Carl and Richard chat with James Montemagno about his experiences building Xamarin applications. But first, a little history, James first getting involved in mobile development, finding Xamarin, culminating with being hired by Xamarin and going on the road trip with .NET Rocks! James talks about the kinds of apps he's been building using the tools, how he organizes his projects for cross-platform development, what's in his toolbox and what he's adding to the community-at-large to help developers...
Apr 30, 2014•55 min
Carl and Richard talk to Udi Dahan about the state of NServiceBus. NServiceBus is Udi's on-going development effort to make the development and maintenance of complex, distributed systems easier. The conversation digs into how developers fall into the N+1 trap of adding more and more interactions between different applications until the system becomes unmanageable - or force the interaction to take place at the very back end of the system, like the database, leading to slow interactions and comp...
Apr 29, 2014•56 min
Carl and Richard talk to Tim Thomas about his thoughts around holistic design. And Tim means it - thinking about all levels of design, not just the UI, but how the whole application goes together. The conversation digs into the debate around skeuomorphism and how technology users themselves are evolving. Lots of broad thinking about the state of technology and how to best interact with your users to inspire and delight! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations...
Apr 24, 2014•54 min
Carl and Richard talk to Neil Black from the XBox team about SmartGlass. SmartGlass is Microsoft's technology for utilizing smartphones and tablets as an extension of the XBox. Neil talks about the various roles that the 'second screen' can play in XBox applications and games. The conversation digs into how SmartGlass works with television events to create a more social experience, how you can provide secret information to game players on an otherwise shared screen, and more! If you're up for do...
Apr 23, 2014•45 min
While at DevIntersection in Orlando, Carl and Richard sat down to chat with Zoiner Tejada about his work instrumenting cloud-based web sites. Zoiner talks about using a wide variety of features in Google Analytics to instrument his Azure apps, including going directly to the Analytics APIs to do instrumentation of other kinds of apps, connecting up just about anything that can speak HTTP! The second half of the conversation dives into utilizing this analysis - with a long chat about what a real ...
Apr 22, 2014•52 min
Carl and Richard chat with Brian Noyes about the state of affairs with WPF, Windows 8 and the Prism project. Brian starts out the conversation talking about WPF is far from dead - Microsoft continues to invest in it, and lots of folks, including Brian's customers, are building great applications with WPF. This leads to a discussion about how the changes to Windows 8 at Build affect the WPF story and development in general - a huge topic area that warrants a bunch more shows. Finally, Brian digs ...
Apr 17, 2014•56 min
Carl and Richard talk to Burke Holland about building mobile apps. But the conversation starts out with an announcement - Telerik's KendoUI is going open source! Burke talks a bit about the history of KendoUI and how it has evolved over the years, including a KendoUI Mobile (which is also open source). That leads to a discussion about mobile development as a whole, including his preferred tools and styles for building apps across different mobile platforms, comparing native, hybrid and web devel...
Apr 16, 2014•54 min
Carl and Richard chat with Richard Astbury about the Microsoft Research project known as Orleans. Orleans brings the Actor model of development to C# - the Actor model is typically found in functional languages, but you can write functional C#, so why not? Richard talks about Orleans being used to run Halo 4, where hundreds of thousands of players connected with each other between hundreds of Azure instances. Orleans was officially released into the wild at Microsoft Build. Looking at scalable s...
Apr 15, 2014•54 min
Carl and Richard go back to space with Uncle Bob! What started at NDC last Fall finishes today! But first, a quick conversation about an episode with Alan Stevens around the software craftsmanship movement, which Uncle Bob is a key part of. Then off to interstellar space! Bob pulls no punches, jumping straight into why nuclear technologies are key to significant space travel. Lots of history in this show too, talking about NERVA engines, Project Orion, Bussard Ram Engines and more! No warp drive...
Apr 10, 2014•51 min
Carl and Richard talk to John Papa about the current state of Single Page Application development. John digs into his latest focus on libraries, the constant evolution in the Javascript world, and how AngularJS is still a big pile of awesome. The conversation also turns a bit philosophical, with a discussion of Javascript being the assembly language of the web, and how languages like Dart, CoffeeScript and TypeScript create abstractions over assembly language to make web applications more mainta...
