Challenge
The platform behind the appliance products had grown over many years: legacy .NET services, a heavy and manual installation and deployment flow and tight coupling to hardware and storage made maintenance, troubleshooting and new releases demanding and risky.
My role
Software Developer, Solution Architect. I was responsible for or carried out the following:
- Development and refactoring of Windows services, client applications, REST APIs and shared components in C#/.NET.
- Integration with Windows, Registry, WMI, services, firewall/GPO, server hardware, out-of-band management and storage controllers.
- Storage configuration, disk validation, RAID/JBOD detection and user flows in the appliance setup.
- Modernisation of the installation and deployment flow using WiX Toolset 6, Burn bundles, MSI and .NET runtime handling.
- Troubleshooting and optimisation of memory usage, service hosting, .NET runtime configuration and performance.
- Automation of builds, signing, SBOM, checksums and publishing via Nuke Build and GitHub Actions.
- Architectural guidance, code reviews, technical task descriptions and documentation.
Solution
Windows services, REST APIs and client applications were modernised to .NET 8/9/10 with consistent logging and error handling. The installation and deployment flow was rebuilt with WiX Toolset 6 and Burn, and the hardware, storage and RAID/JBOD integration was made robust with validation and clear user flows. Build, signing, SBOM and publishing were automated with Nuke Build and GitHub Actions.
Outcome
Higher operational stability and lower memory usage, a more robust appliance setup and a build and release process that can be repeated without manual steps – and that is easier for the team to maintain.