.NET Deployment Checklist

Version: 1.1.0 | Updated: 2026-07-16

Purpose

Gate promotion and rollback of a .NET ASP.NET Core endpoint, hosted service, EF Core unit of work, or application slice.

Why

A syntactically valid .NET artifact can still fail because of invalid DI lifetime or missing registration, concurrent or overlong DbContext use, query translation, N+1, or serialization cycle, request cancellation versus upstream timeout, thread-pool, connection-pool, or GC saturation. Promotion therefore requires target-state and rollback evidence.

How

Run against the exact target and immutable candidate. Preserve outputs from dotnet --info; dotnet restore --locked-mode when lock files are enabled; dotnet build --no-restore -warnaserror; dotnet test --no-build; dotnet list package --vulnerable --include-transitive and review applicability. Stop promotion on any failed item.

Version-aware caution

Read global.json, target framework monikers, SDK lock, runtime image, and package graph. ASP.NET Core hosting, minimal APIs, EF Core translation, and C# language features must match the deployed SDK/runtime baseline.

Tradeoffs

Promotion waits for "SDK used to publish matches global.json and runtime image compatibility" and "locked restore, build with warnings as errors, tests, and package vulnerability review pass". Those .NET target checks slow release but directly bound invalid DI lifetime or missing registration and make this rollback executable: Stop new background work, drain hosted services within the host shutdown timeout, then redeploy the previous published artifact after checking EF migration compatibility.

Anti-patterns

• Registering DbContext or a service that captures it as singleton introduces cross-request concurrency and stale tracking.
• Do not remove a native warning, validator, policy, or safety limit merely to make generated output pass.
• Do not claim a successful result without preserving the command, target, artifact/revision, and observed output.

Enterprise considerations

.NET governance pins SDK and runtime support lines, controls NuGet sources and package signatures, and treats dumps/traces as sensitive production records.

Official sources

• .NET documentation
• ASP.NET Core fundamentals
• EF Core
• Diagnostics tools

Checklist

• SDK used to publish matches global.json and runtime image compatibility.
• locked restore, build with warnings as errors, tests, and package vulnerability review pass.
• EF migration is scripted/idempotent and compatible with mixed application versions.
• Kestrel limits, thread pool, connection pool, and GC/container settings are load-tested.
• health checks distinguish process liveness, readiness, and degraded dependencies.
• dotnet counters, traces, logs, and exception telemetry are live before canary.
• canary compares GC pause, thread-pool queue, dependency duration, and errors.
• rollback verifies prior binaries can read schema and queued contracts.
• Stop new background work, drain hosted services within the host shutdown timeout, then redeploy the previous published artifact after checking EF migration compatibility.
• Evidence identifies version, target, artifact/revision, command or manual method, UTC time, and result.

Changelog

• 1.1.0 (2026-07-16): Replaced generic gates with native .NET evidence and failure controls.
• 1.0.0 (2026-07-16): Added initial checklist.