At the NDC London conference, Carl and Richard talk to Steve Sanderson about his work on the Azure Portal and building arguably the greatest Single Page Application (SPA) around today. Steve talks about the approach the Azure Portal team has taken to deal with memory management as well as a flexible plugin architecture that allows the various Azure related teams to plug into the common "shell" component of the Azure Portal. The conversation digs into the challenges of SPAs as the scale and utili...
Dec 17, 2014•51 min
While at NDC London at the Excel Center, Carl and Richard talked to Phil Trelford about building your own compiler. First off, why would you do that? Phil talks about the various ways that compiler technology can be used and help improve your own understand of languages and tools. You probably don't need to replace the C# compiler for your applications, but you might want to use parsing technology to provide algorithmic support in your applications. The power of F# is apparent when you start wor...
Dec 16, 2014•1 hr
While at the NDC London conference, Carl and Richard talk to Liam Westley about building your own software business. It starts with the idea that the most destructive thing to your software business is support calls - or more broadly, the accumulated cost of your past business. The conversation digs into the power of being a business of one, rather than having employees, and thinking beyond just your development work, digging into all the other aspects of business: marketing, sales, accounting, ...
Dec 11, 2014•53 min
While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard talk to Shay Friedman about the Chrome Developer Tools. The conversation starts out talking a bit about the state of web development, the jump in JavaScript performance, and the huge increase in the complexity of web applications - which naturally leads to the challenge of debugging said JavaScript-based applications. Enter the Chrome Developer Tools. Firefox was the original web developer browser, but Chrome has slid into that slot with more capabilities...
Dec 10, 2014•51 min
While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talk to Ian Cooper about hexagonal architectures. Turns out the important part is not the six sides - it's the idea of ports and adapters. Originally talked about by Alistair Cockburn, this is an architectural approach that focuses on being tolerant to testing as well as separating commands from querying. It's not quite Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS), but you can see it from there! Ian discusses testing in a hexagonal architecture and how Te...
Dec 09, 2014•53 min
Julie is back and all about the latest version of Entity Framework - version 7! The conversation starts out with a bit of a state of the union, with Julie describing how moving Entity Framework to GitHub has opened up an amazing level of communication between the EF team and regular developers. Which leads to the scarier part of the discussion: The breaking changes coming to EF7 from EF6. Like ASP.NET vNext, EF7 represents a substantial break. But Julie says you shouldn't worry, there are lots o...
Dec 04, 2014•1 hr 2 min
Carl and Richard talk to David Božjak about the Lumia Imaging SDK... or is it the Nokia Imaging SDK? Caught in the midst of a name change since the acquisition of Nokia phones, the SDK is called Lumia Imaging on the blog sites, but is still Nokia Imaging on NuGet. Certainly it'll all be Lumia some day. David talks about the huge array of features available in the SDK to take photos, apply filters and effects to them, and then render the images. The conversation digs into how to handle huge image...
Dec 03, 2014•46 min
Carl and Richard talk to Rocky Lhotka about where universal apps in Visual Studio are really going. But first, a bit of a landscape discussion, especially a laugh about the "comeback" of .NET and C#. Did Xamarin save the day? Rocky talks about how universal apps aren't all that universal, but with Xamarin in the mix, you start to look at a common code base for desktop, laptop, tablet and mobile development. Almost. Maybe. It's always more complicated than you think! But Rocky is optimistic that ...
Dec 02, 2014•1 hr
Carl and Richard talk to Itamar Syn-Hershko about adding search technologies to your application. The conversation starts out focused on what SQL Server can do for search... the LIKE operator. What about NoSQL? Itamar talks about the role that data stores like RavenDB can play as far as finding data. But then you get to dedicated indexing and search tools like Lucerne.NET, ElasticSearch and Solr. Itamar talks about the advantages of using these tools in terms of speed of indexing and search, as ...
Nov 27, 2014•54 min
Carl and Richard talk to Jonathan Stark about the wearable landscape today. But first, a crazy story about a Starbucks card. Jon is the guy behind Jonathan's Card, where he put a Starbucks card online for folks to add money to and buy coffee with. Crazy! Next up is a deep dig into the spectrum of watch like devices available today - Samsung Gear, Pebble, the Apple Watch and more! The variety of programming opportunities is just getting bigger. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-...
