Barret Blake
Architect
Barret has nearly 20 years of professional experience in the Microsoft & web technology stacks, including .NET, SQL Server, Azure, JavaScript, and Power Platform. He is a Microsoft MVP in the Power Automate and .NET areas. He is a blogger, content creator, and an active speaker and volunteer at conferences and user groups across Ohio and the US. He is an advocate for mentorship in the developer community and the need to build up the next generation of developers. When he's not doing all that he enjoys spending his time with family, LEGO, D&D, model railroading, and personal projects.
Posts
November 12, 2026ASP.NET Core 11 adds async validation to DataAnnotations, minimal APIs, and Blazor. Here's how it works, the gotchas to watch for, and how it compares to the …
November 10, 2026EF Core 11 makes many existing queries faster without any code changes, and adds a long list of SQL Server features, from vector and hybrid search to full-text …
November 05, 2026EF Core 11 makes migrations easier for teams: foreign keys without constraints, merge conflicts on diverged migrations, one-step add and apply, and more.
November 03, 2026Beyond union types, C# 15 brings collection expression arguments, extension indexers, labeled break and continue, and a preview of a redesigned unsafe model.
October 30, 2026Use AI coding agents and .NET tools to find and safely remove dead code, unused NuGet packages, stale feature flags, and commented-out code from your codebase.
October 08, 2026Like so many things Aspire, a year makes all the difference, and support for AI coding agents has a whole new approach.
October 06, 2026The Aspire dashboard is great. But sometimes you want your telemetry in a terminal.
October 01, 2026I wrote about the Aspire CLI ten months ago. Here's what changed, and what I got wrong.
September 22, 2026Aspire now deploys to Docker Compose, Kubernetes, AKS, and Azure Container Apps. We look at what each target does today and what's actually usable in …
September 01, 2026For those who haven't kept up on Aspire in 2026, you'll find it has become a whole new beast.
June 30, 2026An MCP server is another delivery mechanism for your team's source of truth. Build one in .NET with tools, resources, and prompts, then test and debug it.
June 23, 2026Why Clean Architecture's explicit boundaries make it the ideal guardrail for keeping AI coding agents consistent and maintainable.