SignalR, Aspire, and No Kyber Crystals with Damian Edwards

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.