The Why
As a developer that's always looking to learn more, it's not always possible to start implementing new tools and technologies on a project. There's always room to grow knowledge, but it's not practical on large scale projects to just start upgrading frameworks and adding in new technologies on a whim. There's a lot of additional regression testing and only a limited amount of time.
I wanted to create a .Net 10 application and experiment a lot more with both Claude Code and doing more things with Azure Devops. After giving it some thought, I figured this personal site was the best place to do both.
The Process
I already have a Claude account (https://claude.ai), so working with Claude Code was something I was already familiar with. I then set up a personal Visual Studio Professional licensed account, which gave me full access to my own Azure Devops instance. I then registered my domain name with GoDaddy and set up a Microsoft 365 email account. Next was setting up an Azure services website and database server instance. After squaring away all of my configuration information between the two (DNS entries and such), it was time to start building!
I started off simply by creating a .Net Core MVC application in Visual Studio 2026. I set this up to utilize Identity Framework for user maintenance as I wanted to set up administrative features and to allow multiple users the ability to write blog entries. I did a little bit of personal styling on the website and then started adding in one feature at a time via Claude Code. After about five iterations of features, I decided it was time to push the site live.
I plan on updating this site continously and sharing the things that I do and learn along the way. This is just the beginning!
Summary of Technologies Used
- .Net Core MVC (with the .Net 10 Framework)
- Microsoft Graph API for Email
- Azure SQL Database
- Bootstrap
- jQuery
- TinyMCE
- ReCaptcha
- Google Analytics
- Google Fonts Library