Kalle Marjokorpi

Kalle Marjokorpi

Kalle Marjokorpi

I am a Microsoft-certified Lead Architect, full-stack developer, and blogger. My expertise spans the Microsoft technology stack, including .NET, C#, and Azure.

How to succeed as a Lead Architect? Super powers of informal leaders

TL;DR: Lead Architects often carry the responsibility for technical vision without the formal authority to mandate it. This post explores how to master this "Architect’s Paradox" by using four informal leadership superpowers: Coaching through questions, the See-Hear-Speak framework, building a Personal Board of Advisors, and leveraging

Exploring the capabilities of Azure NAT Gateway

This blog post explores Azure networking, focusing on Azure NAT Gateway and the considerations encountered along the way. In a recent project, it became necessary to integrate an application with an External API. This integration involved whitelisting the source API in the firewall to effectively restrict network access. In the

Enhancing the .NET Aspire Dashboard with Custom HTTP Commands

The .NET Aspire Dashboard is a centralized view into distributed application insights, environment variables, logs, traces, and monitoring capabilities. The .NET Aspire Dashboard isn't just a traditional insights dashboard; it also allows developers to manage applications to some extent. For example, resources can be started and stopped directly

Insights on Application Lifecycle Management - Make it visible and manageable

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is a method for overseeing an application's entire journey from creation to design, development, and retirement. ALM is crucial because each company has applications with different states in their lifecycle. Neglecting to manage technical debt and platform/framework updates can lead to severe problems

Testing the architecture of your distributed .NET Aspire solution

Last year, I read a book called Fundamentals of Software Architecture: An Engineering Approach by Mark Richards and Neal Ford. The book comprehensively covered different architecture patterns, architecture characteristics, soft skills, and practices overall. One very interesting chapter delved into architectural testing, often referred to as fitness functions. Currently, I&

Mastering Diagramming as Code: Essential Mermaid Flowchart Tips and Tricks

I have been using Microsoft Loop for a while now as a note-taking and collaboration tool for work-related things. It's a good tool for collaborating with other people, sharing, co-editing, and it is tightly integrated into the Microsoft ecosystem. In the future, Loop components will be integrated overwhelmingly

Automate the installation of applications using Winget

My current Windows 11 setup on a home PC has become a bit unstable and slow. Originally, I upgraded Windows 10 to 11 immediately when it was available. I think it was four years ago. I handled Windows operating system, files, and programs on a single SSD disk for quite

Researching new hardware for a NAS/home server

This blog post is the documentation of results of my research on acquiring new hardware for a NAS/home server. I'm comparing some potential out-of-the-box NAS devices and DIY (do-it-yourself) solutions. During the research, I explored and read perhaps hundreds of conversation threads and watched a similar number

What are Custom Integrations in .NET Aspire?

In the earlier blog post, I showed how to configure a Curity Identity Server container in a .NET Aspire solution. In this blog post, I'll continue refactoring the Curity configuration to be even more straightforward and reusable. I'll introduce you to the .NET Aspire concept called

Revised .NET Aspire Lessons Learned After One Year

I started to use .NET Aspire when the first preview was launched. I wrote a blog post about my first impressions at the end of 2023. Now, it's good to revisit this and update the lessons learned story. I held a presentation titled "Shift to .NET Aspire