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20 Best .NET Developers in the World

net developers - 20 Best .NET Developers in the World

MS .NET remains one of the most powerful and versatile dev platforms in the world – and that’s largely thanks to a global network of outstanding individuals who push the ecosystem forward every day.

This list highlights top .NET developers of today: from open-source contributors and Microsoft insiders to independent tool builders, educators, and system architects. Whether they’re writing critical runtime code, creating libraries used by millions, leading engineering teams, or mentoring the next generation of developers, these experts shape the way the world builds with DOTNET.

  1. Scott Hanselman
  2. Nicholas Blumhardt
  3. Jon Skeet
  4. Jeremy D. Miller
  5. Paul Stovell
  6. Miguel de Icaza
  7. James Newton-King
  8. David Fowler
  9. Oren Eini
  10. Konrad Kokosa
  11. Steve Sanderson
  12. Stephen Cleary
  13. Marc Gravell
  14. Jimmy Bogard
  15. Udi Dahan
  16. Kathleen Dollard
  17. Julie Lerman
  18. Dominick Baier
  19. Safia Abdalla
  20. Tim Corey

Now, let’s delve deeper into their qualifications and achievements:

Scott Hanselman

YouTube Video

NDC London.

Nationality: American

Scott is a prominent .NET community figure and Partner Program Manager at Microsoft, celebrated for his outreach and education efforts. Through his popular blog and podcasts (“Hanselminutes” and “Azure Friday”), Scott has spent decades demystifying .NET and inspiring developers worldwide.

He actively codes and shares projects on GitHub, often demonstrating the latest C# and .NET techniques in practical scenarios. Hanselman’s influence as a developer advocate is immense – he bridges the gap between Microsoft’s product teams and everyday developers, ensuring technologies like ASP.NET Core, Blazor, and .NET MAUI are approachable. He continues to be a trusted voice, leveraging his platform to welcome and mentor the next generation of .NET developers.

Nicholas Blumhardt

Nationality: Australian

Nicholas is the creator of Serilog, the popular structured-logging library for .NET, and a founder of Datalust (the company behind Seq, a log analysis tool). Nicholas has long been an open-source trailblazer in .NET – he also initiated the Autofac dependency injection container back in 2007 (one of the first IoC containers for .NET).

Earlier in his career, he worked as a program manager at Microsoft, helping to shape parts of .NET, but his passion clearly lies in building tools that developers love. Serilog introduced the idea of structured logging to the .NET world, and its rich ecosystem of sinks and enrichers is a testament to Nicholas’s focus on extensibility. He continues to maintain Serilog (which recently hit version 3.0) and actively engages with the community on GitHub and social platforms. Nicholas’s influence on how C# applications are built – through better logging and DI practices – is immense and ongoing.

Jon Skeet

Jon Skeet - 20 Best .NET Developers in the World

Nationality: British

Jon is known as the world’s top Stack Overflow contributor, particularly in C#. He has amassed over 1.5 million reputation points on Stack Overflow – the highest of any user – by answering tens of thousands of .NET questions.

Jon is also the author of the acclaimed book “C# in Depth”, which has guided many developers through complex language features. As a software engineer at Google (working from the UK), he remains deeply connected to the .NET community: he’s a former Microsoft MVP and continues to blog about new C# features and best practices. Jon’s willingness to share knowledge and clarify intricate concepts (even to the point of correcting Microsoft’s documentation or the C# compiler) has earned him rock-star status among .NET developers.

Jeremy D. Miller

Nationality: American

Jeremy is a veteran software architect and the original author of StructureMap, the first widely used dependency injection container for .NET (dating back to 2004). He has a passion for architectural patterns and clean code, demonstrated through multiple open-source projects over the years. Jeremy leads development of the JasperFX libraries – notably Marten (a PostgreSQL-based document database and event-sourcing library for .NET) and Wolverine (a next-generation background job and messaging framework).

These projects push the envelope of what can be done with C# in terms of efficiency and design elegance. Jeremy runs his own company (JasperFX) and consults for enterprise clients, while maintaining an active blog (“The Shade Tree Developer”) where he shares lessons from real-world systems. In 2025, Jeremy’s projects Marten and Wolverine are seeing wider adoption in the .NET community for building scalable systems, and he continues to refine them with regular updates and community engagement. His long-term commitment to improving the .NET ecosystem through open source makes him a standout figure.

Paul Stovell

Nationality: Australian

Paul is the founder and CEO of Octopus Deploy, one of the most popular deployment automation tools in the .NET world. Based in Australia, Paul started Octopus Deploy as a nights-and-weekends C# project in 2011 to simplify the deployment of .NET applications – it grew into a major DevOps company with hundreds of employees and a $100M+ ARR by 2024.

