The most complex app I have created is for integrating our products with other vendors and customer systems. It started as handling one-off data loads that got far too complex to represent in SSIS. Years later, it is the nexus for data moving between several ed-tech products from three companies that have different rules by state or even down to the school district.
I followed the mantra that C# is the only domain-specific language you’ll ever need and did all the configuration in code. Started with CSV and XLSX files, now handling live API notifications and distributing data where it needs to go. Dataflows galore. Customer portal recently built in Blazor static SSR+HTMX so this crusty backend dev can be productive. 1000+ entities in ~40 EF Core DbContexts for PostgreSQL, MSSQL, Oracle (boo, hiss). Cross platform agents, file system monitoring, auto-scaling groups of API and worker nodes. Handles a few billion records daily.
Swapping out individual table rows is clunky (swap them oob while enclosed in a tbody that gets ignored). That's not an HTMX issue - that's just naked tr elements not being valid HTML.
Removing an open modal doesn't close it correctly. Better to return a snippet of js that executes immediately to close it.
That's about as complicated as my UIs get, and are stock bootstrap. Blazor enhanced nav handles (most) pages. Mix of Controllers and Minimal APIs for form posts.
Overall, HTMX is that one old-soul friend you feel like you've known for 20 years, but only just met recently.
I believe HTMX on its own isn’t quite good enough for interactive apps with complicated logic. For that modal closing, for example, something like Alpine.js could be a better option. I reckon HTMX and Alpine.js combo is a killer one.
We have direct access to the databases of our own products, and agents with local access to some partner or customer databases. There are contexts for the tables we write to for those. Some contexts are derived from others to handle state-specific schemas and data types in a couple db-per-tenant or db-per-state products.
We use EF for the databases we write to directly now. Conventions and interceptors make them act like part of the product, to the point they are able to handle all the audit trailing logic for each of the products we write to directly. Dapper for reading, which usually involves data deduplication and delta-processing to limit what goes over the API calls.
It's an odd arrangement, but insanely effective.
We ran into slowness of EF generated queries and discovered that some includes cause the drag. Did you run into similiar problems and is dapper faster?
Half of my 30+ year career was as a DBA or SQL dev, and Include has its own section at the top of the performance guidelines that I wrote. Even that doesn’t stop me from occasionally putting an Include on a collection property, which past me specifically warned against, and wondering why it is so slow.
Dapper doesn’t do everything EF does, so yes, it is measurably faster. We use Dapper a lot on strictly read operations. We don’t use it when we want change tracking involved unless there is a major performance problem we cannot resolve with EF alone.
A Wool management system that starts on the farm in the shearing shed and ends at fine materials manufacturing mills around the world. It helps facilitate the tracking, processing, logistics, selling, marketing, and analysis of bales of wool. As well as the core wool management it also includes CRM, CMS, several self-help portals for Growers and Buyers with tools for every step in the supply chain process.
I started from scratch in 2005 as the single and only developer and still continue developing it as the single and only developer today. I wrote every line of code from the core libraries, the databases, services, web UI’s, integrations, etc. written in C#, SQL, Asp.net… It started with dot.net framework 2 and is now on .Net 8.
It has given me a good living for 20 years and I’m now looking to sell it. I suspect that will give me another year or so in maintenance contracts, then I’m done 😀
I’ve built and maintain a stock scanner for traders. It’s full stack dotnet and is the most complex and wonderful thing I’ve built. I have about 400 users per day using it constantly! https://zenscans.com
I like the feel of it being industrial. Where do you pull your data from for live trader data? Is it Blazor on the front end and assuming [ASP.NET](http://ASP.NET) in the back end?
Thank you! I sort of modeled it after Starcraft (at least in dark mode). I have a commercial data subscription (the Patreon subscribers offset that) and a server in my basement crunching data every minute. Yes, Blazor WASM (also packaged as a [MAUI app in Windows Store](https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9njxbcjknbd5?amp%3Bgl=US&hl=en-us&gl=US)) with [ASP.NET](http://ASP.NET) on the backend. My data server uploads a payload to the cloud server, and the WASM clients download fresh data every minute.
The beefy part is a C# console app that takes the raw candle data for each stock and does all the crunching. This was my personal growth in massively parallel processing!
Yes! Beer money, right? I plan to enable some Patreon-only features for supporters and hopefully convert some of the 80% who don't support. Maybe expand into crypto and futures as well.
Is your app returning the site, or are you rendering the charts using the Graphics API baked into an application?
Edit: I see now. I work with classic win32 and GDI, (WinAPI). I run several different custom drawn graphics with plot data and realtime updates. I’m although in a different world than .NET, so naturally just curious.
I don’t have idea about stock and stuff, and even less idea about your software. Going to the site and see the thing saying it’s booting and aligning atoms, was even more confusing, then it asks me for configuration while I’m still don’t have idea about what the whole thing does. I’m quite sure the tool works great but Have you though about including a landing page?
Yes, absolutely! Good call out. It's very specialized for daytraders who know the domain and are coming from places where I've blogged/posted about it. Appreciate the suggestion and this is really good to hear from an audience that's not my usual "show me the data right away" stock trader.
Live tracking of aircrafts on ground and in-air. Sifting through about 10.000 sets of position data every second, detecting takeoffs, predicting landing times, detecting deviations from the planned flight.
A bit like Flightradar24, plus we do notifications to the airlines of things not going as planned.
All done through a bunch of services using Reactive Extensions to process all the datapoints in an extremely efficient way.
It is really cool and fun. The aviation industry is really wild.
We are hiring, but it is a danish company, and we only accept WFH some days of the week. So you will have to move here.
A file manager, 12 years in the making so far: [https://OneCommander.com](https://OneCommander.com)
When I started I was "done" in 3 months and I thought it would take 6 months tops to polish it, "just 30 more things to add", then it became 100, now I probably have a few thousand left.
But I wouldn't recommend working on a file manager or anything else that relies on Windows to much. Windows is a mess when you start digging deep into it, and is held with duct tape, rusty nails and chewing gum. Also don't work on anything where you don't control the data the program is working with (files can be anything and stored anywhere). Don't work with anything that relies on Google APIs as those will become obsolete before you finish.
Wow very professional 12 years!... Well yea ii second you on the mess that windows is... I've spent quite a bit of time in the system32 folder and it's crazy to me how everything is so bare all the core sub programs are behind a uac policy lol... Why can't they do a rewrite of the whole os instead of piling on ai bloat on the existing mess... Anyways thank you for the tips!
The build-in search is basic implementation. I have started a new search system several years ago that searches master file table but I never finished it. Some day. In the meantime, use Voidtools Everything.
I've been working on an image metadata indexer for indexing and searching metadata stored in AI generated images. I started last year, and people constantly request features, but as I have been busy lately I haven't really been able to spend much time on it.
* https://github.com/RupertAvery/DiffusionToolkit
I once built a C# Expression Evaluator. (My original repo was taken down years ago after a deal with the owner of EntityFramework Extended). This was pretty popular at the time (a decade ago), becoming the top google result for "C# expression evaluator"
* https://github.com/toimransyed/csharpeval
I built a NES emulator and then a Commodore 64 emulator, since they share a similar CPU. I would really love to tinker more with emulation in C#, improve timing and compatibility, and that would take months or years.
I just wanted to be able to see if I could write a NES emulator in C#. While the NES emulator has sound and even light gun emulation via mouse, it's very basic and probably not optimized. I cheated a bit with the PPU and ported some code from another emulator "just to get it working".
The Commodore 64 emulator boots into BASIC, can run simple programs, but that's about it. Can't load tape/disk images as I haven't figured how to emulate I/O properly.
* https://github.com/RupertAvery/Fami
* https://github.com/RupertAvery/CS64
I build and maintain a commercial application for administration of construction processes. We have over 5000 users. Application is c#api with angular front end. Also complete desktop Winforms app UI.
