Mapping the Story -- Make Your Flat Backlog More Dynamic to Build Better Products

Backlogs are meant to be the source of truth for what a team is building and why -- but all too often, they resemble a bottomless to-do list more than a meaningful product roadmap. When the backlog grows unwieldy, teams lose sight of user goals, product outcomes, and the overarching narrative that should guide development.

That's where Story Mapping comes in. Developed by Jeff Patton, Story Mapping transforms a flat, ticket-based backlog into a visual, goal-oriented artifact that reflects the user's journey and the product's intended impact. It helps teams zoom out, prioritize work with purpose, and build a shared understanding across roles.

Posted by Visual Studio Magazine Editors on 07/07/20250 comments

Writing Utilities with .NET Core Tools

I don't know about you but if you're like me, you have 50 trillion little snippets of code and half-developed apps all over the place on your dev machine. It's all those little one-off applications you wrote to do some kind of little thing that you maybe need to use once or twice a year. Well, did you know that you can actually package them up, publish them, and share them on NuGet? Yah. Rather than letting all that code just sit around doing nothing, you can share them as a .NET Core Tool.

Posted by Benjamin Day on 06/18/20250 comments

Real-Time AI: Take Your Apps to the Next Level with Cutting-Edge AI Features

As generative AI capabilities evolve from novelty to necessity, developers are seeking new ways to integrate intelligence directly into the user experience—without sacrificing speed or accessibility. One frontier showing particular promise is real-time AI: systems that process and respond to user input instantly, whether it's voice, text, or other dynamic data streams.

Posted by David Ramel on 05/29/20250 comments

ASP.NET Core Validation with Component Model Attributes

It might not be the most exciting thing in the world but there's a lot of great stuff in the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace. Last month, I wrote about using Component Model attributes to customize how ASP.NET Core forms are displayed. This month, I'm going to talk about using Component Model attributes to do validation in ASP.NET Core.

Posted by Benjamin Day on 05/20/20250 comments

Cleaning Up ASP.NET Data Display Using Component Model Attributes

In my last article, I talked about how you can use ASP.NET Editor Templates and Display Templates with the Html helper methods to keep your display logic understandable, maintainable, and organized. If you ran the sample application (or looked at some of the screenshots in the article) you might have noticed that the formatting of the field names was kind of messed up. For example, "LastName" instead of "Last Name" and "FirstName" instead of "First Name."

Posted by Benjamin Day on 04/21/20250 comments

Burnout in Software Development

Change-bringer and 21-time Microsoft MVP Robert Bogue studies employee burnout, but he doesn't believe in work-life balance. He believes in work-life harmony. It's an interesting difference.

Long hours, shifting priorities, and the relentless pressure to deliver clean code under tight deadlines -- these are just a few of the stressors that define life in modern software development. While the work can be deeply fulfilling, it can also take a mental and emotional toll, leading many developers down the path of burnout. It's a phenomenon most in the industry have either experienced firsthand or witnessed in colleagues: the creeping exhaustion, rising cynicism, and sense of ineffectiveness that can sap motivation and stifle innovation.

Posted by David Ramel on 04/15/20250 comments

ASP.NET View Re-use with Editor & Display Templates

Whenever I sit down to write one of these articles, I always struggle with whether to write about things that are super-advanced vs. super-basic. My goal though is to try to write about things that are somewhat obscure but handy in the hopes that I can smooth out the learning curve for someone -- especially people who are just getting going with .NET Core. ASP.NET Core has a zillion great features, but lots of them are hidden. One of my favorites (and the topic of this month's article) is ASP.NET Core Editor Templates and Display Templates.

Posted by Benjamin Day on 03/31/20250 comments

Under the Hood: How Do C# Top-Level Statements Actually Work?

I taught a C# programming class for a company just outside of Boston. The company was making a move towards .NET Core and C#, but a good chunk of their coders were Python experts not C# experts. They all knew how to program but moving over to C# and the world of Visual Studio was causing them headaches. So they brought me in to help them get up to speed.

Posted by Benjamin Day on 02/21/20250 comments

CallerMemberName: Your New Best Friend for Logging in C#

As I mentioned in my last post, I recently re-wrote the website and blog engine for my website. As part of that project and a different project of mine, I've been writing a lot of library code for CosmosDb and ASP.NET Core lately. One of the big things that I wanted was an easy way to log CosmosDb query details and ASP.NET Core MVC page request details.

Posted by Benjamin Day on 01/21/20250 comments

Building an AI-Powered .NET Aspire Application

AI's transformation of software development sees more and more groundbreaking tools and frameworks empowering developers to build more intelligent and efficient applications. Among these advancements is the ability to integrate large language models (LLMs), vectorized data, and robust cloud-based services to create AI copilots that can transform how users interact with software.

Posted by David Ramel on 01/13/20250 comments