Anton Martyniuk (Anton DevTips): A Student's Guide to Learning .NET Architecture

When you start coding, you learn how to make things work. You write a feature, you click run, and it does the job. That feels great. But there is a second, harder skill that nobody teaches you at first: how to build software that still makes sense a year later, when ten other people have touched it.

That second skill is called software architecture. And one of the clearest, friendliest teachers of it in the .NET world right now is Anton Martyniuk, who writes as Anton DevTips. His website is antondevtips.com, and its tagline says it all: "Everything You Need To Become A Better .NET Developer." This guide explains who he is, every free and paid resource he offers, and a simple path to learn from him.

A quick real-life analogy

Think about building a house.

Anyone can stack some bricks and make a wall that stands up. That is "making it work." But a real house needs a plan first. Where do the water pipes go? Where are the walls that hold up the roof? If you skip the plan, the house stands for a while, then cracks. And when you want to add a second floor later, you cannot, because nothing was built to carry the weight.

Software is the same. A feature that "just works" is a wall. Architecture is the plan for the whole house: where the parts go, how they connect, and how you add more later without it all falling down. Anton Martyniuk is like an experienced builder who shows you the plan before you lay the first brick. He has done it for 12+ years, on real houses, and he explains it in plain words.

Who is Anton Martyniuk?

Anton Martyniuk is a .NET software engineer and educator with 12+ years of real-world experience. He spends his time teaching other developers how to design better systems.

He is best known for software architecture. That is his strongest focus: designing systems that a team can keep extending for years instead of rewriting every two years. Around that core, he writes about Domain-Driven Design (DDD), SOLID principles, common architectural patterns, EF Core performance, writing cleaner code, building a modular monolith with vertical slice architecture, and authentication and authorization best practices in ASP.NET Core.

He shares this in a few places: his own blog, a fast-growing weekly newsletter, articles on Medium and DEV, and premium courses. He is also active on X as @AntonMartyniuk and on GitHub as anton-martyniuk. A nice habit of his: he gives away the source code for his articles, so you can download a working project and read it, not just look at snippets.

Every resource he offers

Here is the full menu, what each thing is, and what it is best for.

A second way to look at the same menu is by what you are trying to do:

What makes his blog worth your time

The blog is the heart of everything. It is free, and it goes deep without getting lost. Each post takes one real problem a team hits, and walks through a clean way to solve it. He writes about the topics below most often.

Software architecture. This is his core. He explains how to draw boundaries between parts of your app so a change in one place does not break ten others. The goal he keeps coming back to: build something a team can extend for years.

Modular monolith with vertical slice architecture. This is a favorite of his, and a great pattern for many teams. We cover it in depth in our own article on building a modular monolith with vertical slice architecture in .NET, and in our intro to what a modular monolith is.

EF Core performance. He writes a lot about making database reads faster, picking the right tracking mode, and avoiding slow patterns. Our matching guide is how to increase EF Core performance for read queries.

Authentication and authorization. He covers how to do logins and permissions the right way in ASP.NET Core, which is easy to get wrong. See our companion piece on authentication and authorization best practices.

A small taste: a vertical slice feature handler

One idea Anton teaches often is vertical slice architecture. The plain-English version: instead of splitting your app into big horizontal layers (all controllers here, all services there, all data code over there), you split it by feature. Everything one feature needs lives together in one slice.

Think of a sandwich shop. The horizontal way is one person who only chops bread, one who only adds cheese, one who only wraps. A message has to travel across all of them for a single sandwich. The vertical way gives one person everything they need to make a whole sandwich start to finish. It is faster to change, and easier to understand.

Here is a tiny example of a single feature slice that creates a product. Notice how the request, the logic, and the response all sit together.

// One feature, one file. Everything for "Create Product" lives here.
public static class CreateProduct
{
    public record Command(string Name, decimal Price);
 
    public record Response(Guid Id, string Name);
 
    public static async Task<Response> Handle(
        Command command,
        AppDbContext db,
        CancellationToken ct)
    {
        var product = new Product
        {
            Id = Guid.NewGuid(),
            Name = command.Name,
            Price = command.Price
        };
 
        db.Products.Add(product);
        await db.SaveChangesAsync(ct);
 
        return new Response(product.Id, product.Name);
    }
}

A small but important note that fits Anton's recent writing: some libraries people used to reach for here, like MediatR, are now commercially licensed. Anton has even written about refactoring a modular monolith without MediatR. So a plain handler like the one above, with no extra library, is a perfectly good and modern choice.