Importantly, Paul never stopped coding; he was the original developer of the Octopus Server (written in C# on ASP.NET and Azure) and continues to guide its technical evolution. In earlier years, Paul also created open-source libraries like “Bindable LINQ” and contributed to WPF and Silverlight communities. While Octopus Deploy is now a mature product, Paul remains hands-on with technical decisions and frequently interacts with the user community via his blog and GitHub. His journey from solo developer to tech CEO exemplifies how far expertise in .NET can take an entrepreneur, and his active involvement keeps him among the top C# practitioners.

Miguel de Icaza

Miguel de Icaza - 20 Best .NET Developers in the World

Nationality: Mexican

Miguel is a programmer renowned for bringing C# and .NET to non-Windows platforms. He co-founded the Mono project in 2001, implementing the .NET Framework for Linux, and later co-created Xamarin, which enabled C# development for iOS/Android.

Miguel’s work was instrumental in the cross-platform evolution of .NET (Mono now powers Unity3D, and Xamarin evolved into .NET MAUI). In 2016, Xamarin was acquired by Microsoft, and Miguel served as a Distinguished Engineer, championing open-source .NET. Though he left Microsoft in 2023, he remains an active open-source advocate and tech innovator, exploring areas like language runtimes and game engines. His legacy in the .NET ecosystem – making the framework truly cross-platform and open source – is profound, and he continues to influence its direction as a respected thought leader.

James Newton-King

Nationality: New Zealander

James is the author of Json.NET (Newtonsoft.Json), the ubiquitous JSON library that became a de facto standard in .NET development.

Created as a personal open-source project, Json.NET’s reliability and performance led it to be used by millions of developers (it was even bundled with .NET for many years). In 2019, James joined Microsoft and has since been a driving force on the .NET team, contributing to areas like Azure SDKs and the new System.Text.Json library. His knack for building developer-friendly APIs and tools is well known – Json.NET has over a billion downloads on NuGet. Today, James continues to build essential .NET infrastructure at Microsoft, and his influence is felt in nearly every C# application that exchanges JSON data.

David Fowler

Great frameworks aren’t built in isolation. They come from solving real problems — repeatedly.

Nationality: Kittitian

David is a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft and one of the chief architects behind ASP.NET Core. Originally from the tiny Caribbean island of St. Kitts, David co-created the SignalR real-time framework early in his career.

He quickly became known for his skill in building high-performance networking code. David was a key engineer on the team that rebuilt the .NET web stack (ASP.NET Core and the Kestrel web server) from the ground up, achieving industry-leading performance. He’s also very active on GitHub and X (Twitter), sharing tips on async programming, performance tuning, and new .NET runtime features. Renowned for his “code-first” leadership style, he often live-codes prototypes of future .NET features. David’s fingerprints are on many core developments in .NET, and he remains a mentor and inspiration to developers who want to contribute to the platform.

Oren Eini

Oren Eini - 20 Best .NET Developers in the World

Nationality: Israeli

Oren (known by his pen name “Ayende Rahien”) is best known for creating RavenDB, a leading NoSQL database for .NET. A long-time open-source advocate, Oren was a core contributor to NHibernate and other .NET OSS projects in the 2000s before founding Hibernating Rhinos – his company – to build RavenDB from scratch.

RavenDB (written in C#) pioneered easy ACID transactions in a document database and is used worldwide in production systems. Oren is also a prolific blogger at ayende.com, where he shares deep insights into database internals, performance tuning, and elegant code design. Despite being a CEO, he continues to actively code and push commits to RavenDB’s repository. Oren’s passion for performance and clean architecture is reflected in RavenDB’s continual improvements and in his technical posts. He’s considered a “hometown hero” of the European .NET scene and remains one of the top C# system developers today.

Konrad Kokosa

Nationality: Polish

Konrad is a .NET performance guru and author of the definitive book “Pro .NET Memory Management.” As a Microsoft MVP, Konrad has spent years analyzing and teaching how the .NET garbage collector and memory allocator work, helping developers write more efficient C# code.

He co-founded Dotnetos, an organization that runs .NET performance conferences and workshops. Konrad also created tools like Heap Explorer and the Memory Diagnostic Kit to aid in profiling .NET applications. In the community, he’s known as a “Polish .NET legend” and performance expert. In 2025, Konrad took his expertise into new domains – he leads an engineering team at a blockchain company (Nethermind) focusing on .NET performance in blockchain tech. He remains active in speaking (e.g., at NDC conferences) and on social media, often sharing low-level .NET tips. Konrad’s influence ensures that performance and memory awareness are top of mind for serious .NET developers.