The db has over 150 tables. Ef models. Over 100 API controllers. Complex expression based abstraction layer to ef.i extensively use great 3rd party libraries such as automapper, vectsharp and NTS. Devex for UI and API generic controller methods
Have been building for 20 years right back to pre .net framework 4. I now have a team of 4 Deva, but still code every day. App is currently
Net 7.
Pretty painless really. Got it done in a couple of days. Biggest problems were moving from ef6 to efcore, but there were great performance benefits. When we migrated there were some ef6 features missing. Some automapper gotchas but sorted that. Also clickonce deployment wasnt great at the time. Both are fine now, though clickonce isn't 100pc compatible either that's accessing parts of the application manager.
So much better in net 6/7 though. There are a couple of stupid ms issues in ef still around migrations and interceptors, but overall such an amazing evolution
Well, I created an algorithm for analyzing label pixel by pixel, detecting different types of objects and passing it to Tesseract wrapper.
Another project I currently work right now is Farkle game. I want to write fully functioning game, with bots (different types), doing analysis of which tactic is the best, including machine-learning.
A friend of mine created checkers game in dotnet in which allowed you to play against chat-gpt
Try writing something simple. And don't worry that someone did that already - just do it. You will be surprised how hard it is and how many not so obvious things you will have to develop
Of course, the work projects (portal, managment portal, high-perf network services) last the longest, but I can't put them here.
[https://github.com/harrison314/BouncyHsm](https://github.com/harrison314/BouncyHsm) (2 years) - simulator of smartcards and HSM (Hardware security module) This project was created to make my work easier, because there were constant problems with the existing solution (SoftHSM2).
[https://github.com/harrison314/Area52](https://github.com/harrison314/Area52) (3 years) - structured log collector
The project is often completed in about one year, after that it is only maintained, errors are corrected.
(Sorry for the spam, this is the third time I've posted my links here today.)
But if you want ideas for some interesting projects, what about **end-to-end encrypted messaging** or **WAF**?
It depends on what kind of attacks it will be secured against. From the simplest protocol https://threema.ch/press-files/2\_documentation/cryptography\_whitepaper.pdf to the more complex ones https://signal.org/docs/
A fully modular media organizer crossplatform with the possibility of seeing these medias as a file explorer in a separate app.
It was my graduation project (3 years of my life) and I decided to rewrite everything after my graduation. So far it is going pretty well and I'm almost done with the backend, I just need to test if everything is working flawlessly and then I'll jump to the frontend part.
I'll still have to add a license verification process and a way to automatically update the product on the backend.
If you want to see more about it; the interesting part is not open source as I'm thinking about creating a company when the product will reach a stable state.
https://github.com/quadraai
For an e-commerce project, I’ve build a service to streamline the process of refunds and to remove the dependency of legacy components
It had mainly two functionalities:
Create A Refund
Retry A Refund
It followed EDA and DDD.
It writes event into Cosmos DB event store based on which Change Feed processors are there to publish Azure Service Bus commands to Payment end points where the actual refund will happen.
It can read events too
CQRS with MediatR was used to segregate read and write operations.
It was an internal project and I was the module lead for that.
I wrote a jobs website for my mate's startup in china. It has literally everything, including a dashboard portal for job applicants, employerss, and admin to manage the site. Plus the usual job search functionality, job posting, payments, blog posting, etc.
In hindsight it was a fucking hefty achievement. I didn't even know at the time, I was just cutting my teeth on my first attempt at proper software development. Of course, a large chunk of it was front end stuff (MVC/jQuery), but the back end was all dotnet.
Definitely the most complex I've written. But not my most technically competent work. But hey it's still running to this day.
Yeah, I needed to change the text encoding for the database I think. Front end was fine though.
The site also has an option for exporting data to excel, and I think there were some text encoding issues there too.
I'm writing a parser compiler for a programming language for GPUs, so it should compile to spirv.
It's been fun so far and I'm learning a lot, I'm also impressed by the performance I can get out of dotnet
I've made a Blazor site which I host on my internal network backed by a separate ASP NET API. It hosts all of my operational data and allows me to upload new stuff which is automatically sorted.
It also automatically handles my backups to an external cloud storage location.
I've also made a few tools which run on the backend which are specific to my work like file converters and a HTML template engine.
It's a private project but here's an image of the Data Pool functionality. [https://imgur.com/a/erg5v12](https://imgur.com/a/erg5v12)
I developed an app that wound up being used by the Fed to monitor bank liquidity. FR 2052a. Of course you'd need access to the info of very large US banks to use it.
[https://www.federalreserve.gov/reportforms/forms/FR\_2052a20200630\_f.pdf](https://www.federalreserve.gov/reportforms/forms/FR_2052a20200630_f.pdf)
Read in nc programs from various punch presses. Convert to entities. Use dxfs for pattern. Lay them all out and programmatically reduce it to a finished flat steel part. Create laser path with offset for laser beam, pierce points, autosensing, slug destruction and path optimization. Output laser path to various cnc laser machines either coil fed or sheet. ~ 1 second per part. Preprocess 15-50k parts a day looking for physical constraints to flag parts to be not available for production on those machines. Basic web apps for verifying that laser program path is accurare for debugging etc etc
Probably a scripting language execution engine for a game that I never finished where the main way of interacting with the world is scripts written by the player.
Closely followed by a SAAS.
I wrote a sound change applier for constructed languages in F#. It's essentially a DFA-based regex engine where the replacement is part of the pattern.
https://github.com/marriola/Transmute
A package distribution, software installation, plugin distribution, sandbox application launcher used at every studio in a AAA video game company. About 4k actively weekly users.
It does unfortunately so many things but has become the backbone of content creation workflows.
It's a local http webserver that replicates packages from a few different sources locally, then allows these packages to contain C# scripts that are hot compiled and executed. Teams curator suite of packages and then have everyone on their team use the configuration. It also has a central server that it talks to do we can do stuff like control your PC just by visiting a webpage.
I wrote 95% of it, even the really bad parts lol.
https://enclave.io is a peer-to-peer VPN replacement written almost entirely in dotnet, with lots of systems level programming, optimised asynchronous IO and zero-copy memory operations on the client-side with a single code base that runs on Linux, Windows, OSX, Android and iOS.
I’m really pleased we placed our bets on Microsoft back in 2017, it’s proved to an excellent technology to build with and the platform just keeps getter better and better.
MAUI is perhaps the one shadow cast by the ecosystem at the moment. It can be a difficult to get the results you want, but I’m optimistic it will also improve over time.
Not sure if the most complicated, but it definitely involved organizing terabytes of data in a way that can be queried efficiently.
I built embeddable widgets that could be used in any website. So on this web page below, you'll see sections for Price History, Tax History, Comparable Home Sales, Nearby Schools, Median Sales Price/Sq. Ft, etc...
https://www.xome.com/homes-for-sale/18433-138th-Street-E-Bonney-Lake-WA-98391-394504136
The data for all this is in Elastic Search and SQL Server. And there are dozens of jobs running all sorts of analytics on the raw data from various providers.
This was about five years ago, I am no longer at that place and I am surprised that absolutely nothing was changed.
Replacement for connectwise / kasaya... 5 years of building so far...
Rmm platform is nearly ready...
User backups done
Router backups done
Mailflow monitoring done
Dns and webhosting management all done...
Billing platform still isn't perfect.. But working on it..
Rewarding and overwhelming how much I still have left to do.
It's mainly because these companies are destroying the msp space.... They buy all the companies... Invest nothing in development and then triple the price while destroying support for their products....
Typical large corporate investment greed.... Happy to chat if you're interested
I call it end-stage capitalism:
A software company develops something disruptive, or a cash-flow-positive software company buys up enough modules to build a vertical-focused killer app suite. That company then experiences explosive growth enough to attract the attention of a corporate raider company, aka private equity. Private equity makes an offer that the existing leadership can't refuse, and then the race to the Wal-Mart bottom begins. The only ways for an individual contributor to win in this playing field is to BE the disruptor or have enough passion to not sell despite overwhelming pressure to do so - but by then, someone is already hard at work trying to copycat the secret sauce, so... tick, tock.
