The .NET Insider – Issue 19

The Visual Studio February update introduces new productivity enhancements, performance refinements, and deeper AI-powered capabilities. With improved editor responsiveness and tighter Copilot integration, this release continues evolving Visual Studio into an AI-native development environment for modern .NET teams.

Microsoft has released version 1.0 of the official MCP C# SDK, enabling developers to build Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers and clients in .NET. This milestone release provides stable APIs for creating context-aware AI agents, integrating tools, and building intelligent developer workflows across modern .NET applications.

This article explores vector data support in .NET, a foundational component for building modern AI applications. Learn how embeddings, semantic search, and vector storage integrate with .NET libraries to enable intelligent retrieval, contextual reasoning, and AI-powered experiences in C# applications.

This guide walks through building and deploying a distributed application using .NET Aspire 1.3. It covers service orchestration, local development setup, observability, and cloud-ready deployment — making it easier to design scalable, production-ready .NET systems.

This article explains how to safely use scoped services inside singleton services in ASP.NET Core. It covers common pitfalls, dependency injection lifetime rules, and recommended patterns (like IServiceScopeFactory) to avoid runtime errors and ensure correct service resolution in modern .NET applications.

This guide explains how to use YARP (Yet Another Reverse Proxy) as an API Gateway in .NET. Learn how to route requests, manage microservices traffic, and build scalable gateway architectures using Microsoft’s high-performance reverse proxy library designed for modern cloud-native applications.

This article explores how to use MeterListener in .NET to record and consume metrics directly within your application. Learn how in-process metric collection works, how it integrates with the .NET diagnostics ecosystem, and how it can help developers build better observability and performance monitoring into modern .NET services.

This article explores strategies for solving the distributed cache invalidation problem using Redis and HybridCache in .NET. Learn how to maintain cache consistency across multiple application instances while improving performance and scalability in modern distributed systems.

This article demonstrates how to add OAuth-based application security to the SWIYU Generic Management Verifier APIs. It walks through authentication, authorization, and secure API integration patterns for protecting modern .NET services in distributed environments.

This article explains how architecture tests help enforce design rules and prevent unwanted dependencies in .NET applications. Learn five practical tests you can add to your projects to protect boundaries, maintain clean architecture, and ensure long-term maintainability of complex systems.