The .NET ecosystem has grown up. .NET 8 is fast, cross-platform, and genuinely excellent for building high-throughput APIs, background processing systems, and long-lived enterprise applications. Key Brains has been building .NET applications since the framework’s early days. We have maintained codebases that were written badly and codebases that were written well, and we know the difference in terms of what it costs to operate and extend them.
We build REST and GraphQL APIs with ASP.NET Core — versioned, documented with OpenAPI, authenticated with OAuth 2.0 and JWT, and tested with a combination of unit tests, integration tests, and contract tests. Our APIs are designed to be consumed by web applications, mobile applications, and third-party integrations simultaneously, from day one.
Every enterprise application has work that should not happen in the HTTP request cycle — sending emails, processing payments, generating reports, synchronising with external systems. We implement background processing with Hangfire or MassTransit depending on the reliability and ordering requirements, with dead-letter queues, retry policies, and monitoring for every job type.
We use EF Core as our default ORM for .NET applications, with careful attention to the N+1 problem, query performance, and migration management. Our database designs are normalised appropriately, indexed for the actual query patterns of the application, and documented. We have experience with PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and Azure SQL Database as primary data stores.
For complex business domains, we apply domain-driven design principles — bounded contexts, aggregates, domain events, and value objects. This is not a methodology we apply for its own sake. It is an approach we use when the business domain is genuinely complex and when the alternative is a model that becomes unmaintainable as the business rules grow.
We write code for the engineer who will maintain it in three years, who may not be us. Clear naming, consistent patterns, documented architectural decisions, and a test suite that runs in under five minutes. These are not optional extras. They are the definition of a finished project.
Free 30-minute architecture call — no obligation, no sales pitch.