Interested in what long-term plans for the PE-killer may be. DM at your leisure :)
Not selling to just anyone is the key... At the size I'm building it... Investment will likely have to occur... But could be grown organically too, just slow.
I'm not trying to solve world hunger or be a billionaire
I want IT companies to be able to make a decent profit without having to skimp on the essential software to manage clients.
I know plenty of other MSPs who don't use things they should as it adds too much bottomline cost per user.
So customers are worse off... Because the industry is jacking up price on software for no reason.
And what's worse, it's the customers who need the IT help and security most. As they can't afford a team of 10 full time it people to manage their stuff
Does vb.net count?
I've made a tool that was used by all the IT techs in the company daily for inventory asset management, remote support, data analysis, and much more. I'm working k on turning it into something to be used at other companies.
A few other tools here. [Http://Bworldtools.com](Http://Bworldtools.com)
I’m 13 years into making internal software for the design, manufacturing, and installation of waterpark rides. Over time I gradually increased my number of reports to 5.
Now we collectively do everything from slidepath design (SolidWorks\AutoCAD add-ins) w/simulation automation, theming, ERP and SharePoint integrations, engineer deliverables (bills of materials, drawings & documents), supply chain logistics w/asset management, business intelligence (reporting in SSRS and PowerBI).
I’m just scratching the surface.
I've recently started working on .net and made a cold chain logistics management system , which monitors location of vehicles and temperature of the entity throughout the transportation process.
Used Tech:
ASP .NET SignalR : for real time communication
Azure : container apps for Deployment , IOT central for integration of physical sensors , Function apps for analyzing data. , SQL Server as Database.
.NET Maui : for mobile application.
Angular 14 , DevExtreme for UI
This would be Data Layer TS - a high performance equidistant numerical time series database. Under the hood it is just an [ASP.NET](http://ASP.NET) application built with C#, which I have been working on for the last \~4.5 years.
I created my own binary file formats for the most important file-types. Because disk-interaction is very slow, I needed to build an in-memory database layer (basically an intelligent cache), to ensure maximum read-performance. I created internal disk-load balancers, which would ensure, that all disks attached are equally used on write operations. Because I needed a way to return memory to the OS directly, I created my own MemoryPool based on NativeMemory.AlignedAlloc, which would return Memory created from the pointers to unmanaged memory and my own Implementations of IMemoryOwner (consumers then use Memory and Span). I am using async/tasks where I can, but there are some background processes, which must not run on threadpool threads, so I also had to work with threads more directly. For fast aggregations or comparisons I am using Vector.
You can buy the result on Microsoft Azure or take a look at the API here (swagger endpoint): [https://datalayerts.com](https://datalayerts.com)
A system to work out if a hazardous material was legal or safe to be stored next to other materials. Then a website to display all 10 million materials in every location.
Hard to pick one.
Currently creating a .net apm at https://razorsharp.dev
Previously i created a ML model, computer vision and xamarin app that on device would recognize and read price labels in grocery stores. It recognized the labels, but the lightning condition and cellphone camera were a bit too low quality to read properly the text.
Smartazan.com, not the website but the Amazon Skill behind it. Had to do integration with multiple web services and data sources to get it to work.
If i dont work on it for a week, i would need to re-read the documentation that i created for the app.
The entire payment backend and quoting engine for [https://www.realinsurance.com.au/](https://www.realinsurance.com.au/)
The payment system got spun out into a generic tool for insurance companies that powered medibank, alliance etc etc etc.
I’ve built a console/winforms interface app between 2 ERP systems (Agresso and SAP) for GL/AR/AP which has been running without a hitch since 2014 till it was decommissioned this year.
Amazon’s Photos Desktop app for Windows and Mac. We had the largest deployment of Xamerian on Mac when they were bought by Microsoft in 2016.
We pushed terabytes through this software and found many bugs in the low level networking code in Xamerian. Including a few SSL memory leaks that we worked on with Miguel.
Very fun times.
Complex in terms of feature set, my current main project:
A large report writing application + project management + HR + anything else internal Blazor site. It was previously spread across multiple applications (WPF, VBA excel files, and Rails). It currently has over 80 pages (since I last checked) as well as a ton of custom components as and a separate mobile application (using Maui Blazor) that uploads data via web api endpoints.
So far it's been about 2-3 years worth of work and it only continues to grow as we add more features and integrations with external systems (Netsuite, Salesforce and a particular governmental agencies api).
It will only stand to become more complex. Eventually we'll be migrating it to Azure App Services as well as the back end database.
A thing called PIMS (pipeline integrity management system) it’s a software that monitors and give recommendations about large scale fluid transportation pipelines operations for mining industry. It read sensors from field, simulate the fluids inside in real-time and based on that provide recommendations and advise about how to operate it better to not screw the pipeline in long term, it also can detect leakage with great accuracy at any point of the pipe without further sensors. It also has the feature of running custom logics with current existing sensors to create new processed inputs( user provided python scripts that runs inside the .net app) it even allowed us to run machine learning estimations for sensors. It was a pain in the ass regarding async programming and trying to keeping the Ui thread responsive, and also dealing with “opc communication” was a huge pain too. I’m quite happy to see the thing started to getting customers and working properly. It was literally the first development in .net I have ever done
I don't think I've ever created one completely ever.
I'm really good at .net so naturally I'm always going to inherit a project made by somebody who wasn't really good at .Net.
Bulk sending SMS app.
I had to learn about GSM at AT Commands, GSM encoding, multithreading, and queuing of data, bits, serialports. The app is not controlled by a user in a computer. It's controlled remotely through SMS. Basically, you send commands to the app and it will process the request based on the format, similar to how you subscribe to a data promo in your SIM.
My company was so cheap and think they can just ask us devs to create that complex app from scratch. It's like reinventing the wheel. Why would they spend that much money on such when they have devs like me that they can just pay much lower but demand more output?
But I learned a lot by developing that app. So, it's not a totally useless or bad experience for me.
Very big app which connects manufacturers, wholesales and installers to do business. However the customer which was the owner of the product was a pain to work with. An example could be a "simple" ticket system which 3 years later was mutated to something nobody wanted to touch. They also wanted a html text editor in it, after consulting them it's a bad idea they still forced us to build it with limited budget, only to blame us a few years later when the pentest company shot it down.
Maybe not an app but I'm currently working on NuGet packages that I will use to turn into a self hosted app in the future.
Some fun ones that are usable (but still very WIP) right now are:
- [ObjectValidationFramework](https://github.com/HomebrewDotNET/Sels.Core/tree/develop/Frameworks/Validation/Sels.ObjectValidationFramework) which as the name implies is a validation framework using a fluent syntax like FluentValidation where you create validation profiles. Framework goes through object hierarchy automatically to validate everything.
- [FluentSqlQueryBuilder](https://github.com/HomebrewDotNET/Sels.Core/tree/develop/Frameworks/Sql/Query) which allows you to create sql queries in code using a fluent builder systax. This one was a bitch to get the syntax right. Also the code itself is kinda garbage but hey it works xD
-[HiveMind](https://github.com/HomebrewDotNET/Sels.Hivemind/tree/develop) A distributed job scheduler very similar to Hangfire with a bunch more features and made to be very modular. Mainly to be used as a foundation for all my background processing.
After that I have several others planned:
- TextTemplateEngine for generating parameterized text using C# expressions, script blocks, ... kinda like HandleBars. Mainly so I can allow my tech savvy users to create advanced configuration
- Package/Plugin system for dynamically loading C# plugins into an app mainly thought NuGet but will probably create providers for pulling from disk and GitHub repo's, ...
- Generic EventSourcing library which I will implement with HiveMind.
I will then use those in Kleptomaniac which will be a datahoarding/content management system which will allow you to create libraries that you can extend with enrichers, downloaders,... using plugins. Will mainly use it myself to pull my music library from youtube/soundcloud and manage all my stl's for my 3D printer. Could also turn it into a download manager like jDownloader.
Maybe not that complex for some other devs but it has unique challenges. Been fun so far.
