While at NDC, Carl and Richard chat with Justin James about his deployment tool chain of NuGet, Chocolatey, Boxstarter and Vagrant. Each of these tools builds on the other, starting at the lowest level with specific libraries, working up through package managers, configuring operating systems, even provisioning cloud services. Justin talks about using the tools to get you to a configuration-as-code scenario, making installation not only reliable, but fast. There are lots of different ways to get...
Jun 30, 2015•54 min
While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard talk to Troy Hunt about all the scary stuff going on in security today. The conversation starts out recapping some discussion on passwords - how do we get past them? Troy also digs into the on-going issues of SQL Injection, still the number one security risk for web sites. You can still use Google to find vulnerable web sites, and there are great free tools out there to find and exploit insecure SQL databases - don't be one of them! The discussion turns to ...
Jun 25, 2015•59 min
Where will .NET go next? Carl and Richard talk to Rocky Lhotka (who happily is still alive after having his entire aorta replaced) about the resurgence in .NET. Between the open sourcing of .NET creating a common codebase for Windows, OSX and Linux. But that codebase is server focused - what does it take to get to the client? And to that idea, should XAML be open sourced? Rocky drills into the challenges of making cross-platform mobile apps - it's still not simple enough yet. But things are look...
Jun 24, 2015•1 hr 1 min
If it's on the cloud, it'll scale and perform, right? Carl and Richard talk to Christopher Bennage about his work at Patterns and Practices helping understand where performance can go wrong with Azure. It's on GitHub to provide code samples and analysis on the various problems you can find with scaling your Azure app. Christopher discusses eight different anti-patterns the PnP folks have found in their travels that can impair performance. Included in each are code samples and analysis of perform...
Jun 23, 2015•1 hr 2 min
Time for an Energy Storage Geek Out! The most requested Geek Out on FeatHub as Battery Technology, Carl and Richard discuss a wide range of aspects of energy storage. The conversation starts out on electrochemical batteries, which are only about 200 years old. Richard digs through the technical aspects of anode, cathode and electrolyte, dry cells, wet cells and polymer cells. And why do some batteries explode, anyway? Then the focus is on Tesla's new PowerWall battery products, what they're good...
Jun 18, 2015•58 min
So how are you instrumenting your applications? Carl and Richard talk to Jason Taylor of Stackify and Michael Paterson of Carbonite about the power of great instrumentation to make awesome software. Stackify provides a set of free tools if you're working in Azure. And speaking of Azure, Carbonite lives on Azure and uses Stackify for instrumentation. Michael talks about how Stackify helped Carbonite understand performance problems and errors that were occurring in production that were very hard t...
Jun 17, 2015•54 min
How do you extend C#? Carl and Richard talk to Simon Cropp about his open source project called Fody. Simon talks how Fody allows you do do "weaving" of .NET assemblies to add capabilities. Sounds simple, but it's not - it's hugely powerful and has to be handled carefully. To make it even more amazing, there are a ton of add-ins built for Fody to open the door to all sorts of aspect-oriented programming, simplifying testing, instrumentation and other sorts of coding extensions. So many possibili...
Jun 16, 2015•58 min
So how deep are you into Domain Driven Design? Carl and Richard talk to David Rael about his work applying DDD principles to the systems his customers develop. David focuses in on the idea of the ubiquitous language, something Eric Evans admits he wishes he'd put earlier in his seminal book on DDD. The ubiquitous language is the assembly of all the terms needed and agreed upon about the particular domain that the application has being built for. Most of what you need to know to build an applicat...
Jun 11, 2015•57 min
Microservices? Carl and Richard talk to Howard Dierking about his work building microservices starting with the name - Howard hates the term microservices. He prefers to call them focused services, which only makes sense. The goal is to write as little code as possible while delivering the capabilities needed, not all that different from most modern development approaches. The conversation turns to how we've twisted service design because deployment and versioning were so difficult. Today its be...
Jun 10, 2015•54 min
Have you been building web apps with TypeScript? Carl and Richard talk to Steve Ognibene about his work with TypeScript projects. The discussion starts with dispelling myths about TypeScript - no, it doesn't exist just to make C# developers more comfortable in web development! Steve compares how development is different in the strongly typed world of C# where the compiler does a bunch of testing for you versus the dynamically typed space of JavaScript where you're responsible for managing type r...
