It’s .NET’s 20th birthday: 20 years since Microsoft released v1.0 of their managed runtime, a Base Class Library, a couple of application frameworks, and the C# programming language. So I thought I’d do a retrospective of my 20 years working with .NET, because I’m extraordinarily vain and I assume people want to read stuff like this.

I’ve been working on a fun little project on my stream recently. It’s an app called StreamBadger that adds overlay images and plays sounds on the stream through OBS Studio. It uses the Twitch API so it needs to authenticate with Twitch, and as it’s a desktop application I wanted to build that authentication flow where you log in through the browser and the app sits and waits and then magically gets connected.

TL;DR: I’ve come up with a way to gradually migrate old ASP.NET WebForms (or MVC) applications to .NET 5.0, and you can watch me figure it out in real-time on my brand new Twitch channel.