Your CSV import handles 10k rows in dev. Then prod sends 500k, and it runs for hours. New post: parsing, streaming, and the upsert EF Core 10 still can't do natively. Benchmarked on .NET 10. Sponsored by ZZZ Projects. #EFCore #dotnet #sqlserver #databases #data www.woodruff.dev/scaling-ef-c...

Scaling EF Core for Data Imports: From CSV Files to Millions of Database Rows - Chris Woody Woodruff | Fractional Architect

The Import Job Nobody Wants to Own Every team has one. It might be called an import service, a feed processor, or a sync job. The name varies. What stays constant is the shape of the problem: a large ...

woodruff.dev

EF Core 10 ships no native upsert, so everyone hand-rolls the check-then-insert loop that crawls at scale and breaks under concurrency. New guide: BulkMerge performs insert-or-update in a single call. www.woodruff.dev/bulkmerge-up... Sponsored: ZZZ Projects

BulkMerge (Upsert) in EF Core: How to Insert-or-Update Without the Headache - Chris Woody Woodruff | Fractional Architect

Picture this. Your inbox lights up at 7:14 AM. A supplier just pushed 50,000 product records to your endpoint. Half are new. The other half are updates to products already sitting in your database. Yo...

woodruff.dev

reminder for the .NET people: 4 days left on the WOODY code 24 days until the workshop After Friday, you can still come, you just pay $400 extra to feel decisive. live360events.com/events/train... #dotnet #csharp #ai

htmxRazor v2.1.0: Advanced Inputs. Date picker, time picker, combined date+time control, and a radial category selector. Keyboard-accessible, server-rendered, no client-side JS library. Playwright E2E back in CI. www.woodruff.dev/new-release-...

New Release!! htmxRazor v2.1.0: Advanced Inputs - Chris Woody Woodruff | Fractional Architect

Forms are where server-rendered apps either feel sharp or feel clunky. A date field that drops you into a raw text box, a category selector that needs a client-side widget and three npm packages, a ti...

woodruff.dev

Another podcast episode is out! @tedneward.bsky.social @woodruff.dev and I banter about the Conference Session pattern! Let me know what you think!

Developer Relations Activity Patterns@devrelpatterns.com · 2mo ago

Everyone pictures a developer advocate on stage. We finally did an episode about why that image exists — and whether it should. Conference Sessions, hecklers, speaker lounges, and "that guy" in the front row. Episode 6 is out. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayQo...

Performance update for the Baseball History Project: I moved the database from SQLite to Postgres, and the speed jump is huge. Queries that used to drag now feel instant. Next up: an MCP server for baseball stats. Stay tuned. baseballhistoryproject.com

Your codebase has 14 interfaces extracted "for flexibility." 2 have a second implementation. 12 have an interface declaration, one implementation, and a factory that chooses between the only option. Stranded assets. Paid for once. Maintained forever.

The Abstraction Budget

Why Every Interface, Generic, and Pattern in Your Codebase Has a Price You Have Not Paid Yet

simplicityfirstphilosophy.substack.com

Was chatting with the EF Core team about anti-patterns, walked through offset pagination, and completely forgot to mention keyset. So I wrote the post I should have brought. Skip().Take() isn't wrong. It's misapplied. On hot tables, it's slow AND silently drops/duplicates rows. Keyset fixes both.

Pagination in Entity Framework Core: Why Skip/Take Falls Apart on Hot Tables - Chris Woody Woodruff | Fractional Architect

If you've built an ASP.NET Core API or list view backed by Entity Framework Core, you've almost certainly written something like this: var page = await _db.Orders .OrderBy(o => o.Id) .Skip((pageNumber...

woodruff.dev

The new stack was Next.js. The new stack was NestJS. The new stack was modern. Three years later, the same team is having the same conversation about the same problems against the system they just rewrote. The architecture survived the migration intact. #softwarearchitecture #softwaredesign

The Rewrite Trap: Why Rebuilding the System Almost Never Fixes What Was Actually Broken

The Same Architecture, Now in TypeScript

simplicityfirstphilosophy.substack.com

I will be on the .NET Data Community Standup in about 30 minutes. You can watch here www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlR6... I will be discussing 8 Real-World EF Core Query Anti‑Patterns (and How to Fix Them). I might even drop in a bonus EF Core nugget if there is enough time.

.NET Data Community Standup: 8 Real-World Query Anti‑Patterns (and How to Fix Them)

YouTube video by dotnet

youtube.com

The cloud bill was $480K. The system actually costs $2.4M per year to run. The other $1.9M lives in maintenance time, lock-in, integration debt, and exit costs. The accounting system never sees it. The Dependency Audit is the receipt nobody printed.

The Dependency Audit

Why Every Library, Framework, and Vendor on Your Stack Has a Cost You Never Wrote Down

simplicityfirstphilosophy.substack.com

Complexity is not sophistication. It's a trap. I joined The Modern .NET Show to talk about the Architecture Tax, the Three Filters, and why simpler systems consistently outperform complex ones in production. dotnetcore.show/season-8/sim...

S08E19 - Simplicity First: Why Complexity Is Not Sophistication with Chris Woodruff

Chris Woodruff joins Jamie to argue that simplicity, not complexity, is the true mark of sophisticated software architecture, sharing his three filters: the half rule, the 2 a.m. test, and primary pat...

dotnetcore.show

In the latest @devrelpatterns.com podcast @reverentgeek.com @woodruff.dev and I discuss documentation! And, of course, the conversation went agentic! Check it out!

Developer Relations Activity Patterns@devrelpatterns.com · 3mo ago

Is your documentation ready for the "Agentic" era? Good docs for humans = good docs for AI. The crew at Developer Relations Patterns discusses why accuracy and markdown are more critical than ever as we move toward Agent Experience (AX). Catch the full episode: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtnN...

