Service
ASP.NET Core development
Business applications and APIs on ASP.NET Core - the kind with real logic behind them, not a brochure with a contact form.
Quoted per project
What this is for
Most websites do not need ASP.NET Core. A five-page site for a local business is better off on something simpler and cheaper, and I will tell you so.
This is for the other kind of project - where the software has to hold rules, state and other people's data. A warehouse that has to know what is on which shelf right now. A dispatch system that talks to four courier APIs that all disagree with each other. A school that needs admissions, staff records and notices in one place. That is where a real backend earns its cost.
What I build with it
- REST APIs that a web front end, a mobile app or another business system can all use, rather than logic locked inside one website.
- Line-of-business applications - inventory, dispatch, admissions, internal admin tools.
- Third-party API integration, which in practice means the error handling around it more than the happy path.
- Authentication and role-based access, including JWT for APIs that a separate front end talks to.
- Background jobs, scheduled imports and report generation.
- Migrations from older .NET Framework or classic ASP.NET MVC applications.
How I build it
Entity Framework Core over SQL Server, with the schema designed around the queries that actually run constantly rather than around a tidy entity diagram. Indexes follow the workload, not the ERD.
Third-party services sit behind an interface each, so a fifth courier or a new payment provider is an addition rather than a rewrite. That single decision is why the Mezzex dispatch platform supports four carriers without becoming a stack of special cases.
Output caching with tags on read-heavy endpoints, and cache eviction tied to the write that invalidates it - so a page is fast without ever being stale.
Structured logging from day one. When four external APIs sit in your request path, "which call failed and with what payload" is a question that gets asked weekly.
Performance is part of the job, not an upsell
I have written publicly about taking an ASP.NET Core API from roughly 900ms to 3ms on ordinary shared hosting. Almost none of that was clever code - it was repeated work being done on every request that only needed doing once.
That work is included in how I build rather than sold back to you later as an optimisation phase.
Work you can go and look at
Questions people actually ask
- Do I need ASP.NET Core, or would something simpler do?
- If your site is pages of information plus a contact form, something simpler is cheaper to build and cheaper to run. ASP.NET Core earns its place when there is real logic to hold - stock, orders, users, records, integrations with other systems. Send me what you are trying to do and I will tell you honestly which side of that line it falls on.
- Can you work on an existing .NET project?
- Yes. Taking over an existing codebase is normal work. The first thing I do is read it and tell you what state it is actually in, before quoting anything - that assessment is free and you keep it either way.
- Where does it get hosted?
- IIS on Windows hosting or a Plesk VPS is the usual answer for smaller projects, Docker or Azure when it needs to scale. I have deployed to all of them and will set it up rather than handing you a zip and wishing you luck.
- Will I be locked in to you afterwards?
- No. You get the source code, the database schema and deployment notes. I write the kind of code another developer can pick up, because being the only person who understands it is not a business model I want.