  7. The Next Decade of .NET Open Source

2019 1

  1. “Project Maturity Ladder” proposal

2018 3

  1. It's Just Not a Big Deal
  2. The High Price of Comfort
  3. What We Leave Behind

2017 3

  1. The Necessity of Systematic Thinking
  2. The Coming .NET Renaissance
  3. .NET Core is Probably Fine

2016 4

  1. Writing Better Tests Than Humans Can Part 2: Model-based Tests with FsCheck in C#
  2. Writing Better Tests Than Humans Can Part 1: FsCheck Property Tests in C#
  3. .NET Core is Boiling the Ocean
  4. Introducing the New .NET Stack

2015 21

  1. Broken Windows: How Bad Software Releases Happen to Good Teams
  2. Introducing NBench - an Automated Performance Testing Framework for .NET Applications
  3. The Beginner's Reference Guide to Startups
  4. Introducing Access to {AI} Conference, November 12-13 2015
  5. Developers Who Can Build Things from Scratch
  6. Akka.NET Request for Contributors: Akka.Cluster
  7. Visual Studio ProTip: Copying Binaries on Pre and Post-Build Macros
  8. venture-backed Windows Store app analytics and marketing automation platform
  9. Helios 2.0 Development Diary 2 - Channels, Config, and the Curiously Recurring Template Pattern
  10. Helios 2.0 Development Diary 1 - Clean Slate
  11. our adventures migrating databases for MarkedUp analytics here
  12. Scalability Lessons we can Learn from Voat
  13. Talking about Akka.NET and the Actor Model on Hanselminutes and .NET Rocks
  14. how to start contributing to OSS
  15. On a Mission to Mars
  16. Creating a Custom ETW EventSource for Debugging High-Performance Code in C#
  17. Want me to work on your distributed .NET applications?
  18. The Right Way to do Equality in C#
  19. Akka.NET - One Year Later
  20. My Next Thing: Petabridge - the Future of Distributed Software in .NET
  21. In Response to a Letter from a Beginning Programmer

2014 8

  1. wrapping up MarkedUp
  2. Real-time Marketing Automation with Distributed Actor Systems and Akka.NET
  3. MarkedUp ceased operations November, 2014
  4. Tradeoffs in High Performance Software
  5. return to .NET to the uncompetitive, intellectual ghetto of yesteryear
  6. Business to Business Services Are What Will Make Dogecoin Succeed
  7. Bitcoin Paved the Way, but it’s Not the Future of Cryptocurrency
  8. my previous post about the second / third generation cryptocurrencies advancing the start

2013 15

  1. The Taxonomy of Terrible Programmers
  2. Win32 Errors: How to Format GetLastError() Output into Readable Strings
  3. You Succeed Once You Stop Giving a Shit
  4. Being Right is Always the Wrong Choice
  5. Instant File Server: turn any directory into a webserver with a simple command
  6. Cassandra Summit Talk: Real Time Analytics with Cassandra, Hive, and Solr
  7. put on a shitload of weight
  8. Brush the Dust Away
  9. What Do You Need to Become an Elite Developer?
  10. What Do You Need to Become an Elite Developer?
  11. How to Learn a New Programming Skill
  12. Live by “Fuck you, pay me;” Die by “Fuck you, pay me”
  13. Migrating from RavenDB to Cassandra
  14. 10 Reasons Why You’re Failing to Realize Your Potential as a Developer
  15. 10 Reasons Why You’re Failing to Realize Your Potential as a Developer

2012 32

  1. Be Your Own Measuring Stick
  2. Get a Grip
  3. 5 Key Themes from Microsoft on the Future of Windows and WinRT from the //BUILD Keynote
  4. New Features We’ve Added to MarkedUp: Custom Event Reporting and Reliable Crash Logging for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 Developers
  5. Thoughts on Recruiting Developers at Early Stage Startups: Determining Who’s Right for Your Company
  6. What It Takes to Actually Ship a Piece of Commercial Software
  7. Thoughts on Recruiting Developers at Early Stage Startups: Understanding the Job Market
  8. the job market for technical talent at early stage companies
  9. Software Engineering Priorities for Early Stage Companies: Put the Team First
  10. ASP.NET MVC4 Gotcha: Embedded Views and Razor Pre-Compilation
  11. Seven Unproductive Habits of Startup Founders
  12. The Seven Unproductive Habits of Startup Founders
  13. How to Setup a Proper Python Environment on Windows
  14. New Change in the Windows Store TOS: Any App with the Word “Metro” in the Title is Insta-Failed
  15. Today I am Leaving Microsoft and Starting my Own Company
  16. Why Front-End Web Development Makes Me Sad, Issue #1092145
  17. Taking Risks Requires Practice
  18. College: Four Years Later
  19. Code Camp Talk: RavenDB vs MongoDB
  20. Managing Your Windows Azure Services from OS X, Linux, or Windows Using the Command Line Interface (CLI)
  21. How to Build a Real-Time Chat Service with Socket.IO, Express, and the Azure SDK–Part 2: Setting Up Express and Session-Handling
  22. How to Build a Real-Time Chat Service with Socket.IO, Express, and the Azure SDK–Part 1: Setting Up
  23. part 1 of this series
  24. Building a Node + MongoDB Powered Blog on Windows Azure
  25. How to Do Business with Extremely Busy People
  26. How to Use the Azure npm Package Locally without the Azure Compute Emulator
  27. Code Camp Talks: Intro to Node.JS and Building Web Apps with Express
  28. How to Automatically Utilize Multicore Servers with Node on Windows Azure
  29. Troubleshooting “500 Internal Server Errors” in the Windows Azure Emulator when Working with Node.JS
  30. Node.JS on Windows Azure Part 2: Building a Basic Web Application with Node.JS on Azure
  31. Node.JS on Windows Azure Part 1: Setting Up Your Environment
  32. how to set up your development environment for working with Node.JS and Windows Azure