A team spent $14,400 on infrastructure to solve a problem that a 4-minute database index fixed. Nobody measured the system before approving the proposal. "This needs to scale" is performance anxiety dressed as engineering. #softwarearchitecture #engineering #systemdesign

What Would Justify This? The Question Teams Never Ask Before Adding Infrastructure

The proposal is for an internal product catalog API. Forty operations staff will use it.

linkedin.com

"We've already invested $1.8 million. We can't walk away." The $1.8M is gone regardless. The only question: will the next $1.8M produce value? Nobody asks. New essay on why teams can't stop investing in what isn't working: simplicityfirstphilosophy.substack.com/p/the-sunk-c...

The Sunk Cost Architecture

Why Teams Can’t Stop Investing in What Isn’t Working

simplicityfirstphilosophy.substack.com

.NET Foundation most active Microsoft projects for April 2026... Azure SDK for .NET led the way in PRs (826) and Roslyn led in Commits (10547) and New Contributors (59). Honorable mention to .NET Runtime and Aspire. Full list: dnfprojects.org/!/Apr-01-202... @dotnetfoundation.org

A service decomposition took 3 months to build. Reversing it will take 9. The asymmetry was never calculated before the decision was made. Reversibility is the most underpriced quality in software. Every one-way door looks like a corridor until you need to go back.

The Architecture of Regret: Why Reversibility Is the Most Underpriced Quality in Software

Every One-Way Door Looks Like a Corridor Until You Need to Go Back

simplicityfirstphilosophy.substack.com

Your engineers keep building infrastructure that already exists. Authentication. Logging. Deployment pipelines. All solved problems. Every custom solution is a solution you maintain forever. Stop reinventing. Focus on what differentiates your business. www.woodruff.dev/the-strategi...

The Strategic Case for “Use What Works”: Why Smart Tech Leaders Stop Reinventing the Wheel - Chris Woody Woodruff | Fractional Architect

A peculiar kind of pride runs through the technology industry. Many leaders believe their problems are unique, their scale unprecedented, their requirements so specific that only a custom-built soluti...

woodruff.dev

I write most of my .NET in Rider, and I'm not switching. But ReSharper for VS Code 1.0 means I can finally pick up VS Code for a C# task without losing 40% of my brain on the way out. Field report from a week of using it: www.woodruff.dev/resharper-ma... #dotnet #csharp

ReSharper Made VS Code a Real Option for My .NET Work - Chris Woody Woodruff | Fractional Architect

Most posts about ReSharper for VS Code want to convert you. This one doesn't. I write most of my .NET in Rider. I'm not moving. What changed for me back in March 2026, when JetBrains shipped the offic...

woodruff.dev

Today (April 23rd), @woodruff.dev and I will be streaming again at 2pm. Today's stream, Woody and I will share our @jetbrains.com Rider IDE setups including configuration and plugins. I hope to see you there! www.youtube.com/@ChrisWoodru...

Chris Woody Woodruff

youtube.com

82% of engineers believe trending tech adoption improves career prospects. Nobody got promoted for recommending a monolith. The bill stays with the organization. The credit travels with the architect. That asymmetry explains your architecture better than any technical analysis.

The Status Architecture: Why Complexity Is the Currency of Technical Prestige and Who Pays the Bill

The Architect Gets the Credit. The On-Call Engineer Gets the 2 A.M. Page.

simplicityfirstphilosophy.substack.com

Your developer community now has members who cannot read your content. AI coding agents integrate with your platform before a human writes a line. When they get it wrong, developers leave. Silently. No ticket. No post. That gap has a name now. Agentic Relations. agenticairelations.com #devrel

@woodruff.dev and I have been live streaming weekdays for the last week at 2pm EST. We thought it would be a cool idea to stream about our @jetbrains.com Rider plugins and setup. This Thursday at 2PM, we will walk through our setups that make our developing or presenting easier. lnkd.in/gb3hAnTY.

Join @woodruff.dev and I in 15 minutes for day 2 of us integrating Squad in the MoreSpeakers.com application. Today, we will be looking into Ripley, our architect, to see what she found in our code base. I wonder if it's Aliens. Live on YouTube → www.youtube.com/@ChrisWoodruff

htmxRazor v2.0.0 is out. VS Code snippets (97), interactive playground, Theme Builder, SignalR connector, and a Kanban board. Targets .NET 10. No breaking changes. 1,838 tests. dotnet add package htmxRazor --version 2.0.1 htmxRazor.com

69% of developers have tenure under 2 years. The engineers who simplified your architecture are already gone. Their successors followed the communication patterns, not the diagram. Conway's Law runs in reverse. The org rebuilds what it needs. simplicityfirstphilosophy.substack.com/p/conways-re...

Conway's Revenge

How Your Org Chart Keeps Writing Code When Nobody Is Watching

simplicityfirstphilosophy.substack.com

Starting April 13th, @woodruff.dev and I are going live every weekday at 2pm EST. We’ll be walking through using Squad by @bradygaster.bsky.social to build out features for MoreSpeakers.com. If you’re into .NET, AI, or dev tooling, come hang out. Live on YouTube → www.youtube.com/@ChrisWoodruff

Our inaugural River City AI & Dev meetup is on April 15 We're demoing Squad, a multi-agent AI framework that deploys a full team of specialists to build in parallel and ship PRs. Live. In the room. 📍 Bamboo Grand Rapids · 6–8:30 PM rivercity-ai.dev #RiverCityAI #AI #SoftwareDevelopment

The next #UnhandledException is now live. I was joined by @woodruff.dev to chat about the power of keeping things simple in software development. unhandledexceptionpodcast.com/posts/0085-s... #dotnet #softwaredev