// the find
davidfowl/Todos
Various todo list backend API implementations
A collection of minimal API todo backends from David Fowl, one of the ASP.NET Core architects at Microsoft. Each subfolder shows a different architectural approach to the same problem — minimal APIs, controllers, DI patterns, JWT auth — making it useful as a reference when you want to see the official idiomatic way to wire something up in .NET.
Coming from an ASP.NET Core team member, the patterns here are authoritative — if you want to know how minimal APIs are supposed to look, this is closer to ground truth than most blog posts. The side-by-side structure (same domain, different approach) makes it easy to compare controller vs minimal API without noise. The JWT auth samples include a working EF Core identity setup with a sample.http file, which saves time when you just need a working starting point. TodoWithNoRequestDelegate shows a low-level pattern most tutorials skip entirely.
Last commit was November 2022, so it's sitting on .NET 6/7-era patterns — things like typed results, output caching, and keyed services that shipped later aren't here. The README is a single line with no explanation of which sample to look at for what purpose, so you have to open each folder to figure out the differences. There are no tests anywhere, which is fine for demos but means there's nothing showing how to test minimal API endpoints either. The samples stop at the happy path — no validation, no error handling, no pagination — so you can't lift them into production directly.