Apr 09, 2014•52 min
Carl and Richard chat with Nicholas Blumhardt about his work on Serilog, a structured logging tool. But first, the conversation dives a bit into Octopus Deploy, an awesome tool for helping you manage your application packages and help deploy them to testing, pre-production, production, and so on. Then on to the main event - Nicholas' amazing Serilog product. Logging is a pain, and Serilog makes it as painless as possible - one line per log entry, and configuration to write your log anywhere: tex...
Apr 08, 2014•48 min
Carl and Richard talk to Hugh Jones about EU Data Protection laws. But first, a long discussion about the NSA revelations and the surveillance culture we're living in today. Hugh talks about the evolving perceptions around privacy and how data needs to be better protected. From there, Hugh dives into the EU Data Protection laws, which apply not only to companies doing business in the EU, but companies outside of the EU that are handling EU citizen data. The focus is on personally identifiable in...
Apr 03, 2014•52 min
The first of the new Tablet Shows as .NET Rocks episodes, Carl and Richard talk to Scott Allen about the continued evolution of JavaScript. The conversation starts out with a comment from a listener about a past show with Scott on Modernizr, and Scott talks about how things have changed since then - the focus on newer browsers (if IE9 counts as new) means that the tool needs change. Scott also talks about what new features are moving into the browser, reducing the library load your web page need...
Apr 02, 2014•52 min
A flash from the past! Carl and Richard chat with Robert Scoble! Carl and Robert go back to the VBits days and the beginning of the public internet, the first blogs and Robert's time at Microsoft. Then the conversation turns briefly to Robert's work at Rackspace and their attempt to make the cloud even better. Robert also talks about his book the Age of Context, the stories they collected to create the book and a vision of the future! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/don...
Apr 01, 2014•53 min
Carl and Richard talk to Marcel de Vries about CodedUI - the test functionality built into Visual Studio that nobody knows about. CodedUI tests are tests built to automatically operate your UI so that you can test your application top-to-bottom, no short cuts. Marcel talks about how CodedUI tests are actually built using a test recorder and then tweaking the tests to increase coverage. You can build tables of data to use for entry to challenge boundary testing, add additional assertions and vali...
Mar 27, 2014•56 min
Carl and Richard chat with Micheal Learned about modern release management with Visual Studio. The conversation starts like many do when it comes to ALM: what's hard, and what's easy. And let's face it - releasing software properly is often hard! Micheal talks about the various pitfalls that folks fall into around releasing software and how today's environment just won't tolerate those mistakes any more. This leads to a discussion about release pipelines (check out the great doc in the show note...
Mar 25, 2014•56 min
Well, you knew this was coming - a geek out on the not-fun topic of nuclear accidents. Richard runs down the fundamentals of nuclear accidents, with some story telling around what happened at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Then on to the main event - Fukushima. The situation is serious, but progress is being made and the Japanese remain committed to fully cleaning up the mess made there. So is nuclear power worth the risk? Be part of this conversation; it's certainly not done yet! Support this...
Mar 20, 2014•55 min
Carl and Richard talk to Amber DeRosa and Alicia Hatter about usability testing. The conversation starts out by digging into what usability testing is all about - actually looking at how users are using your software... or perhaps would want to use your software. Amber and Alicia talk about working through usability studies even before the software is built to get a feel for what the user would really like. And while software is being built, routine testing digs deeper into how the software will...
Mar 18, 2014•53 min
Carl and Richard talk to Alan Stevens about his views on software craftsmanship. Well, if he just agreed with it, it wouldn't be much of a show now, would it? Alan starts off talking about what it really means to be a craftsman - referencing such wonderful talents as Kevin Ryan Guitars and Steinway pianos as examples. This leads to a discussion about function, construction method and artistry - they're all part of making anything great. The conversation also digs into the whole medieval guild mo...
Mar 13, 2014•1 hr 2 min
Carl and Richard chat with Rob Conery about his open source project called Biggy. Biggy is a project in GitHub that puts a wrapper over top of Postgres (and SQL Server for that matter) to allow you to handle documents (aka JSON) efficiently and fast. Rob takes on thinking around noSQL in general, including graph and document databases. This leads to a whole discussion on what we should store and why. Rob mentions a ton of cool GitHub projects around storage (links in the show notes), and how muc...