2011 24

  1. New Windows Phone 7 App: Lolcats Professional Pro Plus
  2. Project Scaffolding for Python
  3. Intro to Node.JS for .NET Developers
  4. How to Modify Machine.config on Windows Azure Web Roles
  5. How to Migrate Data between On-Premise SQL Server 2008 R2 and SQL Azure Without Getting a Migraine
  6. Rise of the Popped Collar Programmer
  7. How to Use Dependency Injection (Ninject) with WCF Services
  8. New Open Source Project: MVC.Utilities
  9. How to Recruit a Technical Co-Founder for Your Startup
  10. MongoDB vs. SQL Server 2008: A .NET Developer’s Perspective
  11. How to Securely Verify and Validate Image Uploads in ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC
  12. How I Built CaptainObvio.us
  13. Read More
  14. Geolocation Services and Bing Maps in Windows Phone 7
  15. Having Network Connectivity Issues with the Windows Phone 7 Emulator?
  16. How to Create a Twitter @Anywhere ActionFilter in ASP.NET MVC
  17. 8 Lessons Learned from Startup Weekend
  18. ASP.NET MVC3 / Razor: How to Get Just the Uri for an Action Method
  19. Quick and Dirty Feed Parser 1.0 Released!
  20. What Drives a Startup Founder?
  21. Getting Started with AppHarbor – Heroku for .NET
  22. 6 Really Useful Windows Phone 7 Articles
  23. How to Use Asynchronous Controllers in ASP.NET MVC2 & MVC3
  24. How to Make Any Operation Asynchronous in .NET

2010 42

  1. Upgraded to BlogEngine.NET 2.0, Updated Extensions
  2. Quick and Dirty Feed Parser 0.3 Now Available
  3. asynchronous methods to Quick and Dirty Feed Parser 0.3
  4. Fluent NHibernate: How to Create Bidirectional Many-to-Many Relationships with Additional Attributes on Relationship Table
  5. Los Angeles Azure 101 Event - 12/16/2010
  6. SHDH #40 on MVVM for Noobs
  7. Where Are My Windows Phone 7 Icons?
  8. How-To: Remote Validation in ASP.NET MVC3
  9. LA .NET User Group ASP.NET MVC3 Lecture Notes
  10. How to Make it Easy for New Developers to Adopt Your Open Source Project
  11. Consuming REST in .NET
  12. MVVM Light Toolkit Pitfalls on Windows Phone 7 and How to Avoid Them
  13. MVVM Light Toolkit Example on Windows Phone 7: Twitter Search
  14. SuperHappyDevHouse Lightning Talk: MVVM for Noobs
  15. Quick Interview about BizSpark at DEMO 2010
  16. Microsoft recruited me off of Hacker News
  17. Powered by Microsoft
  18. How to Attract Ambitious Employees to Your Company
  19. my previous blog entry
  20. 10 Harder-to-find-than-they-should-be Answers for Silverlight Beginners
  21. My Talk at BarCamp San Diego: How to Create Applications People Love
  22. BlogEngine.NET Extension: Footnotes
  23. Lessons from Code Camp 2010
  24. .NET Culture Shock: Why .NET Adoption Lags Among Startups
  25. Why .NET Adoption Lags Among Startups
  26. One of the other things I took away from Code Camp
  27. Announcing the Release of Quick and Dirty Feed Parser
  28. Learning When It's Time to Walk Away from a Project
  29. Programmer's Dilemma: Baby-Proofing vs. Giving Guns to Monkeys
  30. How to Query a User's del.icio.us Feed with RestSharp
  31. The Myth of the Single-Person Startup
  32. my first failed startup
  33. Discussion: How to Use RestSharp / Hammock to Automatically Parse the YouTube Response Format into POCO Objects
  34. Two Ways to Randomize IList Objects
  35. Frustration Central: Parsing the DateTime Values from the SlideShare REST API
  36. The State of Open Web APIs
  37. Making Basic Requests Against the SlideShare API Using HammockREST
  38. How to Use the Microsoft Enterprise Library Validation Application Block, Part 1
  39. How to Test Regular Expressions in .NET without Giving Yourself Migraines
  40. BlogEngine.NET Extension - Remind Your Readers to Subscribe to Your RSS Feed with SubscribeRemind
  41. A New Year, a New Attitude
  42. Popular .NET Libraries