Editor's note
I pulled together a pretty varied mix this time, with no single theme driving the lineup. Debbie O’Brien’s Playwright conversation is a nice practical listen, and the context propagation piece is a strong reminder that observability details matter in distributed systems. The C# 14 and DTO articles round things out with language and design updates that many teams will want to track.
Playwright, mappers, and C# 14
Jasen Fici
December 29, 2025
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Today's Articles
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Jasen's take on today's picks
Playwright - with Debbie O'Brien
Debbie O’Brien’s Playwright chat is a practical reminder that end-to-end testing gets easier when the tooling actually fits how teams ship.
Facet & traditional mappers in 2026
Facet and traditional mappers in 2026 revisits a familiar architecture decision with fresh tradeoffs and fewer assumptions.
Context Propagation in Distributed Applications and Microservices
Context propagation is one of those invisible details that makes distributed tracing and debugging either work beautifully or fail quietly.
C# Channels Explained — From Producer-Consumer Basics to High-Performance .NET Systems
The Channels article does a good job connecting async basics to real backpressure and throughput concerns in busy .NET services.
Implementing Large File Uploads and Downloads in Azure Blob Storage With .NET
Large Azure Blob uploads and downloads is exactly the kind of pragmatic storage guidance people need before file handling gets expensive.
Why We Abandoned Enums for Strings in Our .NET gRPC Service
Choosing strings over enums in gRPC is a useful reminder that protobuf constraints sometimes force design compromises you only discover in production.
How Do C# Records Improve the Design of Data Transfer Objects (DTOs) in .NET Applications?
Records for DTOs remains a solid topic because immutability and value equality still simplify a lot of application code.
Source Control in VS Code now displays Git stashes 📦
Git stashes in VS Code source control is a small but welcome quality-of-life improvement for anyone living in the editor.
Databases Are Not a Religion: Stop Choosing Tech Like a Fanboy
The database rant lands because technology choices often get emotional; the better lesson is still matching the tool to the workload.
Why ASP.NET Core Feels Stable in a Fast-Changing World
ASP.NET Core stability is worth revisiting, especially for teams who value a framework that evolves without constant turbulence.
C# 14: From Helper Classes to First-Class APIs
C# 14 extension members look like a meaningful step toward cleaner APIs and less utility-class noise.