Session Recap: Create AI Apps with .NET Minimal APIs and MAF
On March 25th I was back at the Cyber RGV monthly meetup at the McAllen Public Library for my third talk — this one tracing how APIs in the .NET ecosystem have evolved over the past two decades and where that journey lands us today with minimal APIs. We go all the way back to the SOAP and ASMX days of early .NET (painful), through WCF (somehow more painful), through MVC and Web API, and finally into ASP.NET Core and the minimal API model introduced in .NET 6 — where you can stand up a production-ready endpoint with authentication, rate limiting, and OpenAPI docs in a handful of lines of code with no controllers, no startup ceremony, no muss, no fuss!
The second half is where it gets interesting: I connect that evolution to AI app development and show how minimal APIs pair naturally with Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF) to build AI-powered applications quickly and cleanly. The demo is a brand content engine that generates social posts, blog outlines, video ideas, and image prompts — swap the brand config and the same app goes from producing cybersecurity marketing copy to coffee shop content without touching a line of application logic. I also throw in parallel AI task execution, which is a great showcase of just how little .NET asks of you when concurrency is involved.
Honestly, I probably should have called this one The Evolution of Building APIs with ASP.NET, because that's really what it is — and it's really just a teaser for the real deep dive happening next month at the first official RGV Devs Dot Net session on April 14, where we get into the full source code, prompts, and architecture behind this project. If this one leaves you wanting more, that's kind of the point, so come check it out in person if you can!
RGV Devs Kickoff — Building an AI Brand Engine with .NET and MAF