.NET Full-Stack / Senior Developer Roadmap (2026)

Target Roles

1. .NET Full-Stack Developer
2. Senior .NET Developer
3. Technical Lead (next growth stage)

Phase 1: Core C# Foundation (Mandatory)

C# Fundamentals

1. OOP concepts and SOLID principles
2. async / await
3. Task vs Thread
4. Delegates, Events, Func, Action
5. LINQ (Join, GroupBy, SelectMany)
6. Exception handling
7. Memory management and Garbage Collection
8. Span and ReadOnlySpan (senior level)

Interview focus:

1. Explain SOLID with real project examples
2. Async vs multithreading use cases

Phase 2: ASP.NET Core (Strong Depth Required)

Must Know

1. MVC vs Web API
2. Middleware pipeline
3. Dependency Injection lifetimes
4. Filters (Action, Exception, Authorization)
5. Model binding and validation
6. Authentication and Authorization (JWT, Cookies)
7. Session, Caching
8. Logging with Serilog or similar

Senior Expectations

1. Custom middleware
2. Global exception handling
3. API versioning
4. Rate limiting
5. Health checks

Phase 3: Database & Data Access

SQL Server

1. Clustered and non-clustered indexes
2. Execution plans
3. Query optimization
4. Joins vs subqueries
5. Deadlocks
6. Normalization vs denormalization

Interview focus:

1. Query performance issues
2. Index usage problems

ORM Knowledge

1. Entity Framework Core
2. Tracking vs NoTracking
3. Lazy vs Eager loading
4. Migrations
5. Performance tuning
6. Dapper (strong advantage)

Phase 4: Frontend (Full-Stack Requirement)

Basics

1. Semantic HTML
2. CSS Flexbox and Grid
3. Responsive design
4. JavaScript ES6

Framework (Choose One)

1. Angular (preferred with .NET)
2. React

Angular topics:

1. Components and modules
2. Services and dependency injection
3. RxJS basics
4. Reactive forms
5. Guards and interceptors

Phase 5: Security (Senior Filter)

1. JWT access and refresh token flow
2. OAuth basics
3. XSS, CSRF, SQL Injection
4. Password hashing and data protection

Phase 6: System Design (Critical for Senior Role)

Core Topics

1. Monolith vs Microservices
2. Clean Architecture
3. Repository pattern
4. CQRS
5. Event-driven architecture
6. API Gateway
7. Caching with Redis
8. Background jobs (Hangfire)

Interview focus:

1. Designing scalable systems
2. Performance and scaling strategies

Phase 7: Cloud & DevOps

Azure

1. App Service
2. Azure SQL
3. Blob Storage
4. Azure Functions
5. Key Vault

DevOps

1. CI/CD pipelines
2. Docker (mandatory)
3. Kubernetes (good to have)

Phase 8: Testing & Quality

1. Unit testing (xUnit, NUnit)
2. Mocking with Moq
3. Integration testing
4. Writing testable code

Phase 9: Projects (Very Important)

Project 1: Enterprise Application

1. Billing or inventory system
2. Role-based authorization
3. Reporting
4. Background jobs
5. Caching

Project 2: Scalable API

1. JWT authentication
2. Redis caching
3. Clean architecture
4. Dockerized deployment

Use your existing ASP.NET Core MVC projects and upgrade them with clean architecture, performance optimization, and security to showcase in interviews.

6-Month Preparation Plan

Salary Range (India – 2026 Estimate)

1. Mid-level Full-Stack: 8–14 LPA
2. Senior .NET Developer: 15–30 LPA
3. Tech Lead: 30+ LPA