Getting back up to date
After some considerable time away from day-to-day product development, I needed to get my skills somewhere near current practice. Clean Architecture kept coming up. Uncle Bob’s essay is short. The samples people point at are not.
I could not, for the life of me, find an example that was not either totally over the top or just plain wrong in its implementation. So, as I often do in these situations, I ignored everybody else and did it my way.
The result is UnmessyCleanExample: four projects, dependencies pointing inward, and nothing else pretending to be a framework.
What is actually in it
- Domain: business logic and entities. No other project, no NuGet noise.
- Application: use cases and service interfaces. Depends on Domain only.
- Infrastructure: adapters. Data access and anything that talks to the outside world.
- BlazorWebApp: the UI. It depends inward; Domain does not know it exists.
That is the whole point of the exercise. Outer layers depend on inner ones. The core stays testable. I used the default Blazor template on .NET 10 / C# 14 shortly after Visual Studio 2026 GA, then carved it up until the arrows went the right way.
Did AI write it?
Some of it. The documentation in particular. Moan about that all you want; AI is here, I have got used to it, and I am really old in development terms. The structure is mine. If you disagree with it, that is fine. It helped me wrap my head around the idea, and it might help someone else too.
Repository
👉 github.com/markheydon/UnmessyCleanExample
Final thoughts
I did not need a reference architecture for a bank. I needed four boxes and a rule I could remember the next time I started a real app. This is that.