Nov 26, 2014•1 hr 1 min
While at the MVP Summit, Carl and Richard sat down with Pratap Lakshman, Peli de Halleux and Nikolai Tillman to talk about automating unit testing in .NET. Originally a Microsoft Research Project, PEX is now part of Visual Studio 2015, and digs deep into the IL of your application to generate a huge variety of unit tests. The team also talks about some of the other cool projects they've built using the PEX engine, including CodeHunt, a tool using testing to teach you to program. Check out PEX on...
Nov 25, 2014•59 min
Carl and Richard talk about two space accidents that happened in the same week - the explosion of Orbital Science's Antares Rocket on October 28 and the breakup of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo on October 31. Richard begins with the Orbital Science's mission to supply the International Space Station. Part of NASA's Commercial Resupply Services, the ORB-3 mission included the Cygnus spacecraft carrying supplies to the ISS as well as a number of smaller payloads, including the Arkyd-3. The Antare...
Nov 20, 2014•54 min
Carl and Richard talk to Rob Irving and Simon Jackson about advertising on mobile apps. The conversation starts out with Ad Duplex, which is an ad exchange and a way to advertise your mobile app on other mobile apps like yours - all in an effort to get more users. Rob talks about alternative ways to get users, such as pursuing reviews, using crowdsouring and in general taking marketing seriously. Simon digs into more traditional advertising using the open source Adrotator library, which takes th...
Nov 19, 2014•53 min
Carl and Richard talk to Scott Ford about taking over existing software projects. There's lots of negativity around existing code, calling them "brownfield" and "legacy projects." Scott looks at existing projects more like an older home that has been well used, but needs updating. The conversation digs into how to understand not only the code of the existing application, but also the intent of the app - more focus on why things are the way they are, rather than just the how parts. But once you u...
Nov 18, 2014•52 min
Carl and Richard talk to David Dennison about his complete change of development career: From C# and .NET to Scala and the JVM! David talks about getting work at iTrellis, and their move to a services stack of Scala, Akka and Spray. The discussion focuses on the many things that are the same between the platforms, as well as the differences - it's all managed code in the end! David also talks about getting into the mindspace of the new platform he is working in, as well as dealing with entirely ...
Nov 13, 2014•51 min
Carl and Richard talk to Greg Shackles about making continuous deployment work in the mobile apps space. The conversation starts out with the projects that Greg is currently working on, and the need to get them deployed routinely to iOS and Android devices - this means, of course, deployment to the AppStore, which only goes so fast. Greg talks about avoiding the AppStores by finding ways to make changes internally, rather than a full deploy. The discussion goes down his preferred toolchain and i...
Nov 12, 2014•54 min
Carl and Richard talk to Michael Van Sickle about developing web applications using the Dojo Toolkit. Not heard of it? You're not alone, but Dojo has been around since 2006! Michael talks about Dojo's focus on backward compatibility, making sure that web applications built with the framework continue to function as HTML, Javascript and CSS evolve. Heck, Dojo started before HTML 5 browsers were even available! If you're concerned about the longevity of your web applications, you should check out ...
Nov 11, 2014•53 min
Carl and Richard talk to Roger Johansson about Akka.NET, a library to help you build concurrent and distributed applications. Akka.NET is a port of Akka for Java, and is open source on GitHub. As Roger explains, Akka.NET uses the actor model to create a level of abstraction ideal for building concurrent applications. This is similar to the Orleans Framework from show 969, but with some distinct advantages. The conversation gets into how folks focus on object orientation can struggle with concurr...
Nov 06, 2014•47 min
Carl and Richard talk to Laurent Bugnion about Xamarin Forms. Now that the forms capability has been out for a few months, Laurent digs into the strengths and weaknesses of the approach. The goal of Xamarin forms is to simplify cross-platform mobile development between iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Has it delivered? Laurent focuses in on building one project, but different builds with different bits of code for each device. You can't have one code base run everywhere, nor do you want to - ther...
Nov 05, 2014•59 min
Carl and Richard talk to Brian Randell about the latest on Visual Studio Online (VSO). As Brian explains, this isn't about putting Visual Studio itself into the cloud, but rather surrounding your copy of Visual Studio with services in the cloud that make development easier. The conversation goes down the list, starting with source control in general and TFS specifically. One huge advantage of VSO - you don't have to deploy TFS yourself! Beyond source control and task management there are deploym...
