A new version of Akka.NET has shipped! Carl and Richard talk to Aaron Stannard about Akka.NET 1.1. The discussion starts out talking about some of the new features in the latest release, which is focused on providing the tooling needed to build highly reliable and scaling enterprise class software. Aaron also digs into the differences between Akka.NET and other actor model frameworks. Akka is growing up! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations...
Aug 23, 2016•52 min
More cloud choices! Carl and Richard welcome Chris Sells back onto .NET Rocks after three years and a career change - Chris is now at Google! And he's been busy, excited to announce that Google is provided extensive support for .NET in the Google Cloud, including Visual Studio add-ins to make your implementation even easier. The conversation ranges over the modern cloud development pattern of building code, packaging it into containers (aka Docker) and then deploying into the cloud - for Google ...
Aug 18, 2016•51 min
There has been lots of conversation about cross-platform mobile apps, but how about cross-platform desktop apps? Carl and Richard talk to David Neal about the Electron framework, letting you build cross-platform desktop apps using HTML, JavaScript and CSS. Electron is how visual Studio Code is built! The conversation also turns to Xamarin - would you rather code in C# and XAML? Lots of choices for cross-platform development, it's worth taking a few out for a spin! Support this podcast at — https...
Aug 17, 2016•49 min
Ready to move to .NET Core? Carl and Richard talk to Stackify's Matt Watson about their efforts to migrate their applications to the RTM editions of the .NET Core and ASP.NET Core. For better or worse, there have been a number of major changes between the two RCs and the RTM. But this is the version to stick to, so if you haven't started to move, now is a great time. Matt also talks about the challenges of losing certain libraries - projects that haven't been migrated to the Core editions yet. S...
Aug 16, 2016•58 min
Could there really be airliners powered by electricity? Time for a Geek Out! The conversation starts out with Richard talking about the Solar Impulse, a single seat aircraft with a wingspan larger than a 747, that has flown around the world powered solely by the solar panels covering it. So yes, electric aircraft are real, but could they be made commercially viable? NASA continues to fund various research projects to improve modern airliners by increasing fuel efficiency, decrease emissions and ...
Aug 11, 2016•51 min
What's a really modern web app look like? Carl and Richard talk to Qiming Liu about the Reactive Trader Cloud, demonstrating the synergy between the cloud, containers, microservices, the Reactive Extensions Framework and ReactJS on the client to make a real time currency trader application. The application is on GitHub, you can take it out for a spin for yourself and get a feel for this cool architecture. Qiming talks about treating all data as streams with the Reactive Framework for Javascript,...
Aug 10, 2016•48 min
What does it take to make an application support multiple customers? Carl and Richard talk to Paul Stovell about his work making multi-tenant applications. As with most things, making multi-tenant apps is more complicated than it seems! Paul talks about making architectural decisions around separation between various customers - do they each get their own database? What about web server and/or app-pool? What about customizations and deployment. Do customers get new features immediately, or do th...
Aug 09, 2016•50 min
How long does it take you to get an idea into a URL? Carl and Richard talk to Daniel Moore about HyperDev - a tool to make the shortest possible path between writing code and putting it online. Initially only implementing Node and HTML, you can use your Javascript skills to build a quick prototype that is easily shareable, even allow multiple people to work on the code together. At this point the system is relatively small, but it's easy to move off onto your own platform once you get your idea ...
Aug 04, 2016•49 min
F# that transpiles to Javascript! Wait, what? While at NDC is Oslo, Carl and Richard chatted with Tomas Petricek about the Fabel project, combining F# and the Babel project to turn F# into some tight Javascript code. Tomas talks about the easy parts of Fabel first, because Javascript does have some functional elements, and it is possible to write immutable-style code in Javascript if you really want to. Then come the more difficult parts, like typing. There's a judgement call to make about what ...
Aug 03, 2016•58 min
So how's your DevOps doing? While at DevTeach in Montreal, Carl and Richard hosted a panel of Stephane LaPointe, Dylan Smith, William Buchwalter and Alexandre Brisebois to discuss the ups and downs of getting teams to work closer together to make better products and provide better services. The conversation focuses first and foremost on culture - the chant of People, Process and Products around DevOps is not accidental, without a commitment in culture, nothing much can happen. How do we create o...
