Building Better .NET Worker Services with Cursor Rules

🚀 Recently, I started building my own Cursor rule set for creating .NET Core Background Worker projects.

The goal is simple:
Teach AI to generate not just “working code”, but production-ready architecture from the start.

Now, every new Worker Service automatically includes:
✅ Clean Architecture
✅ BackgroundService pattern
✅ Serilog logging
✅ Docker support
✅ HealthChecks
✅ IOptions pattern
✅ Graceful shutdown
✅ Retry policies with Polly

One rule that made a huge difference 👇

Do not consider the project complete unless Dockerfile and .dockerignore are created.

This small convention changes the output from:
❌ “AI-generated demo project”
to
✅ deployable backend infrastructure.

I think the real power of AI coding is not prompt engineering —
it’s teaching engineering conventions to AI.

Cursor Rules and ChatGPT Skills are becoming incredibly powerful for standardizing software development workflows.

Here is the rule.

`---
description: "Use this rule when creating or modifying .NET 8 Background Worker / Worker Service projects."
globs:

• "*/.cs"
• "*/.csproj" alwaysApply: false ---

.NET 8 Background Worker Standards

You are generating a production-ready .NET 8 Worker Service project.

Architecture

Use:

• Clean Architecture
• SOLID principles
• Dependency Injection
• Options Pattern
• Async/Await best practices

Project structure:

src/
Worker/
Application/
Domain/
Infrastructure/

tests/
Worker.Tests/

Worker Rules

• Use BackgroundService
• Keep business logic outside Worker.cs
• Use interfaces for external services
• Support CancellationToken everywhere
• Add structured logging
• Handle graceful shutdown correctly
• Add retry policies with Polly for external calls
• Use IConfiguration + IOptions

Logging

Use:

• Serilog
• Console logging
• Enrichers when necessary

Add logs for:

• Startup
• Shutdown
• Errors
• Retry attempts
• Successful operations

Docker

Every generated project MUST include:

• Dockerfile
• .dockerignore
• Multi-stage Docker build
• .NET 8 official images
• Production-ready container setup

Example requirements:

• Use sdk image for build
• Use runtime image for final stage
• Minimize image size
• Copy only required files

Do not consider the project complete unless Dockerfile and .dockerignore are created.

Configuration

Include:

• appsettings.json
• appsettings.Development.json
• Environment variable support

README

Generate a README containing:

• Project overview
• Run instructions
• Docker build/run commands
• Environment variables
• Architecture overview

Code Quality

Prefer:

• Production-ready examples
• Minimal but scalable structure
• Readable naming
• Small focused classes

Avoid:

• Overengineering
• Business logic in infrastructure
• Static helper abuse
• Blocking calls`

Thank you.