Nov 04, 2014•54 min
While at the NSBConf in Brooklyn, New York, Carl and Richard moderated a panel of Udi Dahan, Ted Neward, Oren Eini and Yves Goeleven about the future of the service bus. And the future is bright! Without much contention, the panel focused in on the advantages of message passing and creating coherent boundaries between application layers to make scaling and management much easier when building large applications. There is also a discussion about rendering the update of components asynchronous, so...
Oct 30, 2014•1 hr 2 min
Fresh from the keynote at Tech Ed Europe in Barcelona, Jeremy Thake talks to Carl and Richard about the latest announcements around Office 365. The development story in the cloud continues to evolve, and Jeremy talks about the Office 365 APIs going into general availability, along with an Android SDK. The iOS SDK is right behind it, currently in preview and ready for you to start building apps for iPhone and iPad that work with Office 365. The story is huge - new programming models for Exchange ...
Oct 29, 2014•52 min
Carl and Richard talk to Jen Myers about user interface design on the web. The conversation starts out with a broad focus on what has been happening on the web with HTML 5 - the emergence of the Single Page Application (SPA) and the improvements on separation of data, structure and formatting. Jen focuses in on the challenges of the least mature of the trifecta of web applications - CSS. CSS is only at version 3; HTML and JavaScript are older and more mature. And while CSS3 is a pretty good vers...
Oct 28, 2014•52 min
A Geek Out with a real astrophysicist! Carl and Richard get giddy geeky with the amazing Dr. Amber Straughn who is part of the Project Science team for the James Webb Space Telescope. Considered the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, Amber talks about how the JWST is bigger and different - with a six meter reflector and orbiting 1.5 million kilometres from Earth. The conversation digs into why the JWST is looking into the infrared spectrum, what the cosmological red shift is all about and ...
Oct 23, 2014•55 min
Ready to be scared? Carl and Richard talk to Troy Hunt about the security concerns of the Internet of Things. Troy does what he does best - run down a series of scenarios with existing IoT devices like the LIFX Light Bulb and talk through how they can be exploited. Exploit a light bulb? Sure - to get access to your WiFi! The conversation explores key ideas for protecting your gear, why you need defence-in-depth and what a robust API really looks like - especially if you hack it first! Support th...
Oct 22, 2014•58 min
Carl and Richard talk to Miguel Castro about his work building modern web pages for his clients. After a couple of years working hard on WPF applications, coming over to the web world was a challenge - but as Miguel discovered, the MVVM pattern he used in WPF apps works great on the web as well! Miguel talks about working with Knockout and other libraries on his way to discovering a comfortable pattern of development using AngularJS and ASP.NET MVC together. That's right, using ASP.NET MVC to do...
Oct 21, 2014•59 min
Carl and Richard talk to Jeff Palermo about building new applications without making the mistakes that end up creating legacy projects. The conversation starts out with Jeff describing ClearMeasure, his new organization focused on end-to-end services for his customers - Jeff considers his organization an outsourced IT department, handling development and operations. This leads to the topic of building sustainable applications. Jeff details key steps he takes to make better quality applications, ...
Oct 16, 2014•1 hr 2 min
While at the NSBConf in Brooklyn, Carl and Richard talk to Oren Eini about the latest version of RavenDB. Oren talks about the huge number of changes that have happened in version 3 of RavenDB - it's come a long way from a little transactional document store of years ago! The conversation digs into how the feature set was developed; Oren talks about digging into various customer projects to see how they have pushed his product in ways he had never considered before. The discussion also digs into...
Oct 15, 2014•50 min
Kate Gregory is back! Carl and Richard chat with Kate about the state of C++ today. The conversation starts out with a discussion about the recent C++ conference in Redmond that brought the best-and-brightest in the industry together to talk about how C++ is currently being used and how the standards can continue to evolve. Kate talks about the challenges of the language, how it is not typically used for CRUD apps, but rather applications that live on rovers on Mars, in games, in drivers, operat...
Oct 14, 2014•55 min
Carl and Richard talk to Jimmy Bogard about his experiences scaling an MVC web site to thousands of pages and thousands of users. The conversation starts out focused on why to use MVC - comparing original ASP with ASP.NET Web Forms and MVC. Jimmy talks about the early days of MVC and the challenges of making a very new product work, but in exchange for some substantial benefits - but perhaps not the ones you'd think! Jimmy also digs into scaling an MVC web site across multiple servers, dealing w...
Oct 09, 2014•56 min