Aug 02, 2016•59 min
How do we get more women involved in programming? Carl and Richard talk to Astrid de Laval and Andreas Persson about CodePub, a gathering hosted by NetLight to get women coding. The events have been running in Stockholm, Helsinki, Oslo and more over the past several months, drawing larger and larger crowds. Every event involves some coding exercises even for complete novices who have never coded before. CodeHub is looking to put on more events in more places - if you'd like to be a part of it, r...
Jul 28, 2016•37 min
Ready to learn R? While at NDC Oslo, Carl and Richard sat down with Jamie Dixon and Evelina Gabasova to talk about what .NET developers need to know to get conversant in R. Data science represents a huge opportunity for developers these days, helping businesses actually take advantage of the data the company has. Jamie comes at R from a traditional .NET developer perspective, talking about how there are some skills (like source control and testing) that developers have more experience with than ...
Jul 27, 2016•55 min
Time to get scared times three! While at NDC Oslo, Carl and Richard hosted a security panel of Troy Hunt, Niall Merrigan and Stephen Haunts in front of a live NDC audience. The conversation starts where most security conversation start - on passwords. Yes, passwords suck. The challenge is making them suck less. Beyond passwords, what aspects of application security are the responsibility of the developer, and what are more the focus of operations? Check out the links below for a number of tools ...
Jul 26, 2016•57 min
Ready to talk about Thorium again? Since the last Thorium Geek Out in 2013, there have been a number of important developments. Richard takes Carl on a tour of why we want Thorium as a fuel, molten salt as a reactor design, and the choices we can make around different turbine technologies. Aspects of molten salt reactors continue to mature, offering continuous fuel reprocessing that means more of the dangerous radioactive material can be used for heat and left with safe residuals. Is it time to ...
Jul 21, 2016•55 min
How do we get all our IoT devices talking to each other? While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard chatted with Jimmy Engstrom about AllJoyn, a Qualcomm started project now part of the Linux Foundation that provides a common language for devices to communicate with. Jimmy talks about the different elements of AllJoyn, servers and clients and how they share information about their capabilities. There's a plugin for Visual Studio to make it easier for you to implement AllJoyn in your IoT applications...
Jul 20, 2016•49 min
ASP.NET Core is released, now what? Carl and Richard talk to Shawn Wildermuth about his efforts to migrate to the RTM of ASP.NET Core. As Shawn points out, the framework is ready, but the tooling is still in preview, so more changes to how you build your web sites and services will happen before everything is said and done. Lots of digressions in the show too, talking about the road trip, being an old developer and trying to do things right - a fun conversation! Support this podcast at — https:/...
Jul 19, 2016•53 min
What's the best way for you to learn new technology? Carl and Richard talk to Ben Hall about his latest creation, KataCoda. KataCoda is a free web site that hosts tutorial systems for a variety of technology content including Docker, Erlang, C#, Jenkins and so on. Rather than make you set up an environment to experiment with new tech, KataCoda is all set to go and has great scenarios and walkthrough for you to practice with. And when you're ready to try your own thing, there are playgrounds also...
Jul 14, 2016•45 min
Write your build scripts in C#! While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard talked to Gary Ewan Park about Cake - aka C# Make. Cake is a cross platform build automation solution - it works on Windows, OSX and Linux. Gary talks about being able to work in C# to define everything that needs to happen in your build process, including testing, documentation generation and so on. Your script can call other scripts so that you can contain complexity based on task. And since it's an open source project, if ...
Jul 13, 2016•53 min
Quick, how long can a file path in .NET be? Carl and Richard talk to Jeremy Kuhne, who has taken on the challenge of breaking the 260 character limit on file paths in .NET. Why has this problem persisted for so long? Jeremy references some blog posts from Kim Hamilton back in 2007 when the issue came up big - at the time, .NET was deeply intertwined with Windows, and there were too many things to fix. But the creation of .NET Core presented an opportunity to fix the problem once and for all, and...
Jul 12, 2016•57 min
The Hololens SDK edition is out - are you ready to write some code? Carl and Richard talk to Rene Schulte at NDC Oslo about his work building apps for the Hololens. The conversation explores the differences in virtual reality and augmented reality and the huge number of possibilities out there for Hololens. Rene talks about what it's like to develop for Hololens, discussing the relative merits between writing code in Unity3D and the Universal Windows Platform (XAML!) - it's all C# in the end! Th...
