Tag: comparison

They are not alternatives. WebApplicationFactory boots your app, Testcontainers boots your dependencies. Measured on .NET SDK 10.0.201: a container fixture costs 1.7 s per class against 10 ms for SQLite, and a HasMaxLength(16) violation that Postgres rejects with 22001 is silently accepted by SQLite.

Pick xUnit v3 for greenfield .NET projects, NUnit 4.6 if you live in its constraint model, MSTest 4 if you already ship it. A measured comparison on .NET SDK 10.0.201 covering parallelism defaults, test class lifecycle, assertion failure output, and the Microsoft.Testing.Platform version conflict that breaks the NUnit runner.

For internal service-to-service calls in .NET 11, default to gRPC when you own both ends of the contract and the call is point-to-point. Use REST with JSON when anything you do not control has to call the service. SignalR is not an RPC transport between services: reach for it only when one producer has to fan a message out to many long-lived consumers.

A named subagent starts cold, a fork inherits your whole conversation and shares your prompt cache, and a background agent is a second Claude Code session entirely. The trap is the naming: /fork stopped being the in-session fork at v2.1.212 and /subtask took over.

Use declarative YAML when the graph is a sequential routing decision that non-developers change often. Use code-first WorkflowBuilder the moment you need parallelism, custom executors, or a non-Foundry agent. Here is the decision, the action catalog limits, and the code both ways.

Manual gates every tool call on you. Auto mode gates them on a classifier with 32 built-in block rules. The mode that surprises people is neither: acceptEdits auto-approves rm, mv, and sed, not just file edits. Measured on Claude Code 2.1.123.

Default to IOptions<T>. Use IOptionsMonitor<T> when a singleton has to see config reloads, and IOptionsSnapshot<T> only when a scoped consumer wants a value that is stable for one request. The deciding axis is the lifetime of the consumer, not the shape of the settings.

A decision guide for ASP.NET Core 11: middleware runs for every request before your handler binds, endpoint filters run only for the matched endpoint after binding and can see the typed arguments. Includes a feature matrix, when-to-pick-each scenarios, the ordering rules, and the gotchas that force the choice.

await is the right answer almost every time. When you truly must block, GetAwaiter().GetResult() beats .Result and .Wait() because it throws the original exception. A decision matrix for .NET 11 and C# 14.

Pick Copilot coding agent when the work starts and ends on GitHub and you want issue-to-PR with native branch protection. Pick Cursor cloud agents when you want a live, editor-attached VM, multi-repo tasks, and to take over the run by hand. Full feature matrix, the 59-minute cap, the Actions-approval gotcha, and June 2026 billing for both.