Jimmy Bogard: MediatR & AutoMapper - Episode 356 | Azure & DevOps Podcast

Today's guest is a true heavyweight in the .NET open-source world — someone whose work has quietly but profoundly shaped the way countless developers build software. Jimmy Bogard is the creator and maintainer of two of the most widely used OSS libraries in the .NET ecosystem: AutoMapper and MediatR. If you've ever tried to simplify object mapping or decouple application logic, chances are you've used his tools. Based in Austin, Texas, Jimmy is an independent software consultant and a perennial recipient of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award every single year since 2009. That's more than a decade and a half of consistent, community-driven excellence. AutoMapper alone has been around for 17 years and has racked up hundreds of millions of downloads. It started as a personal tool to streamline development for client projects and grew into a global standard for object mapping.

Topics of Discussion:

[3:15] What keeps Jimmy passionate about coding?

[5:19] The decision to commercialize both libraries.

[6:33] What dual licensing means in practice.

[12:11] Which version of each library will include the license change?

[16:26] Current major versions of AutoMapper (v14) and MediatR (v12).

[17:28] MediatR: the problem it solves and how it structures code.

[20:45] Organizing code by use case.

[26:00] AutoMapper: what it is and why it helps.

[33:28] API design strategy and tailoring endpoints to use cases.

[37:25] OpenAPI vs asyncAPI for message-based systems.

[41:49] Blazor WebAssembly and remote handlers.