Hire .NET developers in 48 hours.

If your mental model of .NET is Windows-only, IIS, and Visual Studio licences, it's a decade out of date. Modern .NET is cross-platform, open source, runs in Linux containers, and posts measurable throughput gains with almost every release — which is why it keeps showing up in greenfield API and platform work, not just legacy maintenance.

The release cadence matters for planning. Microsoft ships a new .NET version every November: long-term support (LTS) versions land in odd-numbered years with three years of support; standard-term (STS) versions land in even years with two. .NET 10 is the current LTS, supported into November 2028. The catch worth knowing: .NET 8 reaches end of support on 10 November 2026, and .NET 9 retires the same day. If you're on .NET 8 or earlier, the clock is already running — which is the single most common reason teams call us about .NET right now.

What makes it a genuine growth stack rather than merely a safe one: one runtime and one language (C#) span web APIs, background services, real-time apps, Blazor frontends, and cross-platform mobile and desktop. EF Core handles data access without hand-written SQL for most cases, and the Azure tooling is first-class. For an enterprise team with a .NET estate, the modern platform is fast, well-supported, and cheaper to operate than its reputation suggests — the real job is convincing leadership the stack isn't standing still. It isn't.

A clean CV and a friendly call tell you almost nothing about whether someone can be trusted with a production .NET system. Our screen is built around the mistakes that actually cause outages and slow teams down.

We start with EF Core query reasoning, because it's where most real-world .NET performance problems live. We give a candidate a slow endpoint and listen for whether they spot the N+1 query, know when to use AsNoTracking() for read-only work, understand the difference between IEnumerable and IQueryable (and when a query silently runs in memory instead of in SQL), and can read an execution plan. Reaching for raw SQL when EF Core is the wrong tool is a good sign, not a bad one.

Then async and concurrency: the async void trap, blocking on .Result or .Wait() and deadlocking a request, ConfigureAwait, and cancellation tokens threaded all the way through. Closely related is dependency-injection lifetimes — we ask candidates to explain singleton versus scoped versus transient, and to find the captive-dependency bug where a singleton accidentally holds a scoped service.

Next, Azure deployment fluency: a senior .NET engineer should be comfortable shipping to App Service, configuring an Azure DevOps pipeline, keeping secrets in Key Vault rather than config files, and reasoning about cost and scaling — not just writing code that compiles locally.

Finally, test architecture. We look for xUnit unit tests aimed at behaviour, and — more telling — integration tests that run against a real SQL Server in a container, not a mock that hides the bugs only the database surfaces. Engineers who test against the real thing have usually been burned by mocks that lied, and that scar tissue is exactly what we're hiring for.

.NET and Azure are built by the same company, and it shows. When the default cloud target is Azure, a lot of integration work you'd otherwise hand-roll simply disappears — which is why our .NET builds are Azure-native unless a client's estate says otherwise.

In practice that means a small, well-understood set of services doing most of the work. App Service runs the web APIs with managed TLS, deployment slots for zero-downtime releases, and autoscale. Azure Functions handle background and event-driven work without a server to babysit. Service Bus carries the asynchronous, multi-step workflows — the kind of insurance-claim and billing pipelines we built for Surgical Partners — so a slow downstream system can't take the request path down with it. Azure SQL is the managed relational store, with point-in-time restore and tuning built in.

The tooling is where the operability story pays off: Azure DevOps pipelines build, test and deploy on every merge; secrets live in Key Vault, not config files; and Application Insights gives real telemetry instead of guesswork when something is slow. We standardised exactly this stack on both our Australian healthcare engagements.

The cost framing matters too: managed PaaS services cost more per hour than a raw VM, but far less per incident and per engineer-hour, because nobody is patching servers or hand-rolling deployment scripts. For most teams that trade is overwhelmingly worth it. When a build also needs deep SQL Server work, we pair .NET engineers with our database specialists.