Steve Sanderson

Nationality: British

Steve is a developer/architect at Microsoft famous for creative web innovations in .NET. Based in the UK, Steve originally created Knockout.js (a pioneering MVVM JavaScript library) and later joined Microsoft’s ASP.NET team.

He is the original creator of Blazor, the framework that allows C# to run in the browser via WebAssembly. Steve’s ability to marry C# with cutting-edge web tech has opened new frontiers for .NET developers, from offline PWAs to hybrid server/client web apps. In addition to Blazor, he contributes to ASP.NET Core’s performance and has authored popular libraries like WebOptimizer. He’s constantly prototyping next-generation features – combining server and WASM models in Blazor and beyond. Steve remains one of the most inventive minds in the C# world, often introducing innovations that other frameworks haven’t even dreamt of yet.

Stephen Cleary

Stephen Cleary - 20 Best .NET Developers in the World

Nationality: American

Stephen is an expert on async/await and concurrency in C#, known for his clear and authoritative writing on the subject. He is the author of “Concurrency in C# Cookbook” and maintains a popular blog where he delves into advanced topics like synchronization contexts, async streams, and cancellation tokens.

Stephen’s Stack Overflow contributions and blog posts have made him the go-to person for developers grappling with asynchronous programming pitfalls. He has also created several open-source libraries – such as Nito.AsyncEx (providing additional synchronization primitives for Task-based code) – to help the community. As a Microsoft MVP, Stephen frequently speaks at conferences and user groups about best practices in .NET development. He continues to update his libraries for .NET 8 and regularly publishes deep-dive articles (for example, exploring new async features or improvements in the latest C# versions). Stephen’s dedication to education and high-quality libraries cements his status among the top .NET developers today.

Marc Gravell

Nationality: British

Marc is a highly respected engineer who recently joined Microsoft after over a decade as a principal engineer at Stack Overflow. He is co-creator of Stack Exchange’s Q&A platform architecture, having built much of it in C#. Marc co-authored the Dapper micro-ORM (an ultra-fast database library) and the protobuf-net library for efficient serialization.

His penchant for writing high-performance C# code has benefited millions of developers – for example, Dapper is one of the most-used NuGet packages. Marc was also a legendary Stack Overflow user (among the all-time top contributors, especially in the C# tag). Now at Microsoft, he works on the .NET team focusing on developer tooling and infrastructure. Known as a “code geek” and C# fan, he continues to share insights on Twitter and contribute to open source (including the .NET runtime and Roslyn compiler). Marc’s blend of real-world systems experience and open-source contributions secure his place as one of the top .NET developers globally.

Jimmy Bogard

Nationality: American

Jimmy is an independent software architect and a prolific open-source creator in the .NET community. He created the widely used AutoMapper library (for object-object mapping) and the MediatR library (implementing the Mediator pattern for CQRS), among other tools.

These libraries are staples in enterprise C# applications and have been downloaded millions of times. Jimmy is also known for promoting the “vertical slice architecture” for .NET systems and has shared his knowledge through conference talks, a popular blog, and as author of “ASP.NET Core in Action.” Based in Austin, Texas, he runs a consulting company and actively mentors teams on clean architecture and domain-driven design in C#. His OSS projects (like AutoMapper) are still very active, and he’s often on Twitter discussing improvements or helping developers – exemplifying a balance of writing code that powers companies while fostering community growth.

Udi Dahan

Udi Dahan - 20 Best .NET Developers in the World

Nationality: Israeli

Udi is one of the world’s foremost experts on service-oriented architecture and domain-driven design, and he is the founder and CEO of NServiceBus. NServiceBus (part of Particular Software, Udi’s company) is the most popular service bus and messaging framework for .NET, widely used to build distributed systems.

Over the past two decades, Udi has been a thought leader in enterprise .NET development, educating teams on building scalable, decoupled systems. He frequently speaks at conferences and offers intensive training courses on distributed architecture. Udi’s contributions include not only the NServiceBus framework itself, but also the patterns and best practices that have influenced how .NET developers design microservices and message-driven systems. As a CEO, he continues to set technical direction for his products while engaging with the community through blog posts and talks. His blend of practical framework development and high-level architecture guidance makes him a unique influencer in the .NET ecosystem.

Kathleen Dollard

Nationality: American

Kathleen is a Program Manager on Microsoft’s .NET team, overseeing .NET languages (C#/F#/VB) and the developer CLI experience. With a career spanning decades, she’s also known for her work on code generation and dynamic languages – she wrote “Code Generation in Microsoft .NET” back in 2004.

