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/ 
https://bsky.app/profile/damianedwards.com

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.