Allan Ritchie
Notes from 25 years of shipping software — .NET, mobile, and the open source libraries I maintain when I should probably be sleeping.
Two phones in the same room, no server, no Wi-Fi, and nothing but Bluetooth between them. That should be easy, and it has never been. So I took the SignalR hub model and put it on the radio: one C# interface, generated proxies, request/response, streaming, events, groups and JSON, with every byte chunked, framed and reassembled for you.
Apple and Google both want assistants to act inside your app, and they picked completely different ways to do it: Swift App Intents on one side, Kotlin AppFunctions on the other. I didn't want to write the same feature twice in two languages I don't ship in, so I built a source generator that writes both from one C# declaration.
A web app inside a .NET MAUI app, served from the device, updated from your own signed server whenever you like, and talking to GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, the camera and more through typed C# and TypeScript clients. Background jobs, pushes and geofences reach the page, or a background script when no page is open. Hot reload runs inside the real app, and a terminal simulator stands in for the device so you can test Wi-Fi drops, denied permissions and GPS walks from a browser.
Four Office editors, a free-form notebook, ribbons on everything, Find across all of them, presenting mode for decks, and a camera you call instead of a screen you build. All of it in the box, on .NET MAUI and Blazor, no WebViews.
Somebody is waiting on bytes that were supposed to have arrived. Usually nothing was carrying them — HttpClient stops the second iOS suspends your app, and Android will reclaim the process while you are not looking. Shiny.Net.Http hands the bytes to the platform instead — NSURLSession, a foreground service, a connectivity-driven managed loop, Service Worker Background Sync — under one API. Plus why I sign Azure Blob and S3 uploads by hand instead of taking the vendor SDKs, what the Android service does when the network drops, and why a Live Activity has to animate a time range instead of a percentage.
DocumentDb runs on ten-odd backends, but picking one used to be a line of C# inside your service. The Aspire integration moves that decision into the AppHost — the consuming code becomes one provider-agnostic line with health checks and OpenTelemetry attached, the admin UI becomes a resource, and an entire Orleans silo points at the same store.
Membership, grain storage, reminders, grain directory and streams are five separate provider contracts. Shiny.DocumentDb.Orleans implements all five on one IDocumentStore — one connection string, grain state you can query without waking a grain, and a stream backlog you can actually open and look at.
A seekable keyframe engine for .NET MAUI with CSS @keyframes semantics in XAML, 42 motion icons compiled from one spec into a drawn scene on MAUI and real CSS keyframes on Blazor, and a ShinyButton that finally makes press-wait-see-if-it-worked a one-liner.
Sixty-odd controls, one token contract, two renderers, zero WebViews. Shiny Controls hits 1.0 for .NET MAUI and Blazor — and there is a live playground you can click through before you install anything.
Thirteen major versions in, there's a lot of DocumentDb that shipped in a bullet list and never got explained. A store that diffs documents for you, a read path that never deserializes, and an extensibility surface that soft delete is entirely built out of.
v13 puts AES-256-GCM field encryption in the core package, adds a transactional outbox that commits with the write that caused it, and gives a document type a front door — REST + Server-Sent Events, and an MCP server. Plus Orleans streams on the database you already have, and admin tools that read an encrypted store without a key.
Ten new packages: a dependency-light, AOT/trim-clean HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 server that runs anywhere .NET runs — including inside a .NET MAUI app on iOS and Android. Routing, middleware, DI scopes, WebSockets, SSE, TLS with managed self-signed certs, an OpenAPI document built with zero reflection, source-generated typed endpoints, XML/MessagePack/protobuf without reflection, gRPC and gRPC-Web, a WebDAV mount, mediator handlers and DocumentDb documents as endpoints, tunnelling so a phone is reachable from the internet, and an MCP server you can point Claude at.