Jul 07, 2016•51 min
How does testing contribute to the failure of a project? Todd Gardner chats with Carl and Richard at NDC Oslo about his experiences with failing projects and testing. More than just the usual case that a lack of testing led to unreliable software, Todd also talks about how testing the market is important too - what if you build software nobody wants? The focus has to be on relevant tests, because every test represents an overhead of computing and maintenance. This ultimately comes back to unders...
Jul 06, 2016•54 min
What does it mean to build for the cloud? While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard chatted with Paul Stack about thinking about architecture specific for the cloud - not necessarily Azure or AWS, but the overall concepts of what it means to be in the cloud. It starts with the idea of everything you build being virtual and portable, whether than be VMs or containers. But there's also so-called 'server-less' designs as well, where your software runs on a platform in the cloud. If you could get rid o...
Jul 05, 2016•50 min
Can you detect lies with machine learning? Jennifer Marsman can! Carl and Richard chatted with Jennifer while at the NDC conference in Oslo. Jennifer talked about gathering EEG data with Emotiv headsets to do lie detection by taking base line (known true and known false) questions and then applying Azure Machine Learning to classify the data. The conversation dives into the different machine learning techniques available on Azure and how certain algorithms are more effective on different data se...
Jun 30, 2016•50 min
Ready to go deeper into Elixir? While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard caught up with Rob Conery to see how his obsession with Elixir and Erlang has evolved. Rob talks about getting comfortable in the space and getting serious about building software using the Phoenix MVC library and other tools. The conversation turns to the Actor Model pattern and how it becomes a way of life when you're working in Elixir - as fundamental as objects are to C#. Rob discusses the building, testing and deploying ...
Jun 29, 2016•50 min
What's next for C#? While at NDC Oslo, Carl and Richard talked with Mads Torgersen about what's coming up in C# 7. But first some fun, talking about how languages evolve and the challenge of bringing new features to life while avoiding breaking what has come before. It's not easy building languages, especially popular ones! Mads talks about the process of deciding what is in and what will be pushed out for the next version of C#. Along the way, the discussion turns to grabbing onto great ideas f...
Jun 28, 2016•1 hr 4 min
Time to get Geeky in space! Carl and Richard talk about what it takes to make a truly reusable spacecraft. First up is the venerable space shuttle, which wasn't so much reusable as rebuildable. It never really made economic sense, but it definitely drove the technology forward. SpaceX has been able to recover four first stage rockets from Falcon 9 flights, but hasn't reused any yet, and Richard gets into the nitty gritty details of the challenges of reusing rocket engines. It may require a diffe...
Jun 23, 2016•1 hr 2 min
It's an exciting time for .NET! While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard sat down with David Fowler and Damian Edwards to talk about the development of .NET Core, ASP.NET Core 1 and the Kestrel web server. The conversation digs into the challenges of writing a cross-platform web development framework, including some controversial pivots that have frustrated some developers - looking at you, RC2! Damian then discusses Kestrel, the cross-platform web hosting environment. This is a wide-ranging conve...
Jun 22, 2016•57 min
Time for a new version of CSLA! Carl and Richard talk to Rocky Lhotka about the latest incarnation of the venerable business object framework that started all the way back at Visual Basic 5! CSLA has always been about keeping business logic out of your user interfaces and databases - keep it in the middle where it belongs. And today that is clearly wise architectural design: The diversity on the client side means you have a lot more devices accessing your application, and CSLA supports most of t...
Jun 21, 2016•55 min
Virtual Reality is here, and there are choices! Carl and Richard talk to Jason Weimann about the HTC Vive, the competitor to the Oculus Rift. Jason talks about how the two devices are similar and how they are different. And one place they are similar is the programming model - it's all about Unity3D. The conversation focuses in on what it takes to really learn Unity - you're working in Visual Studio with C#, but the platform and tooling are quite a bit different. And don't worry too much about 3...
Jun 16, 2016•54 min
Do you know how people are actually using your mobile apps? Carl and Richard chat with Greg Shackles about his work instrumenting mobile apps in production. The low hanging fruit is actually gathering data about every crash or error that occurs in the field. Getting that information back to your dev team can make the application better, but what if operations were able to respond to the failure? What if you could turn a crash into a moment of delight for the user? The conversation then dives int...
Jun 15, 2016•50 min