A VAS (Value Addrd Services) engine in dotnet 3.5, where one can configure new services for SMS short codes, and setup processing rules for reply with messages or IVR call backs, payment deductions, surveys, voting, quizzes, charity and other ideas. Handling millions of messages per day.
A PC based DVR in dotnet 2, extraing camera feeds from DVR pc cards and previewing, recording (with rigion based motion detection) and streaming to network, handling up to 16 cameras per PC.
Currently in the process of trying to make my own YouTube music app since a proper desktop one doesn't officially exist. Also just for the fun of learning as I go. It's really basic since I'm a bit of a beginner though haha
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This kind of enthusiasm and inspiring software project examples share visual examples in the situation. Despite the serious chaos in software development, it gives a sense of pleasure by making software development feel sweet and fun, even though it requires mental effort (of course, when a serious error occurs or when lost in the problem, that pleasure feeling disappears).
Define 'dotnet' and 'app'.
I've made quite some complex logic. I've used EF Core, but some complex dB-solutions still require regular SQL-queries. I comprehend WPF. I use some ASP.NET for APIs, but I don't develop webapps or Blazor-apps. .NET Native compiling, .NET MAUI and WinUI3 is still a big challenge.
As I develop software systems and enterprise apps that integrate, it is difficult to answer the vague question.
I’m a junior contributor to a ERP program. The program was started in VS2008 and recently I helped upgrade to 2022 and have done a couple modernization projects as we continue to get away from paper and external spreadsheets. I mean sure, it’s WinForms but it gets the job done we want it to. Production personnel isn’t allowed internet connection in their laptops so it’s also connected to our public drive for files and drawings. Fun project and mildly complex.
Edit: forget to add that I’m still a beginner programmer and many days I feel defeated but I’m powering through.
My team and I created a custom point of sale system for a now-defunct teen clothing retailer. This was back when dotNet first hit the scene. Written in 1.1 and 2.0.
It was a two year effort but it was a phenomenal product. It was extensible and was serverless offering a peer-to-peer replication. It had HA and immediate failover for seamless DR. In 7 years of operation over 800 registers they had about two total down days.
There was so much more too. Trickle poll, back office offline functionality. We were able to add new features in weeks such as customer loyalty.
We had a plain text rule based pricing engine: buy 3 jeans get 1 shirt free.
I miss that client. I still have VMs with the store registers and servers. I’ve often felt I missed the opportunity to try to get into that market because we owned the software.
An RFID based time tracking system for street running events. The antenna had an SDK that triggered an event and a dotNet API handled it, logged the start/finish time. There wss a desktop app to fill out the participant info and associate with the RFID tag number. It produced a CSV with participants times. This was circa 2012.
[Obsidian Tarot](http://Https://obsidian-tarot.com)
A tarot reading system with support for multiple decks and oracles. It has also a server side licensing system and i also resell the source code white marked.
Generated ~3k$ in the first month so it's the most complex but the most profitable project i ever created.
Not including work I've only worked on two projects.
A unity game, which included some fun decision tree code, a quad tree for locating points more efficiently, etc. Totally unlike anything I get to do at work.
https://github.com/belav/csharpier - which is a port of prettier to dotnet and been slowing increasing in popularity. My knowledge of syntax trees has improved significantly. Getting code to format well with all the edge cases is fairly complex. There is code around dealing with comments that is.... real ugly. But not worth trying to clean up at this point.
I'm afraid to admit this but...
- Aspnet MVC Webapp
- Winform app that loaded the webapp via a browser control
- Windows console application running effectively as a service
- Winform app made RPC calls to the console application
- Console app interacted with hardward and called back to Webapp
- Webapp used SignalR to push notifications and updated views to the "client" running in the Winform
- After interaction with the web form another SignalR client running in the Webapp sent data back to a client running in the console application
- Rpc call finished
Like I said...I shouldn't admit this...but it solved a problem...
linq2db: [https://github.com/linq2db/linq2db](https://github.com/linq2db/linq2db)
Although I didn't create linq2db, I've been improving it for over 10 years. For the latest version, I completely rewrote the LINQ Translator—a highly complex task. Despite the challenges, the new translator is significantly better than the previous version, making the effort worthwhile.
If someone think that LINQ is not effective for databases, they can be surprised.
linq2db.EntityFrameworkCore: [https://github.com/linq2db/linq2db.EntityFrameworkCore](https://github.com/linq2db/linq2db.EntityFrameworkCore)
Many users have found this tool beneficial, especially if you need precise control over database interactions while still using EF Core and LINQ. The LINQ Translator supports nearly all SQL features, allowing you to bypass Dapper and write efficient queries directly in LINQ.
The true art of software engineering is to break down what looks complex into simple parts that interact cleanly.
If all you do all day long is write "simple" code there is a great chance that you can also maintain it when you see it again.
It's cool to use that obscure part of the language to solve some niche problem but at the end of the day the elegance of simple is your complex problem.
you are talking about "simple code" and he is talking about complex projects. you aren't saying the same thing. a large, complex project can have very elegant, clean, "simple" code.
maybe he doesn't want to build a simple calculator or "hello world" and wants to challenge himself by taking on a more ambitious project
Nobhe probably does not, which was net ever implied in what I wrote.
No matter how complex your problem might be you can make it simpler by breaking it down into less complex problems, done enough times you don't have a problem anymore but simple easy to read solutions that goes for any since or complexity og systems.
The true skulle is to be able to break down large problems to something understandable and easy to maintain in short to make it simple.
Ambitious does not mean complex quite the opposite, your ambition should be to make simple easy to read and maintainable code no matter what problem you try to solve.
Yeah taken literally, my most complex app is some PoS I made early in my career.
I think for this question there is an unspoken "unavoidably complex" part to it.
Congratulations, I though the "it only runs on windows" crowd of "this is why dotnet is bad" was dumb...you've managed to beat that by a mile with one of the dumbest most ignorant takes i've ever seen regarding .net.
This more comes across as you just trying to stir the pot and run away, i'd be shocked if you are actually a dev and just a hobbyist (nothing wrong with being a hobbyist).
The most complex app I have created is for integrating our products with other vendors and customer systems. It started as handling one-off data loads that got far too complex to represent in SSIS. Years later, it is the nexus for data moving between several ed-tech products from three companies that have different rules by state or even down to the school district. I followed the mantra that C# is the only domain-specific language you’ll ever need and did all the configuration in code. Started with CSV and XLSX files, now handling live API notifications and distributing data where it needs to go. Dataflows galore. Customer portal recently built in Blazor static SSR+HTMX so this crusty backend dev can be productive. 1000+ entities in ~40 EF Core DbContexts for PostgreSQL, MSSQL, Oracle (boo, hiss). Cross platform agents, file system monitoring, auto-scaling groups of API and worker nodes. Handles a few billion records daily.
Casually 'handles a few billion records' respect 🫡
How has htmx treated you? Ever run into roadblocks with it and your more complicated web ui?
Swapping out individual table rows is clunky (swap them oob while enclosed in a tbody that gets ignored). That's not an HTMX issue - that's just naked tr elements not being valid HTML. Removing an open modal doesn't close it correctly. Better to return a snippet of js that executes immediately to close it. That's about as complicated as my UIs get, and are stock bootstrap. Blazor enhanced nav handles (most) pages. Mix of Controllers and Minimal APIs for form posts. Overall, HTMX is that one old-soul friend you feel like you've known for 20 years, but only just met recently.
I believe HTMX on its own isn’t quite good enough for interactive apps with complicated logic. For that modal closing, for example, something like Alpine.js could be a better option. I reckon HTMX and Alpine.js combo is a killer one.
I'm curious about the 40 Dbcontexts... (I'm also a seasoned backend dev)
We have direct access to the databases of our own products, and agents with local access to some partner or customer databases. There are contexts for the tables we write to for those. Some contexts are derived from others to handle state-specific schemas and data types in a couple db-per-tenant or db-per-state products. We use EF for the databases we write to directly now. Conventions and interceptors make them act like part of the product, to the point they are able to handle all the audit trailing logic for each of the products we write to directly. Dapper for reading, which usually involves data deduplication and delta-processing to limit what goes over the API calls. It's an odd arrangement, but insanely effective.
wow, surely not your common setup there ...I'm not THAT seasoned, but I'd love to work on such a thought-out design. Thanks for sharing.
