It Is Still My Code, Even When AI Writes It
How AI has shifted my development work toward planning, standards, review, and maintaining the mental model of the software I am still responsible for.
Ben Sampica
Software engineer, consultant, and writer covering .NET, architecture, testing, and software craftsmanship.
Latest posts
How to automatically deploy a passwordless Azure PostgreSql Server
How to create an Azure PostgreSql Server automatically that uses Microsoft Entra authentication, migrates the database using Entity Framework Core, and deploys out the infrastructure automatically with Bicep.
What is a Leader?
A short manifesto of what I believe makes a leader.
My Mob Programming Journey
Starting in 2019, I unknowingly embarked on a journey that led me to lead the most productive software development team I have ever worked on.
Testing & Local Development without Dockerfiles in .NET (Aspire)
A guide to running and testing .NET projects without Dockerfiles using .NET Aspire and TUnit.
Testing & Local Development without Dockerfiles in .NET (TestContainers)
A guide to running and testing .NET projects without Dockerfiles using TestContainers.NET and Respawner.
Configuring Optimistic Concurrency in .NET and EF Core
How to configure Entity Framework to handle concurrency with .NET 7 or greater.
Working with Timers in TimeProvider
How to work with Timers in TimeProvider and how to migrate existing timers to them.
A Complete Guide to HTMX + .NET Minimal APIs
Creating a HTMX and .NET Minimal API from scratch and adding necessary features like validation and error handling.
How to automatically deploy a passwordless Azure SQL Server
How to create an Azure SQL Server automatically that uses Microsoft Entra authentication, migrates the database using Entity Framework Core, and deploys out the infrastructure automatically with Bicep.
Is Azure DevOps "Dead"?
A comprehensive comparison with a breakdown of features that are present in GitHub and have been missing in AzDo for years.
D&D + Programming = <3
I combined some of my favorite things by creating some game extensions for TaleSpire, which I use to facilitate Dungeons & Dragons games.
Keyed Services in .NET 8 And The Factory Pattern
How keyed services can smooth over the factory pattern in dependency injection scenarios.
What is Quality Code?
A short manifesto of what I believe quality code means.
Azure AD Authentication Pitfall #1
A common authentication pattern with Azure AD comes to a screeching halt because of backwards compatibility.
Vertical Slice Architecture
A different approach compared to a dominating architecture in our industry - Clean Architecture.
Fake It So You Can Make It
I use Bogus to demonstrate how fake factories can be used to easily create useful, random data, whether it be primitive types or complex objects, for use in testing and non-production data seeding.
Agile Myths
These myths, damaging to the Agile movement, are propagated out of negligence of what Agile is - either inadvertently, through laziness, or old-school skepticism - by all types of people at organizations.
From MVC to Blazor Server
A step-by-step guide to take your MVC project and spice it up with Blazor components - or even Blazor pages!
Clean Code - Part III: Comments
Identifying some examples of common patterns and anti-patterns with comments.
Clean Code - Part II: The Four Principles (of Art)
Drawing parallels from the four basic principles of art to bring order to the code we write.
Blazor Server - EF Core Quirks
By default, EF Core’s DbContext is scoped. This will cause issues with asynchronous components accessing data in Blazor Server.
Clean Code - Part I: What’s In A Name?
Offering some tips on how to name things so other people, including yourself at a later date, can understand it.
Test-Driven Development: The Video Game
Explaining Test-Driven Development through the lens of a video game.
GitHub readme + Dungeons & Dragons
Creating a personal GitHub readme that "plays" Dungeons & Dragons
ADO.NET vs an ORM (Dapper & EF)
A case for an ORM compared to traditional ADO.NET and/or raw SQL scripts.
Fluent Validation
Learning, using, and extending the FluentValidation library.
ASP.NET Core MVC && VSCode
Replacing Visual Studio with Visual Studio Code for ASP.NET Core MVC development
C# Specification Pattern
Learning, using, and extending the specification pattern in C#.