So how do you track errors in production? JD Trask talks to Carl and Richard about raygun.io, a service for instrumenting your clients and servers in production and feed errors directly to your project tracking and bug reporting systems. The conversation digs into how to deal with errors in your application in a way that actually delights your users - sending emails letting them know you saw they had a problem and are working on it, and being able to see the details of the problems early and oft...
Apr 21, 2015•49 min
Are you taking care of your personal brand? Eileen Fisher talks to Carl and Richard about what it means to have a personal brand, how to define, cultivate and care for it over time. In the end, a personal brand is simply what people know you for, and everyone has one, whether they're working on it intentionally or not! Eileen dives into what makes an effective brand and why you want to own and grow it - whether it is to get new projects or a promotion. This leads to a conversation around profess...
Apr 16, 2015•55 min
The Three Ps: Passion, People and Participation. Carl and Richard talk to Mike Benkovich about his passion around the three Ps. The conversation starts first with a tour of favorite technologies, including a long conversation around the evolution of XAML and the challenges of modern development with a diverse set of clients. That impassioned discussion turns meta as Mike brings up the three Ps and what it means to work on things you truly care about with people that matter you. Can you really ca...
Apr 15, 2015•52 min
So how does Docker change development? While at the Nebraska Code Camp, Carl and Richard chatted with Seth Lachner about his work with Docker and the impact it has had on him as a developer. Seth comes from the old school open source world of Linux and C, and has worked with Docker for a long time - he recognized the potential early on. The conversation digs into the concepts of Docker as a virtualization entity on top of an operating system, hooking tightly into the kernel of the operating syst...
Apr 14, 2015•50 min
How do you deal with failure? Carl and Richard talk to Dustin Thostenson about his experiences with failure and how they made him a better developer. The conversation starts out with a discussion of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and how that ultimately maps to our needs as developers as well. The needs build on each other, and you can have a higher-level need without a lower-level need being fulfilled. Dustin talks about how this hierarchy informs his understanding of a prospective employee during...
Apr 09, 2015•52 min
What does it mean to be a modern mobile developer? While at the Nebraska Code Camp, Carl and Richard talked to Heather Downing about her recent dive into mobile development. In only a few years, Heather has been involved in a number of cool projects and talks about learning on the fly to build native, hybrid, and web-based mobile applications. The conversation explores the advantages and disadvantages of each of the stacks, and the enthusiasm that comes from being effective and successful even w...
Apr 08, 2015•52 min
How did you learn to debug? While at the Nebraska Code Camp, Carl and Richard talked to Joel Kauffman about debugging practices. Rarely is debugging taught in classes, arguably because all school code is perfect. But code in the real world has bugs, and finding those bugs can be challenging. Joel talks about helping developers understand how debugging works, utilizing stack traces, working backward through code, using watches, and so on. The conversation also digs into various tools available fo...
Apr 07, 2015•51 min
At the Nebraska Code Camp, Carl and Richard moderated a panel discussion with Mads Kristensen, Lee Brandt, Josh Broton, and Robert Boedigheimer exploring the state of web development on the Microsoft stack. Of course, the first topic is the upcoming ASP.NET vNext and its switch over to open source, along the way letting go of some legacy features including Web Forms. The panel also discussed various JavaScript libraries, when they should be used and when plain old VanillaJS is a better way to go...
Apr 02, 2015•50 min
How are you thinking about UX these days? Carl and Richard chat with Danielle Cooley about her talk at the Nebraska Code Camp around user experience, efficiency and effectiveness of design. Danielle talks about her background in biotechnical design and the challenges of bringing biology (that's us) and technology together in an effective way - including web design! The conversation explores a variety of effective designs: it's not just about speed and simplicity, sometimes it's more important to...
Apr 01, 2015•57 min
What's the difference between an Azure Web Site and Web App? Not at thing! Carl and Richard talk to Scott Hunter about the latest announcements from Microsoft about Azure App Service. Azure App Service brings together Azure Web Sites, Mobile Services and a whole bunch of other goodness. Scott explains how Microsoft has unified all of these services under one umbrella to make it easier to buy and use. If it speaks HTTP or HTTPS, it's an Azure App Service. Then on to the new stuff, including Logic...
