How can you learn what your users like about your application and what you can do to make it better? Enter user research! While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talked to Lily Dart about her approaches to doing user research - guerrilla style! Lily talks about being out on street corners asking passersby to look at an application on a smartphone and give their impressions, all for a Starbucks card. The trick is not to take what they say literally, but to actually watch how they interact with the ...
Feb 11, 2016•57 min
How do you instrument your applications in production? While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talked to Joe Guadagno about his efforts using Azure Application Insights to understand how his web applications run under load. Gathering telemetry from your production applications used to be a very case-by-case scenario, but when working the Azure Web Sites, things get a bit simpler, using Azure App Insights. But its far more than just monitoring your web site - App Insights has agents for every kind ...
Feb 10, 2016•56 min
What patterns make sense with containers? At NDC London, Carl and Richard talk to Ben Hall about some more mature pattern approaches to container implementations, specifically with Docker. Ben talks through a number of key patterns that make containers work the way you expect in production. There are key elements such as immutability, avoiding circumventing the configuration-as-code mindset of containers. Containers should be built, torn down and built again from their scripts, rather than ever ...
Feb 09, 2016•1 hr
What does your company do when it brings in new hires? While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talked to Jessie Shternshus of the Improv Effect about how she helps organizations create fun, innovative onboarding processes that actually reflect the culture of the company. Jessie talks about various exercises she uses to help folks get comfortable with a team and communicate effectively. The conversation digs into how every organization has a culture that new people see, the question is only how int...
Feb 04, 2016•56 min
How can you make machine learning simpler? While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talked to Seth Juarez about his open source project NuML. Seth has been working on NuML since 2011, providing tooling to let developers think more about the goals of their machine learning than the specific mathematical concepts involved. But he reinforces that you do need to learn some core concepts of machine learning no matter what! You can run NuML anywhere you like, but if you're working in the cloud, Seth ment...
Feb 03, 2016•59 min
How are you managing identity? While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard talk to Dominick Baier and Brock Allen about their work Identity Server. Now part of the .NET Foundation (making it easier for enterprises to being open source into their organization), Identity Server can provide the authentication services across all your applications. That naturally leads to a discussion on the authorization side of things, which focuses more on claims-based security specific to each application and the n...
Feb 02, 2016•57 min
What do you know about R? While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talked to Barbara Fusinska about her work using R as part of real system. Barbara talks about the role of statistics and machine learning as well as the various tools that make it easier to incorporate into your application. The conversation turns to MatLab and Revolution Analytics language R. R is focused on machine learning, it's not a general purpose language. Think of it as SQL for machine learning - great at the thing it does, ...
Jan 28, 2016•53 min
Service Discovery? Is UDDI back? While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talk to Ian Cooper about service discovery in the microservices world. Ian talks about the effect of microservices in making systems more complex - it's easy to end up with hundreds of services. And you don't want to be hard-coding service locations into your application, what happens when things change? While you could roll your own, Ian talks about a range of tools already out there to help your applications discover the se...
Jan 27, 2016•59 min
What's the current situation with containers in Azure? While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talk to Michele Leroux Bustamante about the continuing evolution of containers in the cloud, especially around Azure. Michele digs into the story of Docker and the idea of configuration-as-code extending to the virtual machine. Then the discussion turns to analyzing the various tiers of container service provide by the major cloud provides, including Microsoft. Ultimately there is a vision of a Platform-...
Jan 26, 2016•54 min
Are space elevators really possible, or just science fiction? Time for a Geek Out! Carl and Richard chat about the idea of being able to build a cable from the surface of the Earth into space to make space transport 100 times cheaper than rockets. The conversation starts out focused on the concept of space tethers, of which the space elevator is one particular species. Tethers have actually flown in space and demonstrated some amazing properties, including using the magnetic field of the earth t...
Jan 21, 2016•1 hr 2 min
Glimpse is moving to version 2! Carl and Richard chat with Anthony van der Hoorn and Nik Molnar about the latest version of Glimpse and what moving from version 1 to 2 really means. Still in beta, Glimpse V2 is very much a rethink of how you instrument a client while still keeping what you love about V1 - a great dashboard to understand what's going on with your web app. Anthony and Nik talk through the changes and the power of taking everything you've learned about a project to a clean slate. G...