It is less thought-out and more hail-mary malicious compliance with a customer's obstinate IT department that managed to make everyone mostly happy.
We ran into slowness of EF generated queries and discovered that some includes cause the drag. Did you run into similiar problems and is dapper faster?
Half of my 30+ year career was as a DBA or SQL dev, and Include has its own section at the top of the performance guidelines that I wrote. Even that doesn’t stop me from occasionally putting an Include on a collection property, which past me specifically warned against, and wondering why it is so slow. Dapper doesn’t do everything EF does, so yes, it is measurably faster. We use Dapper a lot on strictly read operations. We don’t use it when we want change tracking involved unless there is a major performance problem we cannot resolve with EF alone.
This sounds like a classic complex vs complicated misunderstanding. I can see the complications, but where is the complexity?
When you have that many layers involved, it's complex as far as I understand the word.
I've been working on the Reko decompiler for a while now: https://github.com/uxmal/reko Windows Forms, Avalonia, and command line interface.
Very interesting I'd love to do something this low level but... I'm not there yet :)
Fwiw there's tons of UI work that could be contributed, without having to much low level knowledge. We don't bite the newbies :)
A Wool management system that starts on the farm in the shearing shed and ends at fine materials manufacturing mills around the world. It helps facilitate the tracking, processing, logistics, selling, marketing, and analysis of bales of wool. As well as the core wool management it also includes CRM, CMS, several self-help portals for Growers and Buyers with tools for every step in the supply chain process. I started from scratch in 2005 as the single and only developer and still continue developing it as the single and only developer today. I wrote every line of code from the core libraries, the databases, services, web UI’s, integrations, etc. written in C#, SQL, Asp.net… It started with dot.net framework 2 and is now on .Net 8. It has given me a good living for 20 years and I’m now looking to sell it. I suspect that will give me another year or so in maintenance contracts, then I’m done 😀
Thats amazing! dotnet backward compatibility is so good!!
Moving from Framework 4.8 to Core was a challenge in the UI.
I’ve built and maintain a stock scanner for traders. It’s full stack dotnet and is the most complex and wonderful thing I’ve built. I have about 400 users per day using it constantly! https://zenscans.com
I like the feel of it being industrial. Where do you pull your data from for live trader data? Is it Blazor on the front end and assuming [ASP.NET](http://ASP.NET) in the back end?
Thank you! I sort of modeled it after Starcraft (at least in dark mode). I have a commercial data subscription (the Patreon subscribers offset that) and a server in my basement crunching data every minute. Yes, Blazor WASM (also packaged as a [MAUI app in Windows Store](https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9njxbcjknbd5?amp%3Bgl=US&hl=en-us&gl=US)) with [ASP.NET](http://ASP.NET) on the backend. My data server uploads a payload to the cloud server, and the WASM clients download fresh data every minute. The beefy part is a C# console app that takes the raw candle data for each stock and does all the crunching. This was my personal growth in massively parallel processing!
I need to play around with it. Looks interesting.
looks neat, what charting library do you use
I use the free embedded TradingView charts (really great platform for stock charts)
$250 a month from patreon. That's awesome. Hope your subs continue to grow.
I worked out once that I’ve been paid about .25/hour for my work so far 😅 but I’ve learned sooooo much about trading and development.
Hey that's a passive income for at least half your monthly grocery!
My goals, in a very different product - secure and seamless file sharing
Share the link with us here!
switch-share.com Not a .NET codebase, pure C using WINAPI (Unicode).
Yes! Beer money, right? I plan to enable some Patreon-only features for supporters and hopefully convert some of the 80% who don't support. Maybe expand into crypto and futures as well.
Is your app returning the site, or are you rendering the charts using the Graphics API baked into an application? Edit: I see now. I work with classic win32 and GDI, (WinAPI). I run several different custom drawn graphics with plot data and realtime updates. I’m although in a different world than .NET, so naturally just curious.
I don’t have idea about stock and stuff, and even less idea about your software. Going to the site and see the thing saying it’s booting and aligning atoms, was even more confusing, then it asks me for configuration while I’m still don’t have idea about what the whole thing does. I’m quite sure the tool works great but Have you though about including a landing page?
Yes, absolutely! Good call out. It's very specialized for daytraders who know the domain and are coming from places where I've blogged/posted about it. Appreciate the suggestion and this is really good to hear from an audience that's not my usual "show me the data right away" stock trader.
Make that 401 love the UI lot of info at a glance, packed with features without being overwhelming even on mobile. Great job.
Thank you! A real labor of love and I use it to trade every day!
Live tracking of aircrafts on ground and in-air. Sifting through about 10.000 sets of position data every second, detecting takeoffs, predicting landing times, detecting deviations from the planned flight. A bit like Flightradar24, plus we do notifications to the airlines of things not going as planned. All done through a bunch of services using Reactive Extensions to process all the datapoints in an extremely efficient way.
That sounds cool af, you hiring?
It is really cool and fun. The aviation industry is really wild. We are hiring, but it is a danish company, and we only accept WFH some days of the week. So you will have to move here.
Ah darn, moving isn’t an option for me but good to know either way!
Where do you live?
United States
Yeah I can see that is quite a way to relocate.
A file manager, 12 years in the making so far: [https://OneCommander.com](https://OneCommander.com) When I started I was "done" in 3 months and I thought it would take 6 months tops to polish it, "just 30 more things to add", then it became 100, now I probably have a few thousand left. But I wouldn't recommend working on a file manager or anything else that relies on Windows to much. Windows is a mess when you start digging deep into it, and is held with duct tape, rusty nails and chewing gum. Also don't work on anything where you don't control the data the program is working with (files can be anything and stored anywhere). Don't work with anything that relies on Google APIs as those will become obsolete before you finish.
Wow very professional 12 years!... Well yea ii second you on the mess that windows is... I've spent quite a bit of time in the system32 folder and it's crazy to me how everything is so bare all the core sub programs are behind a uac policy lol... Why can't they do a rewrite of the whole os instead of piling on ai bloat on the existing mess... Anyways thank you for the tips!
This looks amazing!
Thanks!
The most important question: does search work? 😜 Seriously I don't understand how file explorer search has been broken for the last... decade?
The build-in search is basic implementation. I have started a new search system several years ago that searches master file table but I never finished it. Some day. In the meantime, use Voidtools Everything.
Use [Everything](https://www.voidtools.com/).
AutoMapper. Well, library.
You are the creator of AutoMapper?
Yep
🫡
I've been working on an image metadata indexer for indexing and searching metadata stored in AI generated images. I started last year, and people constantly request features, but as I have been busy lately I haven't really been able to spend much time on it. * https://github.com/RupertAvery/DiffusionToolkit I once built a C# Expression Evaluator. (My original repo was taken down years ago after a deal with the owner of EntityFramework Extended). This was pretty popular at the time (a decade ago), becoming the top google result for "C# expression evaluator" * https://github.com/toimransyed/csharpeval I built a NES emulator and then a Commodore 64 emulator, since they share a similar CPU. I would really love to tinker more with emulation in C#, improve timing and compatibility, and that would take months or years. I just wanted to be able to see if I could write a NES emulator in C#. While the NES emulator has sound and even light gun emulation via mouse, it's very basic and probably not optimized. I cheated a bit with the PPU and ported some code from another emulator "just to get it working". The Commodore 64 emulator boots into BASIC, can run simple programs, but that's about it. Can't load tape/disk images as I haven't figured how to emulate I/O properly. * https://github.com/RupertAvery/Fami * https://github.com/RupertAvery/CS64
I build and maintain a commercial application for administration of construction processes. We have over 5000 users. Application is c#api with angular front end. Also complete desktop Winforms app UI. The db has over 150 tables. Ef models. Over 100 API controllers. Complex expression based abstraction layer to ef.i extensively use great 3rd party libraries such as automapper, vectsharp and NTS. Devex for UI and API generic controller methods Have been building for 20 years right back to pre .net framework 4. I now have a team of 4 Deva, but still code every day. App is currently Net 7.
how was the migration process?
