Four books on the Microsoft stack: AI agents, retrieval-augmented generation, Entity Framework Core, and modern C#. Written for engineers who have to put this in production, not in a demo.
Ninety-two features across ten themes, from C# 5 to C# 14. If you nod along to any of these, it was written for you:
record class over record struct.Span<T> but never written allocation-free code yourself.
Each book stands alone. Together they cover the modern .NET data and AI stack.
Your first guide to the Microsoft Agent Framework: tools, MCP, multi-agent workflows, hosting, observability, and guardrails.
Embeddings to Azure deployment: chunking, hybrid retrieval, reranking, GraphRAG, eval gates, and prompt-injection defence.
Modelling, migrations, querying, JSON columns, vector search, interceptors, and performance work on EF Core 10.
Ninety-two language features from C# 5 to C# 14, grouped into ten themes with the reasoning behind each one.
Two books, one stack. Agents teaches you to build and orchestrate; RAG teaches you to ground them in your own data. They are two halves of the same problem — an agent without retrieval is fluent and confident about nothing in particular.
Code in the text is not pseudocode. It comes from a companion repository that builds clean from a fresh clone, and each snippet traces back to a specific file.
Written against stable, generally available releases — .NET 10 LTS, C# 14, Microsoft Agent Framework 1.16, EF Core 10 — so the samples do not break next Tuesday.
Hosting, observability, evaluation, security, cost and latency are chapters, not afterthoughts. The parts that decide whether a demo survives contact with real users.
Rachid Dahir designs systems for the long haul. A software architect, technical author, and educator based in Morocco, he has spent over a decade building enterprise-grade .NET solutions in financial services, healthcare, and large-scale enterprise environments — where reliability, performance, and clean architecture are not optional.
His books are written for developers who are ready to move beyond tutorials: rigorous, production-grounded, and clear enough that advanced topics never feel out of reach.
More about the author and the imprint