Kathleen has been a frequent speaker at major conferences (Build, Ignite, etc.) and an active community leader. In recent years, she’s been heavily involved in .NET Core’s open-source development – hosting Community Standups, engaging with the community on GitHub for C# and F# design, and driving improvements to the dotnet CLI and SDK. She was instrumental in pushing features like Source Generators and analyzers in Roslyn. Kathleen’s focus is on improving the inner-loop productivity for developers: better tooling, project templates, and polished language features. As a female leader in the .NET world, she also mentors other women in tech. Her continued impact on both the .NET product and its community makes her one of the top figures in C# today.

Julie Lerman

Nationality: American

Julie is a world-renowned authority on Microsoft’s data access technologies and a long-time Entity Framework expert. Based in the U.S., Julie has been a Microsoft MVP for well over a decade and authored the highly regarded “Programming Entity Framework” book series.

She’s often called the leading independent authority on EF, having guided the community from the classic ADO.NET and EF6 era up through modern EF Core for cloud apps. Julie is a frequent speaker at international conferences and a regular contributor to well-known tech publications (including MSDN Magazine and CODE Magazine) on topics like domain-driven design, EF Core performance tuning, and using C# for data-oriented microservices. Recently, Julie has been focusing on the latest EF Core 8/9 features, even publishing new courses on Pluralsight (her EF Core 8 Fundamentals course came out in early 2024). She also mentors and consults with teams on adopting DDD and clean architecture with C#. Julie’s generous sharing of knowledge over the years – and her continued active engagement – make her an inspiration and top influencer in the .NET community.

Dominick Baier

Dominick Baier - 20 Best .NET Developers in the World

Nationality: German

Dominick (also known by his alias @leastprivilege) is an expert in identity & access control and the co-creator of IdentityServer. Since 2009, Dominick and his colleague Brock Allen have built free open-source security software – most notably IdentityServer, an OpenID Connect and OAuth 2.0 framework for ASP.NET Core.

IdentityServer has become the standard solution for handling authentication and authorization in the .NET world, used by countless companies and projects. In 2020, Dominick co-founded Duende Software to provide commercial support and continue the development of IdentityServer after it shifted to a sustainable open-source model. He remains deeply involved in the .NET security community, maintaining libraries like IdentityModel and consulting on secure architecture. Dominick is a Microsoft MVP and a frequent speaker on security in .NET, educating developers on topics like OAuth, OpenID Connect, and implementing secure APIs. His long-standing contributions have made robust security more accessible to .NET developers everywhere.

Safia Abdalla

Nationality: American (Egyptian-American)

Safia is a Software Engineer on Microsoft’s ASP.NET Core team who has made significant contributions to the Blazor framework itself. Coming from an open-source background (she was previously a core contributor to the nteract data science project), Safia brought her passion for community and collaboration to Blazor’s development.

She has worked on important features such as debugging support in Blazor WebAssembly and performance improvements in the framework’s rendering engine. Safia is also a frequent speaker on .NET and Blazor – for instance, appearing on the ASP.NET Community Standup to discuss new Blazor features in .NET 6 and 7. As one of the few women on the core team, she advocates for diversity and inclusion in tech, inspiring others by her example. Safia’s blend of hands-on engineering and public engagement ensures that Blazor is not only well-built but also well-documented and welcoming to newcomers.

Tim Corey

Nationality: American

Tim is a highly respected software development trainer and content creator in the .NET community. With over 25 years of experience, he has been recognized with eight Microsoft MVP awards for his contributions to the coding community.

Frustrated by the difficulties he encountered learning programming early on, Tim now teaches an easier path to becoming a real-world developer. He has trained millions of students through his YouTube channel and online courses – his free YouTube tutorials on C# and .NET (as “IAmTimCorey”) have made complex topics accessible to beginners and experienced developers alike. Tim primarily teaches C#, along with related technologies like SQL and web development, focusing on practical, hands-on learning. In addition to YouTube, he runs a training site with full courses that take developers from beginner to job-ready. Tim’s approachable teaching style and community engagement (he actively answers questions and runs a “Dev Questions” podcast) have made him one of the most influential .NET educators today.

Wrap Up

These legends represent exceptional talent, making them extremely challenging to headhunt. However, there are thousands of other highly skilled IT professionals available to hire with our help. Contact us, and we will be happy to discuss your hiring needs.

Note: We’ve dedicated significant time and effort to creating and verifying this curated list of top talent. However, if you believe a correction or addition is needed, feel free to reach out. We’ll gladly review and update the page.

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