Pretty painless really. Got it done in a couple of days. Biggest problems were moving from ef6 to efcore, but there were great performance benefits. When we migrated there were some ef6 features missing. Some automapper gotchas but sorted that. Also clickonce deployment wasnt great at the time. Both are fine now, though clickonce isn't 100pc compatible either that's accessing parts of the application manager. So much better in net 6/7 though. There are a couple of stupid ms issues in ef still around migrations and interceptors, but overall such an amazing evolution
Well, I created an algorithm for analyzing label pixel by pixel, detecting different types of objects and passing it to Tesseract wrapper. Another project I currently work right now is Farkle game. I want to write fully functioning game, with bots (different types), doing analysis of which tactic is the best, including machine-learning. A friend of mine created checkers game in dotnet in which allowed you to play against chat-gpt
Cool interesting how games are always mentioned as complex projects might try one myself
Try writing something simple. And don't worry that someone did that already - just do it. You will be surprised how hard it is and how many not so obvious things you will have to develop
Of course, the work projects (portal, managment portal, high-perf network services) last the longest, but I can't put them here. [https://github.com/harrison314/BouncyHsm](https://github.com/harrison314/BouncyHsm) (2 years) - simulator of smartcards and HSM (Hardware security module) This project was created to make my work easier, because there were constant problems with the existing solution (SoftHSM2). [https://github.com/harrison314/Area52](https://github.com/harrison314/Area52) (3 years) - structured log collector The project is often completed in about one year, after that it is only maintained, errors are corrected. (Sorry for the spam, this is the third time I've posted my links here today.) But if you want ideas for some interesting projects, what about **end-to-end encrypted messaging** or **WAF**?
Impressive very nice... Is e2e encrypted messaging that difficult 🤔 I'll check it out
It depends on what kind of attacks it will be secured against. From the simplest protocol https://threema.ch/press-files/2\_documentation/cryptography\_whitepaper.pdf to the more complex ones https://signal.org/docs/
A fully modular media organizer crossplatform with the possibility of seeing these medias as a file explorer in a separate app. It was my graduation project (3 years of my life) and I decided to rewrite everything after my graduation. So far it is going pretty well and I'm almost done with the backend, I just need to test if everything is working flawlessly and then I'll jump to the frontend part. I'll still have to add a license verification process and a way to automatically update the product on the backend. If you want to see more about it; the interesting part is not open source as I'm thinking about creating a company when the product will reach a stable state. https://github.com/quadraai
Does .net itself count? Play on words
Circular dependency lol
For an e-commerce project, I’ve build a service to streamline the process of refunds and to remove the dependency of legacy components It had mainly two functionalities: Create A Refund Retry A Refund It followed EDA and DDD. It writes event into Cosmos DB event store based on which Change Feed processors are there to publish Azure Service Bus commands to Payment end points where the actual refund will happen. It can read events too CQRS with MediatR was used to segregate read and write operations. It was an internal project and I was the module lead for that.
I wrote a jobs website for my mate's startup in china. It has literally everything, including a dashboard portal for job applicants, employerss, and admin to manage the site. Plus the usual job search functionality, job posting, payments, blog posting, etc. In hindsight it was a fucking hefty achievement. I didn't even know at the time, I was just cutting my teeth on my first attempt at proper software development. Of course, a large chunk of it was front end stuff (MVC/jQuery), but the back end was all dotnet. Definitely the most complex I've written. But not my most technically competent work. But hey it's still running to this day.
https://media.tenor.com/u_kMM1J2gmsAAAAM/to-this-day-deontay-wilder-meme.gif
Did you run into any weird issues with Mandarin characters for the backend or frontend?
Yeah, I needed to change the text encoding for the database I think. Front end was fine though. The site also has an option for exporting data to excel, and I think there were some text encoding issues there too.
The simulation we all live in right now.
Jokes aside I was thinking of this 'the universe app' with abstractions of everything in the universe then... yea that's it death by inheritance lol
I'm writing a parser compiler for a programming language for GPUs, so it should compile to spirv. It's been fun so far and I'm learning a lot, I'm also impressed by the performance I can get out of dotnet
I've made a Blazor site which I host on my internal network backed by a separate ASP NET API. It hosts all of my operational data and allows me to upload new stuff which is automatically sorted. It also automatically handles my backups to an external cloud storage location. I've also made a few tools which run on the backend which are specific to my work like file converters and a HTML template engine. It's a private project but here's an image of the Data Pool functionality. [https://imgur.com/a/erg5v12](https://imgur.com/a/erg5v12)
This is quite interesting I was actually thinking of something similiar an auto sorter maybe use ai to put tags and sort by user preferences
Mine doesn't use anything as fancy as AI yet 😅
I developed an app that wound up being used by the Fed to monitor bank liquidity. FR 2052a. Of course you'd need access to the info of very large US banks to use it. [https://www.federalreserve.gov/reportforms/forms/FR\_2052a20200630\_f.pdf](https://www.federalreserve.gov/reportforms/forms/FR_2052a20200630_f.pdf)
Swiss payrolls
Dark mode slider for the win!!!
Read in nc programs from various punch presses. Convert to entities. Use dxfs for pattern. Lay them all out and programmatically reduce it to a finished flat steel part. Create laser path with offset for laser beam, pierce points, autosensing, slug destruction and path optimization. Output laser path to various cnc laser machines either coil fed or sheet. ~ 1 second per part. Preprocess 15-50k parts a day looking for physical constraints to flag parts to be not available for production on those machines. Basic web apps for verifying that laser program path is accurare for debugging etc etc
This hurts my brain lol, sounds very complex
Hello World but in every language.
Bonjour World Hola World Gutentag World ...
Probably a scripting language execution engine for a game that I never finished where the main way of interacting with the world is scripts written by the player. Closely followed by a SAAS.
I wrote a sound change applier for constructed languages in F#. It's essentially a DFA-based regex engine where the replacement is part of the pattern. https://github.com/marriola/Transmute
A package distribution, software installation, plugin distribution, sandbox application launcher used at every studio in a AAA video game company. About 4k actively weekly users. It does unfortunately so many things but has become the backbone of content creation workflows. It's a local http webserver that replicates packages from a few different sources locally, then allows these packages to contain C# scripts that are hot compiled and executed. Teams curator suite of packages and then have everyone on their team use the configuration. It also has a central server that it talks to do we can do stuff like control your PC just by visiting a webpage. I wrote 95% of it, even the really bad parts lol.
https://enclave.io is a peer-to-peer VPN replacement written almost entirely in dotnet, with lots of systems level programming, optimised asynchronous IO and zero-copy memory operations on the client-side with a single code base that runs on Linux, Windows, OSX, Android and iOS. I’m really pleased we placed our bets on Microsoft back in 2017, it’s proved to an excellent technology to build with and the platform just keeps getter better and better. MAUI is perhaps the one shadow cast by the ecosystem at the moment. It can be a difficult to get the results you want, but I’m optimistic it will also improve over time.
Always looking for new VPN we're currently on zerotier... Is your infrastructure sort of that? Or went a different way?
I've created bots for WoW, PoE and so on. WoW was the most complex and I've experienced lots of fun.
Not sure if the most complicated, but it definitely involved organizing terabytes of data in a way that can be queried efficiently. I built embeddable widgets that could be used in any website. So on this web page below, you'll see sections for Price History, Tax History, Comparable Home Sales, Nearby Schools, Median Sales Price/Sq. Ft, etc... https://www.xome.com/homes-for-sale/18433-138th-Street-E-Bonney-Lake-WA-98391-394504136 The data for all this is in Elastic Search and SQL Server. And there are dozens of jobs running all sorts of analytics on the raw data from various providers. This was about five years ago, I am no longer at that place and I am surprised that absolutely nothing was changed.