Jan 20, 2016•1 hr
Time for a GitHub sync with Phil Haack! Carl and Richard chat with Phil about the latest developments at GitHub, including the on-going evolution of the extensions to Visual Studio (getting better) and a bunch of other third party components that can help you use GitHub more effectively. Phil talks about Gitter, the chat system associated with GitHub projects. GitHub is not just about source code, there are all sorts of projects going into GitHub, including blogs, legal documents, even creation ...
Jan 19, 2016•55 min
Encrypt all the things! Carl and Richard talk to Stephen Haunts about how to use cryptography properly. And as it turns out, you don't have to be a mathematician to put crypto to work for you! The conversation starts out focusing on password hashing - lots of ways to do it wrong, salting seems complicated, but in the end, there is a built-in, poorly named function in the .NET Framework that will give you proper leading edge password hashing, you just have to know what it is (check the links on t...
Jan 14, 2016•53 min
What does it take to successfully implement test automation on your application? Carl and Richard talk to Arnon Axelrod about his work using test automation. The discussion dives into the diverse world of testing, both manual and automated, as well as the variety of tests you can write. How do you go about building tests that aren't so fragile that you have to rewrite them all after every build? What tests are actually valuable to the overall quality of your software? And why automate? What can ...
Jan 13, 2016•49 min
Messaging is taking over the world! Arguably it already has. Carl and Richard talk to Clemens Vasters about his ten years of work at Microsoft building messaging systems, starting way back with the .NET Service Bus. Clemens discusses his work with OASIS and OPC-UA developing more advanced messaging standards, it's importance in the Internet of Things space, and how versions matter - different protocols have different capabilities, and the need for unified communications is only getting bigger. M...
Jan 12, 2016•59 min
What is it like managing a mature open source project? Carl and Richard talk to Jimmy Bogard about his experiences with AutoMapper, an open source project he started back in 2009 that is still going strong today. While open source has been around for many years, the ecosystem has been evolving, and Jimmy talks about how site like GitHub and Stack Overflow has made it much easier to stay engaged with your user base and have meaningful conversations about code - without having to repeat yourself o...
Jan 07, 2016•56 min
Microservices built with a functional language? You bet! Carl and Richard talk to Rachel Reese about her work with jet.com building microservices in F#. It turns out that the good practices of building functional code lend themselves neatly to the same principles in microservices. Rachel also talks about the actor model as a natural fit for this architecture as well, writing code with simple entry and exit points as functions in F#, focusing on composability to relate elements together. There ar...
Jan 06, 2016•48 min
Do you have a DevOps stack? Carl and Richard talk to Brian Randell about his experiences implementing tooling for DevOps practices using Visual Studio and other Microsoft tools. The conversation runs the gambit of elements in the DevOps stack, including continuous deployment, package management, configuration-as-a-code and instrumentation in production. The more automation the better when it comes to moving fast and reliably. While DevOps often focuses on the culture and process that goes into b...
Jan 05, 2016•52 min
What is the good and bad of being an old programmer? To wrap up 2015, Carl and Richard chat with Gary Wisniewski about his blog post on the subject and more! Gary is the same Gary of Carl and Gary's VB Home Page, one of the first web sites on Visual Basic way back in 1994. The conversation digs into what's great about having lots of experience, and how it came hold you back as well. There's no magic to being a programmer at 20 years old and there's no magic when you're 60 either - it's got more ...
Dec 31, 2015•59 min
Do you understand how to develop software with GitHub? Carl and Richard walk through the fundamentals of GitHub with Bill Wagner. Bill walks through the key differences between the distributed source control that is GitHub versus the more classic central control style source control systems. Often it is harder for experienced developers to deal with the reality of GitHub than someone new to source control! The conversation explores all the concepts of GitHub - repositories, cloning, forking, pus...