Mar 11, 2014•54 min
While at the ModernApps2013 event in Mountain View, California, Carl and Richard got a chance to sit down with David Chappell and get his views on the changing landscape of software and software development. David talks about how applications have evolved into a devices+services model, where parts of the application live in the cloud, and the rest live in the various form factor devices that we all now use. Later the conversation turns to the evolution of Application Lifecycle Management, with c...
Mar 06, 2014•52 min
Carl and Richard talk to Neil Danson about his experiences with F#. The conversation starts off connecting Carl's thoughts on neural networks and a listener question - so what is the role of F# in the big data analytic world? Neil digs into how F# has permeated all types of development in the .NET world, even WPF! There's also some serious discussion about quality of code in F# and how Bob Martin's SOLID principles can be applied to functional programming. Support this podcast at — https://redci...
Mar 04, 2014•49 min
Carl and Richard chat with David McCarter about what it takes to be successful when you are interviewed for a job. But David goes well beyond just the interview - are you pursuing the right job for you? Are you looking for it the right way? The conversation digs into the value of recruiters and difference between good ones and bad ones. And when it comes to the interview itself, what preparation should you be doing? What are the right answers to classic questions like 'do you have any questions ...
Feb 27, 2014•52 min
Carl and Richard talk to Hilton Giesenow down in South Africa about what it takes to build real enterprise-class SharePoint systems. Hilton talks about the history of SharePoint and how it's twists-and-turns have left a bad taste in the mouth of some developers. The conversation also digs into the infrastructure side, which is unavoidable when it comes to SharePoint - there are lots of moving parts, and someone has to take charge of them. If you're keen on SharePoint, you owe it to yourself to h...
Feb 25, 2014•1 hr 3 min
Carl and Richard talk to Benjamin Howarth about his experiences working with Umbraco. Umbraco is a CMS system built in ASP.NET. Benjamin discusses how Umbraco has become a key part of his work with Universal Music - and how its affected the entire development practice. After a digression into DevOps, the conversation comes back around to what you need to know to be successful with Umbraco - where it can save you time, where you need to write code, and why you'd want to. This is open source the w...
Feb 20, 2014•1 hr 1 min
Carl and Richard talk to Michael Kennedy about using Python with .NET. Michael talks about the nature of Python and what makes it great (like whitespace counting). The conversation digs into the many forms of Python, some Windows friendly, some not so much, and many with specializations. Don't miss the discussion about the Zen of Python, and check out the huge collection of links for various Python bits! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations...
Feb 18, 2014•58 min
Time to geek out on Bitcoin! Well, more than Bitcoin, let's talk cryptocurrency in general. But first, a history lesson - Richard runs down the fundamentals of currency and banking from the neolithic era, ancient culture, the middle ages, all the way to today. The history lesson sets the stage for why cryptocurrencies have come into being. While there are many cryptocurrencies, the boys focus on Bitcoin since it's the big kahuna. Is it the Napster of its time, or the iTunes? Check the links and ...
Feb 13, 2014•1 hr 2 min
Carl and Richard talk to Tatham Oddie about his work with Neo4j. The conversation starts out exploring the core concepts behind graph databases - of which Neo4j is one. This leads to a more general conversation about NoSQL, what it's good for and where it struggles. Can NoSQL and SQL work side by side? You bet! Tatham talks about some of the applications he's built using both technologies, and how your thinking has to change to really take advantage of all your choices. Support this podcast at —...
Feb 11, 2014•1 hr 3 min
Carl and Richard talk to Jonathan Zuck about the state of software patents today. The conversation starts out talking about some of the craziness around software patents - patent trolls, extortion-like letters and the like. Jonathan talks about the changes made by the US to patent law in 2012, and how the biggest challenge today is cleaning up poorly written patents from the DotComBoom era. Also mentioned is a document for application developers created by ACT Online for what to do if you receiv...
Feb 06, 2014•1 hr 1 min
While at the Denver stop of the ModernApps2013 tour, Carl and Richard talk to Tim Huckaby about the latest on the Kinect. The Xbox One comes with the Kinect 2, which by summer 2014 will be available for PCs. The conversation starts out explaining the differences between the old Kinect and new (it's three times better!) and some ideas of what can be done with it. But don't stop there - from gesture comes mind control and more! The NUI continues to evolve - jump in and explore! Support this podcas...
Feb 04, 2014•1 hr 3 min
