About Tore Nestenius

Programmers Heaven started as two CD-ROMs that I published during my university studies (the story is on my blog’s About page). I then turned it into a website, an online community for developers that reached over 750,000 visitors a month at its peak. In 2000 I left my job to run it full time.

I ran the site mostly on my own, from development and hosting to selling the advertising that paid for it. It started in classic ASP and moved step by step to ASP.NET and C# on SQL Server, and to handle the traffic it was generated as static pages once a day. I sold Programmers Heaven in 2008. It is still the biggest project I have built, and it taught me how to run, administer and promote a website at scale.

After reading The Wiki Way, I was fascinated by the idea of a wiki: a shared knowledge base that anyone can add to. So in 2003 I wrote my own wiki engine in ASP.NET and used it to build CodePedia, “The Developers Encyclopedia”, a wiki for developers. It ran as a separate site next to Programmers Heaven and grew to over 2,000 pages.

In 2006 I published C# School, a free 338-page ebook that teaches C# and .NET from the ground up. It started as a series of lessons on Programmers Heaven. Another author wrote most of them, and I edited them into a book together with two other editors.

Over 16 chapters it goes from the language fundamentals and object-oriented programming to exception handling, delegates and events, Windows Forms, data access with ADO.NET, multithreading, files and streams, and the new features in C# 2.0, such as generics.

I made it free because I wanted to give something back to the developer community, and it can still be downloaded online.

I got involved with .NET in its beginnings in 2002. Bringing what I had learned so far together, I decided to work for a few years as an independent .NET consultant in Sweden, implementing various systems for e-commerce companies.

I co-founded Edument, which over the years grew to become a regional software consulting, development, and training company, with about 35 employees and offices in Helsingborg, Göteborg, Malmö, Stockholm and Prague.

I decided to leave Edument to return to my passions of teaching and consulting, becoming an independent consultant and trainer again with a focus on .NET, architecture, IdentityServer, web development and web security. Since the change, there have been quite a lot of developments!

New Courses: Over the last few years, I have released a wide range of practical and up-to-date courses on a range of areas in the world of development. There’s more to come!

.NET Skåne: I co-founded the .NET Skåne Meetup group, a community for connecting .NET developers together and sharing insights.

The Cloud Debugger for Azure: I decided to take the harder route for my AZ certifications and in the process developed a handy open-source debugger tool that you can use.

Microsoft .NET MVP Award: I was really proud to be recognized by Microsoft as an MVP in .NET. As someone who’s been active on the platform since it started in 2002, it was a really gratifying achievement.

Thanks for getting to know me here. If you’re curious about my training or consulting services, you can click the links below, or scroll down to find some handy content and open-source tools you can use.

I started focusing more on AI-driven development and scalable ways of sharing knowledge with developers worldwide.

AI and Coding Agents: I have been exploring how modern coding agents work under the hood, giving talks on the subject to more than 600 developers, and publishing tools to better understand and visualize their behavior, including the open-source project Coding Agent Explorer.

Recorded Video Courses: In 2026 I published my first recorded video course on Dometrain: Getting Started: Authentication and Authorization in .NET, 12 hours on authentication and authorization in ASP.NET Core, covering both the underlying concepts and practical implementation patterns. My second course, Getting Started: OpenID Connect, came out in October 2026.