Jun 09, 2015•1 hr 1 min
What do developers like on their calendars? Carl and Richard talk to Steve Smith and Brendan Enrick about the making of the new 2016 developer calendar. They have been the team behind the NimblePros and later Telerik developer anti-pattern calendars for years. But there was no calendar in 2015 for a variety of reasons, leading to an outcry. In an effort to bring back the calendar, Steve and Brendan have launched a kickstarter campaign to raise enough funds to make the calendar, and a feathub sit...
Jun 04, 2015•54 min
Do you fear the CSS? You're not alone! Carl and Richard chat with Elijah Manor about his experiences becoming a "real" front end developer and embracing CSS development. Elijah talks about making the leap from hiding behind Twitter Bootstrap and actually starting to think about CSS as its own thing. The conversation turns quickly to tools - LOTS of tools. Elijah explains his CSS stack of Sass, CSSLint and AutoPrefixer. But many other tools get mentioned along the way for the variety of services ...
Jun 03, 2015•56 min
Remember Orleans? Once an MSR project to scale Halo 4 multiplayer mode, it has grown into a full blown actor model implementation. Carl and Richard chat with Barry Briggs about bringing Orleans to your project. Barry talks through some great ideas on the actor model and it's focus on building distributed highly scalable applications. Orleans is now an open source project hosted on GitHub, and is worth a look - compare it to Akka.NET! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/dona...
Jun 02, 2015•50 min
Time for a Geek Out experiment! Richard dives into his notes on a bunch of the past Geek Out episodes to bring you up to date on current developments. This includes solar, wind and wave power, automated driving, various developments on the fusion power front and some space related news as well. It's a grab bag full of goodness, but does the format make sense? The Geek Outs are still experimental, and we take ideas from the listeners at FeatHub Geek Out List so send us what you'd like to hear! Su...
May 28, 2015•59 min
What happens when a bunch of developers get in a room with a bunch of IoT devices? Carl and Richard talk to Josh Holmes about the amazing workshops he's been running to get people looking at the potential of small computing devices in the world of Internet of Things. Josh focuses in on the key bits of what it takes to make something useful in the IoT space - the difference between prototype and production hardware, the role of the cloud, and how critical the security situation is. Lots of great ...
May 27, 2015•1 hr 2 min
So how are you using Azure for your apps? Carl and Richard talk to Mark Brown about his work inside and outside of Microsoft - after fifteen years at Microsoft, Mark is out on his own now and still working hard with Azure. The conversation digs into the amazing tool that is Web Jobs, letting you automate tasks based on time and events. Mark also talks about machine learning as his new focus, recognizing that the huge amount of data we're gathering needs to be analyzed too. Lots of great thinking...
May 26, 2015•56 min
So what does it take to be a craftsman, software or otherwise? Carl and Richard talk to Bob Reselman about his work building software and guitars. Trained as a musician, Bob found software later in his life, and guitar making later still. But the process of getting good at making guitars makes it no different than making good quality software. The path to craftsmanship involves hard work, making mistakes and sometimes injury! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations...
May 21, 2015•55 min
So how will you build mobile apps going forward? Carl and Richard talk to Atley Hunter about the impact of Windows 10 and various announcements at Build on your strategies for building mobile apps. After a quick conversation about the awesome that is HoloLens, the conversation dives into issues around Windows Phone adoption and app creation. Do the new tools make it more likely for companies to build Windows Phone apps? Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations...
May 20, 2015•55 min
So what has happened with the .NET Core? Carl and Richard talk to Jay Schmelzer about his involvement from the very beginning of the .NET Core infrastructure and the interesting future it has as an open source project. But first a call back to a project that Jay led for years - LightSwitch. So where has it gone and where is it going? Then the conversation turns to the .NET Core. Jay talks about how the development team at Microsoft is starting to do their development in public on the open source...
May 19, 2015•54 min
Can biology inform computing? Or computing help biology? Yes! Carl and Richard talk to MSR scientist Colin Gravill about biological computing. Alas, the conversation is not about making computers out of biological materials, but there is some discussion about using DNA to do some kinds of computing as well as building synthetic life from modified cells. Colin talks about the tools they're building to be able to simulate cell generations and understand how stem cells evolve into specialized cells...
