Anil Channa: 20+ Years
Building on Microsoft .NET
From writing his first .NET 1.1 console app in 2003 to leading a team of 15+ engineers on .NET 10 today. This is the story of nearly two decades spent inside the Microsoft stack, through every framework, every breaking change, every greenfield product shipped, and every legacy system that needed saving.
Every Era of .NET, First-Hand
Anil didn't read about these frameworks in a textbook. He shipped production code in every single one of them.
First Steps with .NET Framework 1.1
Microsoft released .NET Framework 1.1 in April 2003. Anil was among the early adopters in India who saw it as the future of enterprise software. He spent evenings working through C# fundamentals, console apps, and Windows Forms, building muscle memory for a language that would define his career.
Full-Time .NET: Enterprise Projects Begin
With .NET 2.0 (Oct 2005) introducing generics and .NET 3.0 (Nov 2006) bringing WCF, WPF, and Windows Workflow Foundation, the platform matured rapidly. Anil made .NET his full-time profession, building data-driven desktop applications, business logic layers with ADO.NET, and Windows Services for enterprise clients.
ASP.NET WebForms, LINQ & Entity Framework
.NET 3.5 (Nov 2007) introduced LINQ and Entity Framework, transforming how developers queried data. Anil mastered ASP.NET WebForms, building complex multi-tier web applications for clients across retail, government, and logistics. He worked heavily with ASMX Web Services and WCF, connecting .NET backends to external systems.
Trip Management and Route Optimisation on Early Smartphones
Anil worked for a national passenger transportation management company serving transit agencies, school districts and the healthcare industry, on a trip management and route optimisation system driven by GPS-enabled smartphones. Delivering it meant supporting a genuinely fragmented mobile landscape and pushing updates to drivers in the field through each manufacturer's own notification infrastructure: Apple, Google and RIM's BlackBerry, years before a common approach to mobile push existed.
WCF Mastery: MCTS Certification Achieved
With .NET 4.0 (Apr 2010) came the Managed Extensibility Framework, dynamic types, and parallel computing. Anil earned his Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) certification in WCF, validating deep expertise in service-oriented architecture, bindings, contracts, and distributed systems. He was building complex service meshes when microservices were still a blog post.
Business Analysis Alongside Development
For three years Anil worked client-facing as a business analyst as well as an engineer, sitting with clients to draw out what they actually needed, writing the proposals, then building the result. It is the period that taught him to separate what a client asks for from what they require, and it is why our assessment engagements are led by someone who has done both sides of that conversation rather than handing you an estimate written by a salesperson.
async/await, Web API & .NET Core 1.0
.NET 4.5–4.6 brought async/await and Web API. Then in June 2016, Microsoft launched .NET Core 1.0, the cross-platform, open-source revolution. Anil embraced it early, migrating projects to .NET Core while maintaining legacy codebases for clients who weren't ready. This dual expertise, legacy fluency and modern capability, is what Softwiz was later built on.
Softwiz Infotech: Turning Experience Into a Company
With .NET 5 (Nov 2020) unifying the platform and dropping the 'Core' branding, the modern era began. Anil founded Softwiz Infotech in 2021 after nearly two decades of hands-on .NET work. Today the team of 15+ engineers works across .NET 6 (LTS), .NET 8 (LTS), and .NET 10 (LTS, Nov 2025), covering legacy maintenance, modernisation, and greenfield development.
The AI Era: Embedding Intelligence into .NET
After twenty years inside one stack, the AI work arrived in another. The team builds AI services in Python — LangGraph agents that tool-call existing .NET APIs, open-weight models run on our own hardware, computer vision over camera feeds — and wires them into .NET applications that have been running for a decade or more. The focus isn't new AI apps in isolation; it's giving 10-, 15-, even 20-year-old .NET systems the capabilities users now expect, without rewriting them.
Why Legacy Systems Deserve Respect
“Every legacy codebase was once someone's best idea. It was written by developers who cared, for a business that needed it. When that system still runs 15 years later, that's not a liability. That's resilience. Our job is to honour that resilience while preparing it for the next 15 years.”
Legacy is Not Technical Debt
A system running in production for 10+ years has survived real-world chaos. That resilience deserves respect and the right maintenance extends its life by another decade.
Depth Over Breadth
Softwiz doesn't do 50 different technologies. We do .NET, deeply, from Framework 1.1 to .NET 10. That focus is a deliberate choice.
You Speak to the Engineer
When you contact Softwiz, you talk directly to Anil or a senior team member, not an account manager who relays messages to a developer.
Building New or Maintaining Legacy? Anil Has Done Both.
20+ years of hands-on .NET, from shipping greenfield .NET 10 products today to stabilising systems first written in .NET 1.1. Whatever stack your project sits on, there's a good chance he's worked in it.