March 25, 2026 — Cyber RGV Monthly Meetup, McAllen Public Library
RGVDevs organizer Josh Morales returned to the Cyber RGV monthly meetup in March for a third talk, this time tracing two decades of API development in .NET from the very beginning to where things stand today.
The session starts back in 2002 with SOAP and ASMX files (clunky, XML-heavy, and painful by modern standards) moved through Windows Communication Foundation (more powerful, arguably more painful), then ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web API as the framework slowly gave APIs a real home of their own.
The story lands with ASP.NET Core and, finally, minimal APIs in .NET 6: a production-ready endpoint, complete with authentication, rate limiting, and OpenAPI documentation, in a handful of lines of code. No controllers, no startup boilerplate, just results.
The second half connected that history directly to AI application development, showing how naturally minimal APIs pair with the Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF). The live demo was a brand content engine that generates social posts, blog outlines, video ideas, and image prompts on demand.
A key moment showcasing the power of the framework: swapping the brand configuration from a cybersecurity company to a coffee shop and watching the exact same application produce completely on-brand content for each, without touching a single line of application logic.
A parallel-execution demo rounded things out, showing just how little ceremony .NET requires to run multiple AI tasks concurrently and aggregate the results.
This session was intentionally a teaser setup for a deep dive for our first official RGV Devs session on April 14, where the full source code, prompts, and architecture behind the brand content engine will get the complete walkthrough! If you want the whole story, the full recording of this session is on YouTube:
Watch: Create AI Apps with .NET Minimal APIs and MAF.
Two decades of API evolution boiled down to a handful of lines of code is exactly the kind of "wait, .NET can do that now?" moment RGVDevs loves putting in front of people.
A big thank-you to Cyber RGV for hosting this session as well — their continued support has helped get RGVDevs off the ground. Learn more about their work at rgv-cyber.org.
Want in on what's next? Join the conversation in the RGVDevs Facebook Group and keep an eye on rgvdevs.net for upcoming sessions.