May 14, 2015•49 min
What does it take to grow new developers into something more experienced? Carl and Richard talk to Jeff Casimir about his approach to shepherding developers, helping them to grow into experienced developers. But what sort of experiences should you have? The conversation digs into the ideas around intentional practice, something rarely done in software. Jeff also talks about the scarcity of mentors and what it takes to get your code reviewed on a regular basis with an expert - and what an expert ...
May 13, 2015•56 min
So where does BizTalk fit into your Azure application? Carl and Richard talk to Sam Vanhoutte about his work using BizTalk technology to integrate systems together with Azure in the middle. The conversation pokes a little fun at BizTalks's on-going battle for relevance - for the customers that really need it, it is awesome. But now it's available as a cloud product in Azure which can save a ton in hardware fees, enough to run the infrastructure for a long time. Sam also digs into Enterprise Serv...
May 12, 2015•57 min
How does your organization leverage open source? Carl and Richard talk to Jeff Strauss about open source coming into the corporate space and the challenges that exist there. Microsoft has gone into open source in a big way, how does that affect our development going forward? The conversation starts out talking about Microsoft's approach to open source, especially around the open source promise. From there Jeff dives into the range of open source licenses out there, from the various copyleft conc...
May 07, 2015•1 hr 2 min
We're back from Build! On the last day of Build, Carl and Richard went up to the TWiT.tv studios to record a Windows Weekly with Leo LaPorte, Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley. That show went more than two hours, so we thought we'd make a more condensed version and focus on our favorite bits of Build. And feeing Leo lots of Scotch, you wouldn't want to miss that. The conversation starts out with a bit more of an IT bent, talking about data lakes and docker virtualization. From there Carl digs into...
May 06, 2015•50 min
Akka.NET ships! Carl and Richard talk with Aaron Stannard about Akka.NET, a toolkit and runtime for building highly concurrent, distributed and fault tolerant event-driven applications. Akka.NET is a port of the original Akka framework in Java/Scala. Aaron talks about the reactive manifesto as the driver for Akka.NET, to provide tools for responsiveness, resiliency, elasticity and message driven. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations...
May 05, 2015•59 min
Ready for a GitHub Extension for Visual Studio 2015? Phil Haack is back and talking smack about the cool code being build at GitHub. The announcement about the product was made at Build, but this show dives deeper into the technology involved. This new tool goes well beyond Git integration, diving deeper into the social media aspects of GitHub and making it easier for cross-platform teams to collaborate at GitHub. You need Visual Studio 2015 to take advantage of this, but that's pretty easy to g...
Apr 30, 2015•56 min
What are the habits that make a successful developer? Carl and Richard talk with Llewellyn Falco about the ongoing process of being the best developer you can be. Llewellyn discusses his role as a consultant to different organizations, and how often he discovers that there are simple practices just not happening within a team that would make everyone more effective. How do you create change in that scenario? How many times do you have to repeat a new approach to things before it actually sticks?...
Apr 29, 2015•1 hr 1 min
So what is the state of open source in the .NET community? While at the .NET Fringe conference, Carl and Richard moderated a panel of Ian Cooper, Amy Palamountain, Scott Hanselman, Sebastian Lambla and James Nugent as they explore the past, present and future of open source and the .NET stack. Obviously having Microsoft open source huge tracts of the .NET stack is a huge topic on its own, but so is the role the Microsoft should play in the open source community. What makes this community differe...
Apr 28, 2015•44 min
So when will Moore's Law end? Time for a Geek Out! In honor of the 50th anniversary of Gordon Moore writing the article that 10 years later would be known as Moore's Law, Richard digs into how much work goes into keeping the Moore's Law promise and its impact on society. The conversation delves into the complexities of manufacturing microchips at the nanometer scale, and all of the problems that companies like Intel and Samsung have to overcome for each incremental improvement that leads to a do...
Apr 23, 2015•1 hr 3 min
So what JavaScript libraries are you focused on today? Scott Allen is back to talk about the latest bits he's excited about, including Rob Eisenberg's Aurelia! The conversation starts out focused on the on-going evolution of Javascript, with ECMA 6 and 7 picking up more and more features of modern programming languages - it's not the JavaScript you remember from the old days! This also impacts JavaScript libraries and opens the door for the on-going evolution of those libraries. Some change radi...
Apr 22, 2015•52 min