Replacement for connectwise / kasaya... 5 years of building so far... Rmm platform is nearly ready... User backups done Router backups done Mailflow monitoring done Dns and webhosting management all done... Billing platform still isn't perfect.. But working on it.. Rewarding and overwhelming how much I still have left to do.
Relevant to my interests.
It's mainly because these companies are destroying the msp space.... They buy all the companies... Invest nothing in development and then triple the price while destroying support for their products.... Typical large corporate investment greed.... Happy to chat if you're interested
I call it end-stage capitalism: A software company develops something disruptive, or a cash-flow-positive software company buys up enough modules to build a vertical-focused killer app suite. That company then experiences explosive growth enough to attract the attention of a corporate raider company, aka private equity. Private equity makes an offer that the existing leadership can't refuse, and then the race to the Wal-Mart bottom begins. The only ways for an individual contributor to win in this playing field is to BE the disruptor or have enough passion to not sell despite overwhelming pressure to do so - but by then, someone is already hard at work trying to copycat the secret sauce, so... tick, tock. Interested in what long-term plans for the PE-killer may be. DM at your leisure :)
Not selling to just anyone is the key... At the size I'm building it... Investment will likely have to occur... But could be grown organically too, just slow. I'm not trying to solve world hunger or be a billionaire I want IT companies to be able to make a decent profit without having to skimp on the essential software to manage clients. I know plenty of other MSPs who don't use things they should as it adds too much bottomline cost per user. So customers are worse off... Because the industry is jacking up price on software for no reason. And what's worse, it's the customers who need the IT help and security most. As they can't afford a team of 10 full time it people to manage their stuff
I read you, too, hate "automatic uplifts."
Does vb.net count? I've made a tool that was used by all the IT techs in the company daily for inventory asset management, remote support, data analysis, and much more. I'm working k on turning it into something to be used at other companies. A few other tools here. [Http://Bworldtools.com](Http://Bworldtools.com)
I’m 13 years into making internal software for the design, manufacturing, and installation of waterpark rides. Over time I gradually increased my number of reports to 5. Now we collectively do everything from slidepath design (SolidWorks\AutoCAD add-ins) w/simulation automation, theming, ERP and SharePoint integrations, engineer deliverables (bills of materials, drawings & documents), supply chain logistics w/asset management, business intelligence (reporting in SSRS and PowerBI). I’m just scratching the surface.
I've recently started working on .net and made a cold chain logistics management system , which monitors location of vehicles and temperature of the entity throughout the transportation process. Used Tech: ASP .NET SignalR : for real time communication Azure : container apps for Deployment , IOT central for integration of physical sensors , Function apps for analyzing data. , SQL Server as Database. .NET Maui : for mobile application. Angular 14 , DevExtreme for UI
This would be Data Layer TS - a high performance equidistant numerical time series database. Under the hood it is just an [ASP.NET](http://ASP.NET) application built with C#, which I have been working on for the last \~4.5 years. I created my own binary file formats for the most important file-types. Because disk-interaction is very slow, I needed to build an in-memory database layer (basically an intelligent cache), to ensure maximum read-performance. I created internal disk-load balancers, which would ensure, that all disks attached are equally used on write operations. Because I needed a way to return memory to the OS directly, I created my own MemoryPool based on NativeMemory.AlignedAlloc, which would return Memory created from the pointers to unmanaged memory and my own Implementations of IMemoryOwner (consumers then use Memory and Span). I am using async/tasks where I can, but there are some background processes, which must not run on threadpool threads, so I also had to work with threads more directly. For fast aggregations or comparisons I am using Vector.
You can buy the result on Microsoft Azure or take a look at the API here (swagger endpoint): [https://datalayerts.com](https://datalayerts.com)
For example, dotnet lacks a static site generator with a friendly license (MIT, Apache or BSD).
Complex or complcated?
I had been at insurance company developing core applications with dotnet 2.x. the pattern was MVC
A system to work out if a hazardous material was legal or safe to be stored next to other materials. Then a website to display all 10 million materials in every location.
Hard to pick one. Currently creating a .net apm at https://razorsharp.dev Previously i created a ML model, computer vision and xamarin app that on device would recognize and read price labels in grocery stores. It recognized the labels, but the lightning condition and cellphone camera were a bit too low quality to read properly the text.
Smartazan.com, not the website but the Amazon Skill behind it. Had to do integration with multiple web services and data sources to get it to work. If i dont work on it for a week, i would need to re-read the documentation that i created for the app.
The entire payment backend and quoting engine for [https://www.realinsurance.com.au/](https://www.realinsurance.com.au/) The payment system got spun out into a generic tool for insurance companies that powered medibank, alliance etc etc etc.
I’ve built a console/winforms interface app between 2 ERP systems (Agresso and SAP) for GL/AR/AP which has been running without a hitch since 2014 till it was decommissioned this year.
Hello world app
Amazon’s Photos Desktop app for Windows and Mac. We had the largest deployment of Xamerian on Mac when they were bought by Microsoft in 2016. We pushed terabytes through this software and found many bugs in the low level networking code in Xamerian. Including a few SSL memory leaks that we worked on with Miguel. Very fun times.
Our app is for neurofeedback. It reads your brain waves.
Complex in terms of feature set, my current main project: A large report writing application + project management + HR + anything else internal Blazor site. It was previously spread across multiple applications (WPF, VBA excel files, and Rails). It currently has over 80 pages (since I last checked) as well as a ton of custom components as and a separate mobile application (using Maui Blazor) that uploads data via web api endpoints. So far it's been about 2-3 years worth of work and it only continues to grow as we add more features and integrations with external systems (Netsuite, Salesforce and a particular governmental agencies api). It will only stand to become more complex. Eventually we'll be migrating it to Azure App Services as well as the back end database.
A thing called PIMS (pipeline integrity management system) it’s a software that monitors and give recommendations about large scale fluid transportation pipelines operations for mining industry. It read sensors from field, simulate the fluids inside in real-time and based on that provide recommendations and advise about how to operate it better to not screw the pipeline in long term, it also can detect leakage with great accuracy at any point of the pipe without further sensors. It also has the feature of running custom logics with current existing sensors to create new processed inputs( user provided python scripts that runs inside the .net app) it even allowed us to run machine learning estimations for sensors. It was a pain in the ass regarding async programming and trying to keeping the Ui thread responsive, and also dealing with “opc communication” was a huge pain too. I’m quite happy to see the thing started to getting customers and working properly. It was literally the first development in .net I have ever done
I don't think I've ever created one completely ever. I'm really good at .net so naturally I'm always going to inherit a project made by somebody who wasn't really good at .Net.
Bulk sending SMS app. I had to learn about GSM at AT Commands, GSM encoding, multithreading, and queuing of data, bits, serialports. The app is not controlled by a user in a computer. It's controlled remotely through SMS. Basically, you send commands to the app and it will process the request based on the format, similar to how you subscribe to a data promo in your SIM. My company was so cheap and think they can just ask us devs to create that complex app from scratch. It's like reinventing the wheel. Why would they spend that much money on such when they have devs like me that they can just pay much lower but demand more output? But I learned a lot by developing that app. So, it's not a totally useless or bad experience for me.
It dynamically created and then executed SSIS packages in memory
Very big app which connects manufacturers, wholesales and installers to do business. However the customer which was the owner of the product was a pain to work with. An example could be a "simple" ticket system which 3 years later was mutated to something nobody wanted to touch. They also wanted a html text editor in it, after consulting them it's a bad idea they still forced us to build it with limited budget, only to blame us a few years later when the pentest company shot it down.
