When Your Use Case Half-Succeeds: Designing for Partial Failure in .NET

This article discusses the common problem of partial failure in .NET applications when a use case involves multiple external systems (e.g., payment, email, database). It uses a 'place order' example to illustrate how a single user action can lead to inconsistent states, such as duplicate charges or lost orders. The author categorizes side effects into three types (transactional, external reversible, external irreversible) and provides strategies for designing use cases that fail loudly and recover safely, including when to use the Outbox pattern. It is a technical guide for software developers working on resilient systems.