Namaste, I’m Rob Hutton.

Welcome to my blog, where I dive into the world of .NET development with a focus on Blazor, Clean Architecture, Design Patterns, OpenAI, and more. Whether you’re exploring new frameworks or refining your skills, you’ll find practical, real-world step-by-step code examples with clear, easy-to-understand explanations. My goal is to break down complex concepts into actionable insights, helping developers at all levels build better applications with .NET.

Articles


  • Using EF Core Like a Pro: Performance, Patterns, and Modern Features in .NET 8–10

    Master modern EF Core features — compiled queries, split queries, JSON columns, EF.Functions, and global filters — to write clean, efficient, and scalable data access code. Read article on Medium. Entity Framework Core has evolved into a powerful, full-featured ORM that lets .NET developers work efficiently with relational databases while keeping code clean and maintainable. With EF Core 8+ and beyond, new features

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  • 🎇Beyond Basics: Top 10 .NET Questions for Mid to Senior Developers

    Read this article on Medium. Navigating a .NET interview can feel like walking a tightrope between theory and real-world experience. Mid-level developers are expected to demonstrate solid understanding of C#, design principles, and frameworks, while senior developers must show judgment in architecture, patterns, and performance. This guide covers questions that go beyond the basics — spanning SOLID principles, dependency injection, common design patterns, Blazor, Entity Framework, caching, and performance management. You’ll get both conceptual questions and practical scenarios, helping you prepare for interviews that test not just knowledge, but how

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  • End-to-End Server-Side Paging, Sorting, and Filtering in Blazor

    A practical MudBlazor + API pattern that actually scales Read this article on Medium. Let’s Build Something Real Client-side paging works… until it doesn’t. It’s fine for small datasets, demos, or admin screens that will never grow. But once your data starts to scale, the cracks show fast: slow load times, inconsistent sorting, broken filters, and incorrect total counts. In this article, we’ll walk through a real,

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  • A Practical Guide to End-to-End Contract-Based Development in .NET 10

    Read this article on Medium. Most bugs in distributed .NET systems don’t come from bad algorithms — they come from drift. The UI expects one shape of data, the API returns another, and tests quietly fall out of sync. Each layer evolves independently until something breaks in production. Contract-based development flips that dynamic. Instead of treating DTOs as disposable plumbing, it makes them the source of truth — shared, versioned, and enforced across Blazor SSR, WASM,

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  • The .NET Features Senior Developers Actually Use (And the Ones They Ignore)

    Read this article on Medium. If you’ve worked on the same .NET system for more than five years, you already know this: the features you were most excited to adopt aren’t always the ones still in the codebase today. Time, not hype, is the real test of architectural decisions. This article looks at modern .NET features through a senior developer’s lens — not based

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  • Why Blazor Auto Mode Finally Solves the SSR vs WASM Debate (.NET 10)

    Read this article on Medium. The Blazor Identity Crisis If you’ve built anything serious with Blazor, you’ve hit the same wall: Should this be Server, WASM, SSR… or Auto? And if we’re being honest, most of us didn’t choose — we compromised. For years, the Blazor community debated hosting models as if one had to win. Blazor Auto Mode ends that

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  • State Management in Blazor: Beyond Cascading Parameters

    Read this article on Medium. Cascading parameters are convenient.They’re also one of the fastest ways to quietly sabotage a Blazor application. Most Blazor apps don’t fail dramatically.They fail subtly. If any of that sounds familiar, the problem usually isn’t Blazor.It’s state ownership. Why State Management Is Tricky in Blazor Blazor components are short-lived.State usually is not. That mismatch

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  • Blazor Auto Mode + Vertical Slices: The New Full-Stack Standard in .NET 10

    Why Blazor Auto Mode Changes Everything Read this article on Medium. Blazor Auto Mode represents a major shift in how full-stack .NET applications are built. Instead of choosing between Server-Side Rendering (SSR) or WebAssembly (WASM), Auto Mode starts with SSR for fast initial load and SEO, then seamlessly hands off to WASM for rich client-side interactivity. The result is a best-of-both-worlds experience — but only if your architecture can

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  • 10 Architecture Mistakes Developers Make in Blazor Projects (And How to Fix Them)

    Read this article on Medium. Blazor is a powerful framework for building interactive web applications with C#. But it’s easy to fall into architectural traps that hurt maintainability, performance, and scalability. Here are the top 10 mistakes developers make — and how to fix them. 1. Doing Too Much in Components The Problem In Blazor (and component-based frameworks in general), components are meant to represent a piece

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  • Designing .NET Web APIs for Performance and Scale

    Read this article on Medium. Performance problems rarely come from the framework. In production systems, slow APIs are usually caused by returning too much data, doing too much work synchronously, or asking the database to do things it was never designed to do efficiently. After working on several high-traffic .NET applications, I’ve found that Web API performance boils down to a

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