Network Programming in .NET

If you’ve spent any time with Claude recently, you may have noticed it can do things that feel surprisingly connected to the real world — looking up domain expiry dates, checking live weather, querying your calendar. Most of that happens through MCP: the Model Context Protocol, an open standard that lets AI assistants talk directly to external APIs and servic...

If you’ve ever tried to decode a Chinese VIN or look up vehicle specifications for a car manufactured in China, you’ll know the data is hard to come by. Commercial providers charge significant fees, the official sources are in Chinese, and the coverage is often incomplete. I recently spent several weeks solving this problem from first principles — scraping, parsing, and enric...

A production .NET service had been running fine for months. It made outbound HTTP calls through a rotating proxy provider — the kind that promises a new exit IP for each request. Then one day, requests started timing out. Not failing cleanly with a 4xx or 5xx. Timing out. Each one sat there for thirty seconds or more before giving up.

The fix...

We’re delighted to announce that our vehicle registration lookup service now supports Indonesia. With over 150 million registered vehicles on its roads, Indonesia is one of the largest automotive markets in Southeast Asia, and adding it to our coverage has been a long-running priority. As of today, you can query Indonesian plates through the

If you’ve ever seen a stack trace like this in a .NET application: