Insights & Engineering Notes — X24 Technologies

SQL SERVER 8 min read

Optimizing SQL Server Queries: A Practical Guide to Missing Indexes & Execution Plans

How to read graphical execution plans, identify expensive table scans, distinguish between Clustered Index Seeks and Key Lookups, and write composite covering indexes that eliminate locking in high-concurrency workloads.

Key Takeaway: Why DMV missing index recommendations can be misleading, and how to verify index impact using Query Store and Extended Events.

By Khailesh Sharma Oct 2026

.NET ENGINEERING 10 min read

Structuring ASP.NET Core APIs for Maintainability: Clean Architecture in Practice

A practical walkthrough of organizing C# Web APIs into presentation, application, domain, and infrastructure layers. Includes CQRS pattern implementation with MediatR, DTO mapping strategies, and unit testing guidelines.

Key Takeaway: Decoupling business rules from Entity Framework Core to keep domain logic testable without a database container.

By Khailesh Sharma Sep 2026

AI & AUTOMATION 7 min read

Building Practical AI Document Processing Without the Hallucination Risk

Why naive prompt engineering fails for financial invoices and contracts. How to combine deterministic OCR bounding boxes with Pydantic JSON schemas, confidence scoring, and human-in-the-loop review queues.

Key Takeaway: Using strict schema validation to reject malformed extraction before any database write occurs.

By X24 Engineering Aug 2026

ARCHITECTURE 9 min read

When to Modernize Legacy .NET Applications (and When to Leave Them Alone)

An engineering decision framework for systems running on .NET Framework 4.5–4.8. Assessing security compliance, cloud hosting costs, library compatibility, and using the Strangler Fig pattern over full rewrites.

Key Takeaway: How moving from Windows Server IIS VMs to Linux Docker containers yields up to 60% immediate cloud infrastructure savings.

By Khailesh Sharma Jul 2026

DATA ENGINEERING 8 min read

Designing Resilient Data Ingestion Pipelines: Lessons from Production

Building pipelines that handle API rate-limits, malformed CSV records, and network dropouts without data loss. Implementing idempotency keys, atomic upserts, and dead-letter queues.

Key Takeaway: Why every data pipeline must assume third-party APIs will fail, change schemas without warning, or send duplicate payloads.

By X24 Engineering Jun 2026

.NET ENGINEERING 6 min read

Entity Framework Core vs Dapper: A Pragmatic Hybrid Architecture

Stop arguing over ORM vs micro-ORM. How to pair EF Core for transactional entity mutations and change tracking with Dapper for raw performance on complex reporting queries and bulk projections.

Key Takeaway: Achieving sub-50ms p95 API response times on high-read endpoints while preserving domain model safety on write operations.

By Khailesh Sharma May 2026