Dec 30, 2015•59 min
When was the last time you thought about Windows Workflow? Carl and Richard talk to Blake Helms about the projects he's been building with Workflow - and they're awesome! Blake talks through how Workflow has evolved into the latest version for .NET 4.5, with better visualization tools and a consistent interface that is easy to work with. The conversation digs into how Workflow separates work from flow - activities are code and flows are the relationships between them. This separation lets you se...
Dec 28, 2015•50 min
How technical is technical debt? Carl and Richard talk to Einar Høst about how technical debt has more to do with your understanding of a system and the intentional shortcuts we take to make deadlines than anything specific to technology. The conversation dives into the domain driven design thinking of Eric Evans and the challenges of deeply understanding the domain of a system well enough to build great software to model it. As Einar puts it, some complexity is intentional, and some is accident...
Dec 24, 2015•54 min
So what's the story with Power Apps? While at the Tel Aviv stop of the Azure Tour, Carl and Richard chatted with Julia White about the on-going evolution of Azure and Office 365 including the introduction of Power Apps. Power Apps is a tool for building mobile applications for iOS, Android and Windows Phone without writing code or having to deploy to the store. While it may not be a tool that developers will be keen to use (or will it?), its certainly something to pay attention to - this might b...
Dec 23, 2015•43 min
So what can you do with Reactive Extensions (Rx)? You know, really? While at the Azure Tour stop in Tel Aviv, Carl and Richard sat down with Tamir Dresher to talk about Rx in the real world. Tamir is the author of Reactive Extensions in Action and he talks through the practical applications that Rx has, and where it can make your software better. This is not an all-or-nothing proposition, you can slide Rx into spots where you want to react to key bits of data while ignoring others, so where you ...
Dec 22, 2015•56 min
Time for the Smart Home Geek Out! Carl and Richard chat about what the house of the future is like. Future homes have been predicted for a long time, and the discussion dives into some of those earlier predictions from the 1960s. When thinking of what smart homes can become, it helps to think like a developer - have an array of sensors that measure the state of the home, its environment, contents and people. Then write code - get all those things talking to each other! Today we're starting to ha...
Dec 17, 2015•1 hr 1 min
So what does it take to make your web applications secure? Carl and Richard talk to Bill Sempf about his work educating developers on writing secure software. The conversation focuses on the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) and all the resources there for securing your web applications. Bill leads the .NET side of OWASP, providing tools, techniques and links for everything you need to build a more secure web application. You'd be amazed how many great security resources are built in...
Dec 16, 2015•59 min
It's only date and time, how hard could it be? Carl and Richard chat with Matt Johnson about the challenges of really managing dates, times and time zones properly. The world is a complicated place, and time zones are a relatively new invention that is as much driven by politics as geography. And then there's daylight saving time, which is even worse! Matt talks about the simple mistakes that developers can make assuming behavior around dates and time that can lead to significant failures in you...
Dec 15, 2015•55 min
So how many shortcuts do you know in Visual Studio 2015? Carl and Richard talk to Joseph Woodward about his conscious efforts to learn more shortcuts and speed his development pace. Every time you take your hand off the keyboard, you slow yourself down, and more importantly, interrupt your flow! But not all shortcuts are created equal - the discussion focuses first on navigation shortcuts to move around your code more efficiently, and then into block editing and moving. Of course there are tools...
Dec 10, 2015•57 min
Time to revisit MassTransit! Carl and Richard talk to Chris Patterson about his work on MassTransit and more. MassTransit is an open source .NET service bus that is happy running on-premise or in the cloud. The conversation explores the evolution of MassTransit and the way the Enterprise Service Bus has evolved. SOA is a fine idea and SOAP works, but is there an easier way? Chris talks about better queuing with RabbitMQ, to the point that the latest version of MassTransit doesn't support MSMQ. A...
Dec 09, 2015•57 min
How do you build a tool that bridges data silos? Carl and Richard talk to Tim Ward about his work on CluedIn, a tool for connecting documents, email and other business resources together so that employees can see what everyone is working on with a minimum of fuss. Tim talks about using different data stores within CluedIn to leverage their strengths - the graph storage of neo4J maintains relationships between documents where ElasticSearch actually finds things. The art of tagging and cataloging ...
Dec 08, 2015•1 hr 2 min