Mar 31, 2015•54 min
How do you do agile faster? Carl and Richard talk to Dan North about accelerating agile - but Dan has changed the name to Software, Faster. And even that is controversial, as Dan talks about focusing on delivering business needs, which may or may not involve code. The conversation also calls back to the Agile Manifesto and its abuse - it's not code with no documentation, its code over documentation! There's a great digression about the BBC giving away a million tiny computers to children to help...
Mar 26, 2015•57 min
Where can iBeacons take you? Carl and Richard talk to Greg Shackles about some of the opportunities available using beacon devices with smartphones. While iBeacons are specifically an Apple technology, there are lots of third party implementations that are more open. The balancing act of power and capability is a constant struggle for beacons. Things get really fun when you start looking at all the ways you can locate someone in an interior space using beacons - opening the door to a huge number...
Mar 25, 2015•53 min
Are you building in WPF? Are you using PRISM? Carl and Richard talk to Brian Noyes and Brian Lagunas about the PRISM project, which is a set of tools for building WPF apps. As Brian Noyes says, PRISM is the AngularJS of WPF! The conversation dives into the on-going evolution of PRISM, including support for Windows Phone and Universal Apps. The point of PRISM is composability, helping you to organize the elements of your application into something more maintainable, easier to test and continue to...
Mar 24, 2015•53 min
Is Spaced-Based Power viable? Time for a Geek Out! Carl and Richard chat about the state of space-based power, reviewing a number of designs going back to the 1970s. Can you really transmit enough power to make it worthwhile? How big does the satellite need to be? What's the best place to put the satellite? Is it a giant weapon when its done? Who will build it and why... and just how much is this going to cost? It's not all good news, but its interesting stuff - have a listen, and don't forget t...
Mar 19, 2015•59 min
Programming in Swift? Want to build Android apps too? Carl and Richard talk to Marc Hoffman of RemObjects about his Silver project - using Swift to program for Android. Swift is Apple's cool new language for developing iOS apps, making life easier than Objective C. Don't use Swift? No problem, how about Pascal - because RemObjects has Oxygene, which is a moderized version of Pascal. That doesn't work for you? Then how about C#? Because this tool set lets you write C# across all the platforms too...
Mar 18, 2015•55 min
So when do IT Pros become developers? Carl and Richard talk to Steve Evans about his operations folks writing code and dealing with all the challenges that everyone finds when they write, own and operate code. The code in question is primarily PowerShell, used to automate deployment. It needs testing, source control and everything else that code requires. Steve talks about how his operations folks have come to learn the same things that all developers need to learn, and for the most part, end up...
Mar 17, 2015•59 min
The awesome Kinect applications keep coming! Carl and Richard talk to Tim Huckaby about the on-going revolution of applications utilizing Kinect. While not especially popular in the traditional desktop setting, the Kinect is finding remarkable traction in retail and commercial spaces, as interactive signage and for connecting with customers. Tim talks about battling the creepiness factor - the ability of tools like Kinect to figure out who you are and what you're doing can be rather disconcertin...
Mar 12, 2015•57 min
Like beer? Are you using Untappd? Carl and Richard talk to creator Greg Avola about the phenomenon that is Untappd. What started as a simple tool to keep track of what beer he liked and didn't like has turned into a super popular app with millions of downloads. Greg talks about what it took to keep the app working as the number of users grew immensely, and how he and the team built the app to work on all sorts of different phones. In the end, the cornerstone of Untappd is the back end with an am...
Mar 11, 2015•54 min
What an amazing year for ScriptCS! Carl and Richard talk to Glenn Block about the latest developments in ScriptCS - comparing the state of affairs to the last time he was on a year previously. With Roslyn all but shipped, ScriptCS is going mainstream - perhaps it will even be bundled with Studio someday! In the meantime, Glenn and a host of other contributors have continued to extend ScriptCS to make it easier to deploy, share scripts and add additional functionality without having to work in Vi...
Mar 10, 2015•55 min
Are you user accounts secure? Carl and Richard talks to Troy Hunt about all the ways you can get your accounts stolen. So what should you store and how should you store it? Troy digs into the various encryption and hashing techniques available - and the many mistakes that have been made with them. Along the way expect yet another discussion about password management, it is an endless process. And while we're at it, SQL Injection is *still* the largest vulnerability out there. Fix it first! Suppo...
