Store Application Performance Metadata in a Database Using AOP in ASP.NET Core

Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) is a programming paradigm that attempts to increase the modularity, maintainability, and flexibility of your application while overcoming the traditional Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) limitations.

- Joydip Kanjilal

AOP adds a new programming concept, known as an aspect, which are reusable, modular pieces of code that can solve common problems like logging, performance management, exception handling, configuration management, and security. Aspects can be used to combine similar concerns into a single unit and applied to an application's core logic via weaving.

This article compares AOP to OOP and Procedural Programing, and provides a deep dive into AOP, explaining why it’s useful, and illustrating how you can optimize performance of an ASP.NET Core application using AOP and then store the captured performance metadata in a database.

If you’re to work with the code examples discussed in this article, you need the following installed in your system:

• Visual Studio 2022 • .NET 8.0 • ASP.NET 8.0 Runtime If you don’t already have Visual Studio 2022 installed on your computer, you can download it from here: https:// visualstudio.microsoft.​com/downloads/.

In this article, I'll examine the following points:

• Procedural, OOP, and AOP programming styles and their benefits

• AOP and its features, benefits, and downsides

• The core concepts of AOP

• How to use Autofac to create a memory cache interceptor

• How to use PostSharp to build an application that stores application performance metadata in a database

• How to use PostSharp to store CPU and memory usage details in a database