Nabeel's Blogs

Designing Resilient .NET Applications: Handling Failures in Distributed Systems Designing Resilient .NET Applications Handling Failures in Distributed Systems Overview: Distributed systems fail by default, not by exception. This article explains how to design resilient .NET applications using proven patterns like retries, circuit breakers, and fallback strategies. You will learn how failures propagate across microservices and how to control them using modern .NET 8 tooling. The focus is on real production systems, not theory. 1. The Reality of Distributed Systems In monoliths, failures are predictable. In distributed systems, failures are inevitable and unpredictable . Network latency, service downtime, partial failures, and cascading outages are normal behavior. Engineering truth: “Everything fails eventually. The only question is whether your system is prepared.” Critical mistake: Assuming services will always respond successfully leads to cascad...

JWT vs Sessions vs Azure AD B2C: Modern Authentication Strategies Explained Choosing the wrong authentication strategy can break scalability, security, and developer velocity. This guide explains how JWT, Sessions, and Azure AD B2C actually behave in production .NET systems. 1. The Authentication Confusion Problem Most developers don’t fail because they lack knowledge. They fail because they copy patterns without understanding trade-offs. Common anti-patterns: Storing JWT in localStorage Building custom session stores Ignoring OAuth/OIDC standards Security principle: Every shortcut in authentication becomes long-term security debt. Reality Check: Authentication is not a feature. It is infrastructure. Treat it like one. 2. JWT Explained (Production Reality) JWT is a stateless authentication mechanism. The server does not store session state. Instead, identity is encoded in a signed token. Structure: Header.Payload.Signature builder.Services.Add...

RAG vs Fine-Tuning: Real Engineering Decisions with Azure OpenAI RAG vs Fine-Tuning Real Engineering Decisions with Azure OpenAI (.NET Perspective) 1. The Problem Most Teams Get Wrong Most teams entering AI make a critical mistake: they assume they need fine-tuning to solve everything. In reality, they are trying to solve a data problem with a model training solution . Hard truth: If your knowledge changes frequently, fine-tuning will become your most expensive mistake. The real question is not “Which is better?” but: Are you solving knowledge retrieval or behavior control? --- 2. RAG — The Default Strategy You Should Start With Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) keeps your model static and injects fresh data at runtime. Production Flow 1. Convert documents into embeddings 2. Store in vector database 3. Retrieve top matches 4. Inject into prompt 5. Generate response Engineering Tip: The bottleneck in RAG is not the LLM, it is retriev...

Monolith vs Microservices in .NET: Making the Right Architecture Decision in 2026 1. The Real Problem Nobody Talks About Every week on .NET forums, developers ask some version of this: "Should we use microservices or a monolith?" The answers they get are almost always useless — vague blog posts listing pros and cons that could apply to any system ever built. Here's the truth: microservices have become the default answer even when they are spectacularly wrong . I've watched three startups burn through runway because a five-person team decided to build 14 independently deployed services from day one. I've also watched a large enterprise choke under a single 800,000-line codebase that no one dared touch. Both extremes fail. The right answer is always context-dependent, and in 2026, with .NET 8/9's maturity, the tooling exists to do both well — if you know what you're actually choosing. Architectural decisio...

In this blog, we’ll explore how to create and manage a RESTful API using ASP.NET Core . Specifically, we'll demonstrate how to build a simple API that performs CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations on a database entity, which can be consumed by web applications, mobile apps, or other services. RESTful APIs are at the heart of modern web development. They allow seamless communication between client and server, making it easier to share data across platforms. While APIs can be designed using many technologies, ASP.NET Core provides a robust, high-performance framework with built-in features for security, routing, and model validation. By the end of this blog, you’ll have a clear understanding of how to build an API from scratch in .NET, and how it can be extended to power real-world applications. Required Components for API Creation To build a RESTful API in ASP.NET Core , you’ll primarily work with the following: Models ...

Connecting to a Multi-Tenant API using the MVP Design Pattern in .NET In modern software architectures, building scalable and maintainable applications is essential. One approach that helps to manage the complexity of multi-tenant systems is the use of the Model-View-Presenter (MVP) design pattern. In this blog, we’ll walk through how to implement this design pattern for connecting to a multi-tenant API in a .NET application. This blog will cover the following aspects: Setting up the .NET project Understanding the MVP design pattern Connecting to a Multi-Tenant API Detailed code implementation and explanation 🔧 Step 1: Setting Up the .NET Project Before diving into the code, let’s start by setting up the .NET project. We'll create a new Razor Pages application for this example, which is suitable for web-based applications. Follow these steps: 1. Create a New .NET Web Application Open a terminal or Visual Studio and run the following...