Mar 05, 2015•1 hr 1 min
How are you dealing with mobile testing? Karen Johnson talks to Carl and Richard about thinking through the big picture when it comes to testing. The conversation starts out with a discussion about the tools we've had for desktop and web testing for years that are still hard to come by on the mobile platform - like UI capture of touch, gestures and typing. Its just not that easy to do capture on a phone. The diversity of products is a huge part of the problem, but its also the rapidly evolving o...
Mar 04, 2015•55 min
ASP.NET continues to evolve! Carl and Richard talk to Mads Kristensen about the many amazing things he's working on in the web space, starting with Web Essentials! Mads explains how Web Essentials is a way to experiment with new features for ASP.NET, and that success comes when the feature is pulled into Visual Studio itself - and you get to be part of that process, it's all open source! The conversation turns to Visual Studio embracing the web development ecosystem to use the best tools for the...
Mar 03, 2015•1 hr 2 min
So what IoT device have you built? Carl and Richard talk to Suz Hinton about her experiences building IoT devices. Suz starts out talking about Meow Shoes, a pair of shoes she added sensors and an Arduino too - and used cat meows to test with. All sorts of hilarity ensues, but there are a number of interesting applications can be made from capturing someone's movements, even through their feet. The conversation turns to the dev stack - all Javascript, front and back! There are all sorts of libra...
Feb 26, 2015•57 min
How do you test your mobile applications? James Montemagno talk to Carl and Richard about various testing approaches for mobile apps. James talks about the Xamarin Test Cloud with thousands of different devices you can test against... for a fee of course. This leads to a conversation about automating UI testing, testing against local devices and only going to the cloud when you're ready to test on a larger diversity of phones. James also talks about the broadening range of devices out there, not...
Feb 24, 2015•59 min
So where is Azure at today? Carl and Richard talk to Michele Leroux Bustamante about her work with a number of customers utilizing Microsoft Azure. The conversation digs into what Michele considers new Azure vs. old Azure. She still has customers depending on web and worker roles, while many have moved purely over to WebSites. And the evolution continues, with better analytics, the beginnings of container technology taking over from regular VMs... we're still at the beginning of the cloud revolu...
Feb 24, 2015•59 min
How do you test your cross platform applications? Carl and Richard talk to Paul Mooney about building software in .NET and Java and wanting to use a common set of testing protocols. Tricky, but possible! The conversation focuses in on abstractions, which are key to creating sufficient separation of functionality to allow you to insert testing code regardless of what language you work in. And it turns out you can write tests for multiple languages if you're careful. Java and .NET are more similar...
Feb 19, 2015•51 min
So how do you build your cross-platform mobile apps? Carl and Richard talk to Troy Miles about his experiences building mobile apps with the Ionic Framework. Built over top of Adobe Cordova, Ionic takes over a lot of the plumbing code that you find yourself building in every mobile app. Ionic brings controls to the table in two forms - pure CSS components and CSS/JavaScript. You could write the CSS yourself (or maybe you couldn't), but why would you? Troy talks about some of the applications out...
Feb 18, 2015•49 min
Jez Humble is back and building a lean enterprise! Carl and Richard talk to Jez about continuous delivery and all that amazing DevOps stuff - but then we get to the serious bit, which is really about how DevOps is a manifestation of organizational change. You need buy-in from the top to make it happen, but it can't happen all at once. How do you make gradual improvements to present the power of a better culture with deeper understanding? Jez talks about the importance of metrics and measuring th...
Feb 17, 2015•53 min
Well, there goes another milestone - show 1100! Since Richard actually joined as co-host starting with show 100, that makes ONE THOUSAND .NET Rocks episodes together. Sure, there's 130 Tablet Shows, but who's counting? The conversation digs into a bunch of the gear used to make .NET Rocks and all the PWOP podcasts. We may not take ourselves too seriously, but we sure do take podcasting seriously. You wanna know how it's done? Have a listen! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-roc...
Feb 12, 2015•55 min
Are you ready for ECMAScript 6? Carl and Richard talk to Jafar Husain about some of the great new features coming in ECMAScript 6 - the next version of JavaScript, at least for now. Jafar talks about the fun and challenges of participating in the TC39 committee that developed the ES6 standard which is now being implemented by browser developers. Jafar digs into Promises, Yields, Proxies and more - lots of discussion about features you've come to love in languages like C# appearing in JavaScript!...
Feb 11, 2015•52 min
