.NET
I honestly wasn't sure the outbox pattern belonged in an Orleans codebase. Grains are single-threaded. State writes are atomic. The runtime handles failover. Bringing in a relational-era workaround felt like admitting Orleans hadn't solved the problem, when I was fairly sure it had. Then I watched
AI
A saved chat isn't a team workflow "Use the prompt from that conversation. Not the first version. The one after I told it not to upgrade everything." That's a terrible dependency for a development team. I don't want a useful maintenance process
Aspire
I don't want to be the clipboard Copy a stack trace. Paste it into chat. Get a plausible explanation. Try the suggested fix. Hit the endpoint again. Copy a different stack trace. At some point, we're not using an assistant to debug. We're manually
AI
I don't want ten agents waiting for me Ten agents writing code at once sounds productive. Ten pull requests waiting for the same person sounds like Monday. I care about the second number. If I have to reconstruct the intention behind every diff, check whether the agent solved
.NET
Preview 5 brought the headliners: Runtime Async, unions, vector search. Preview 6 is where they grow up. If my breakdown of .NET 11 Preview 5's features that actually matter was about the ideas, this post is about those ideas taking production shape. Unions now serialize and show up
.NET
Every .NET developer has the same reflex. An API wants a Stream, you have a string or a buffer, so you allocate a MemoryStream, copy everything into it, and hand it over. We've done it for twenty years. It's such muscle memory that nobody even registers
.NET
Your agent started with a tidy 300-token system prompt. Six months later it's 9,000 tokens. Legal added the compliance rules, Support pasted in the escalation playbook, Finance dropped the entire expense policy on top. I've watched this happen on two projects now. Nobody plans it.
.NET
I've deleted more Selenium test suites than I've shipped. Fifteen years of StaleElementReferenceException, Thread.Sleep(3000) landmines all over the codebase, and CI pipelines nobody trusted. A red build meant "re-run it" long before it meant "something's broken". E2E testing
.NET
Traditional event sourcing asks you to solve five problems independently: concurrency control, aggregate hydration, snapshot management, event persistence, and projection delivery. Five infrastructure concerns, five failure modes, and at least three NuGet packages you'll regret choosing. Orleans already solved every one of those problems. It just solved them
.NET
Rate limiting in .NET has always been an afterthought. You either bolted on AspNetCoreRateLimit (which hasn't aged gracefully), hacked together a custom ActionFilter with a ConcurrentDictionary, or shipped without any limiting and hoped nobody would hammer your endpoints. We've all been there. .NET 10's
.NET
Your job scheduler is probably the oldest pattern in your codebase. Hangfire or Quartz.NET, running in production, doing its thing. It works. But every time you touch the scheduling code, you wince a little. Magic strings mapping to methods. Reflection-based serialization that blows up after a rename. XML config
.NET
EF Core 11's vector search announcement was genuinely exciting, if you're on SQL Server. But according to Stack Overflow's 2024 Developer Survey, PostgreSQL is the most-used database among professional developers at 49%. Half of us watched that announcement and thought: "Cool. Doesn'