You can read our full breakdown of this style in our vertical slice architecture article.

A second taste: a fast EF Core read query

Another thing Anton stresses is fast database reads. A common, easy win is AsNoTracking. By default, EF Core "tracks" every entity it loads so it can save changes later. But when you only want to show data on a screen, tracking is wasted work. Turning it off makes reads lighter and faster.

// A read-only query. We never edit these rows, so skip tracking.
public async Task<List<ProductDto>> GetProducts(
    AppDbContext db,
    CancellationToken ct)
{
    return await db.Products
        .AsNoTracking()                  // no change tracking = faster reads
        .Where(p => p.IsActive)
        .Select(p => new ProductDto(     // pull only the columns you need
            p.Id,
            p.Name,
            p.Price))
        .ToListAsync(ct);
}

Two ideas hide in that small block, and both are very Anton. First, AsNoTracking for read-only data. Second, the Select that pulls only the columns you need instead of loading the whole entity. Less data over the wire means a faster query. He also writes about heavier tools like bulk insert for when you must write thousands of rows at once, but AsNoTracking is the one every reader should learn first.

A suggested path to learn from him

Do not try to read everything at once. There are a lot of posts. Follow this order so each step builds on the last.

1. Subscribe to the free newsletter first. It is the lowest-effort way to keep learning. One short email a week.
2. Pick one topic and read deeply. A good first stop is his work on the modular monolith with vertical slice architecture.
3. Download the source code for that post. Open it, run it, and click through the files. Reading real code teaches more than any snippet.
4. Build a tiny app yourself. Copy just one pattern, like a single vertical slice. Small wins build real skill.
5. Then, if you want structure, look at a premium course. His courses are built to take you from junior to senior, and from senior to tech lead or architect.

Who he suits (and who should wait)

He is a great fit if you can already build a basic ASP.NET Core app and now you want it to be clean and lasting. If you are a mid-level developer aiming for senior, or a senior aiming for tech lead, you are squarely in his target audience.

If you are brand new and still learning what a controller is, that is okay, but start with the basics first. Come back once you have shipped a small app, and his architecture posts will click much faster.

How to get the most value for free

You can learn a lot here without paying anything. Here is how to squeeze the most out of the free side.

First, subscribe to the newsletter. It is the single best free resource because it keeps you learning with almost no effort.

Second, always download the source code for any article you like. Reading a finished, working project is the fastest way to understand how the pieces fit. Run it. Break it. Fix it. That loop is gold.

Third, follow him on X and read on Medium or DEV if you prefer those platforms. Same ideas, where you already are.

Fourth, keep your knowledge current. As of 2026, .NET 10 is the LTS release, C# 14 has shipped, and C# 15 with union types is in the .NET 11 preview. Newer posts will reflect this. And as mentioned, a few once-free libraries (MediatR, MassTransit, AutoMapper) are now commercially licensed, so check a library's license before adding it to a new project. Anton's "do it without the extra library" posts are handy here.

Quick recap

• Anton Martyniuk (Anton DevTips) at antondevtips.com teaches .NET developers how to design better systems.
• His strongest focus is software architecture: building systems a team can grow for years.
• He covers modular monoliths, vertical slice architecture, DDD, SOLID, EF Core performance, clean code, and auth in ASP.NET Core.
• Most of his stuff is free: the blog, the 25,000+ subscriber newsletter, and the downloadable source code.
• His premium courses take you from junior to senior, and from senior to tech lead or architect.
• A simple path: subscribe, read one topic, download the code, build something tiny, then consider a course.
• Best free move: join the newsletter and always download the source code for posts you like.

References and further reading

• Anton DevTips (home)
• About Anton Martyniuk
• Anton DevTips blog
• Building a Modular Monolith With Vertical Slice Architecture in .NET
• Anton Martyniuk on DEV
• Anton Martyniuk on Medium
• Anton Martyniuk on X (@AntonMartyniuk)
• anton-martyniuk on GitHub
• Our related guides: vertical slice architecture, building a modular monolith with vertical slice architecture, EF Core performance for read queries, and authentication and authorization best practices