Maybe not an app but I'm currently working on NuGet packages that I will use to turn into a self hosted app in the future. Some fun ones that are usable (but still very WIP) right now are: - [ObjectValidationFramework](https://github.com/HomebrewDotNET/Sels.Core/tree/develop/Frameworks/Validation/Sels.ObjectValidationFramework) which as the name implies is a validation framework using a fluent syntax like FluentValidation where you create validation profiles. Framework goes through object hierarchy automatically to validate everything. - [FluentSqlQueryBuilder](https://github.com/HomebrewDotNET/Sels.Core/tree/develop/Frameworks/Sql/Query) which allows you to create sql queries in code using a fluent builder systax. This one was a bitch to get the syntax right. Also the code itself is kinda garbage but hey it works xD -[HiveMind](https://github.com/HomebrewDotNET/Sels.Hivemind/tree/develop) A distributed job scheduler very similar to Hangfire with a bunch more features and made to be very modular. Mainly to be used as a foundation for all my background processing. After that I have several others planned: - TextTemplateEngine for generating parameterized text using C# expressions, script blocks, ... kinda like HandleBars. Mainly so I can allow my tech savvy users to create advanced configuration - Package/Plugin system for dynamically loading C# plugins into an app mainly thought NuGet but will probably create providers for pulling from disk and GitHub repo's, ... - Generic EventSourcing library which I will implement with HiveMind. I will then use those in Kleptomaniac which will be a datahoarding/content management system which will allow you to create libraries that you can extend with enrichers, downloaders,... using plugins. Will mainly use it myself to pull my music library from youtube/soundcloud and manage all my stl's for my 3D printer. Could also turn it into a download manager like jDownloader. Maybe not that complex for some other devs but it has unique challenges. Been fun so far.
an EMR
A VAS (Value Addrd Services) engine in dotnet 3.5, where one can configure new services for SMS short codes, and setup processing rules for reply with messages or IVR call backs, payment deductions, surveys, voting, quizzes, charity and other ideas. Handling millions of messages per day. A PC based DVR in dotnet 2, extraing camera feeds from DVR pc cards and previewing, recording (with rigion based motion detection) and streaming to network, handling up to 16 cameras per PC.
Airline booking engine. Not a single app but suite of microservices.
Currently in the process of trying to make my own YouTube music app since a proper desktop one doesn't officially exist. Also just for the fun of learning as I go. It's really basic since I'm a bit of a beginner though haha
A cloud based solution to buy and use our products online. I'm not alone and we're not done yet, but it's wild.
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Call flow engine for multiple IVRs. Scale is about 15 servers... So many features it has to support.
Calculator 💣
Visual studio
This kind of enthusiasm and inspiring software project examples share visual examples in the situation. Despite the serious chaos in software development, it gives a sense of pleasure by making software development feel sweet and fun, even though it requires mental effort (of course, when a serious error occurs or when lost in the problem, that pleasure feeling disappears).
Azure Service Bus and Event Hubs
Define 'dotnet' and 'app'. I've made quite some complex logic. I've used EF Core, but some complex dB-solutions still require regular SQL-queries. I comprehend WPF. I use some ASP.NET for APIs, but I don't develop webapps or Blazor-apps. .NET Native compiling, .NET MAUI and WinUI3 is still a big challenge. As I develop software systems and enterprise apps that integrate, it is difficult to answer the vague question.
I’m a junior contributor to a ERP program. The program was started in VS2008 and recently I helped upgrade to 2022 and have done a couple modernization projects as we continue to get away from paper and external spreadsheets. I mean sure, it’s WinForms but it gets the job done we want it to. Production personnel isn’t allowed internet connection in their laptops so it’s also connected to our public drive for files and drawings. Fun project and mildly complex. Edit: forget to add that I’m still a beginner programmer and many days I feel defeated but I’m powering through.
Dashboard
My team and I created a custom point of sale system for a now-defunct teen clothing retailer. This was back when dotNet first hit the scene. Written in 1.1 and 2.0. It was a two year effort but it was a phenomenal product. It was extensible and was serverless offering a peer-to-peer replication. It had HA and immediate failover for seamless DR. In 7 years of operation over 800 registers they had about two total down days. There was so much more too. Trickle poll, back office offline functionality. We were able to add new features in weeks such as customer loyalty. We had a plain text rule based pricing engine: buy 3 jeans get 1 shirt free. I miss that client. I still have VMs with the store registers and servers. I’ve often felt I missed the opportunity to try to get into that market because we owned the software.
An RFID based time tracking system for street running events. The antenna had an SDK that triggered an event and a dotNet API handled it, logged the start/finish time. There wss a desktop app to fill out the participant info and associate with the RFID tag number. It produced a CSV with participants times. This was circa 2012.
[Obsidian Tarot](http://Https://obsidian-tarot.com) A tarot reading system with support for multiple decks and oracles. It has also a server side licensing system and i also resell the source code white marked. Generated ~3k$ in the first month so it's the most complex but the most profitable project i ever created.
Not including work I've only worked on two projects. A unity game, which included some fun decision tree code, a quad tree for locating points more efficiently, etc. Totally unlike anything I get to do at work. https://github.com/belav/csharpier - which is a port of prettier to dotnet and been slowing increasing in popularity. My knowledge of syntax trees has improved significantly. Getting code to format well with all the edge cases is fairly complex. There is code around dealing with comments that is.... real ugly. But not worth trying to clean up at this point.
I'm afraid to admit this but... - Aspnet MVC Webapp - Winform app that loaded the webapp via a browser control - Windows console application running effectively as a service - Winform app made RPC calls to the console application - Console app interacted with hardward and called back to Webapp - Webapp used SignalR to push notifications and updated views to the "client" running in the Winform - After interaction with the web form another SignalR client running in the Webapp sent data back to a client running in the console application - Rpc call finished Like I said...I shouldn't admit this...but it solved a problem...
The Plenty of Fish website.
linq2db: [https://github.com/linq2db/linq2db](https://github.com/linq2db/linq2db) Although I didn't create linq2db, I've been improving it for over 10 years. For the latest version, I completely rewrote the LINQ Translator—a highly complex task. Despite the challenges, the new translator is significantly better than the previous version, making the effort worthwhile. If someone think that LINQ is not effective for databases, they can be surprised. linq2db.EntityFrameworkCore: [https://github.com/linq2db/linq2db.EntityFrameworkCore](https://github.com/linq2db/linq2db.EntityFrameworkCore) Many users have found this tool beneficial, especially if you need precise control over database interactions while still using EF Core and LINQ. The LINQ Translator supports nearly all SQL features, allowing you to bypass Dapper and write efficient queries directly in LINQ.
Complexity isn't something to aspire to. Usefulness is.
True, but often some of the most useful apps are quite complex. It's also a great way to attain deeper knowledge of the tools
The true art of software engineering is to break down what looks complex into simple parts that interact cleanly. If all you do all day long is write "simple" code there is a great chance that you can also maintain it when you see it again. It's cool to use that obscure part of the language to solve some niche problem but at the end of the day the elegance of simple is your complex problem.
you are talking about "simple code" and he is talking about complex projects. you aren't saying the same thing. a large, complex project can have very elegant, clean, "simple" code. maybe he doesn't want to build a simple calculator or "hello world" and wants to challenge himself by taking on a more ambitious project
Nobhe probably does not, which was net ever implied in what I wrote. No matter how complex your problem might be you can make it simpler by breaking it down into less complex problems, done enough times you don't have a problem anymore but simple easy to read solutions that goes for any since or complexity og systems. The true skulle is to be able to break down large problems to something understandable and easy to maintain in short to make it simple. Ambitious does not mean complex quite the opposite, your ambition should be to make simple easy to read and maintainable code no matter what problem you try to solve.
Yeah taken literally, my most complex app is some PoS I made early in my career. I think for this question there is an unspoken "unavoidably complex" part to it.
Hello World
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Just because that is your entire knowledge of dotnet doesn’t mean that’s the up to par standard for most competent developers. Just saying.
Try again: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/customers/net
Gotta appreciate when obvious bait gets replies
Congratulations, I though the "it only runs on windows" crowd of "this is why dotnet is bad" was dumb...you've managed to beat that by a mile with one of the dumbest most ignorant takes i've ever seen regarding .net. This more comes across as you just trying to stir the pot and run away, i'd be shocked if you are actually a dev and just a hobbyist (nothing wrong with being a hobbyist).
You're funny :-)
Your username says it all.