In this episode, we catch up with Damian Edwards at Microsoft Build! We talk about his journey from launching SignalR to shaping .NET Aspire, how performance became a core .NET culture shift, and what it's like being in the room for some of the biggest moments in .NET history. He shares behind-the-scenes stories from the early days of ASP.NET, how Aspire is simplifying cloud-native dev, and even gives us his thoughts on lightsabers, Blazor, and Blu-rays. It's a deep dive into code, performance, and a galaxy not so far away.
Guest:
🎤 Damian Edwards – Principal Architect for .NET at Microsoft
Topics Discussed:
How SignalR started as a moonlighting project
The evolution of .NET performance culture
What makes Aspire a game-changer for cloud-native apps
Lessons learned from building Blazor and Razor
Scaling real-time systems (and yes, Halo used SignalR)
How Aspire smooths out local dev and onboarding
Thoughts on AI, accessibility, and the future of developer tooling
Star Wars hot takes (spoiler: no Kyber crystals required)
Building custom PCs and chasing that perfect dev setup
Links:
https://github.com/dotnet/aspire
https://frame.work/Â
https://bsky.app/profile/damianedwards.com
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Catch us at Build and beyond!
🎧 Don't forget to subscribe to the Coding After Work podcast for more conversations like this one.
A huge thanks to Daniel Hindrikes, who helped with mixing the podcast.
