Carl and Richard talk to Kit Eason about how you can get your organization using F#. Kit talks about his work using F# and how he retrained himself to use the language effectively. It only takes a few days! He makes some awesome suggestions for approaches to learning the language effectively and the advantages that it brings. We're living in a polyglot world where the best language is used in its best role... and F# has a role! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations...
Jul 02, 2013•54 min
While at the Norwegian Developers Conference (NDC) in Oslo last week, Carl and Richard moderated a panel talking about the state of functional programming in mainstream development. The discussion reached back in time to languages like Haskell and Erlang, and looked forward at JavaScript and it's vector to seemingly take over the world. Even if you're not well versed in functional languages, this was a great discussion. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations...
Jun 27, 2013•56 min
While at NDC, Carl and Richard talk to Jez Humble about Continuous Delivery. Jez discusses the difference between continuous integration and continuous delivery and how nothing matters until your code actually gets to the customer. So no shipping parties until it does! The conversation digs into the overall story of DevOps, how development and operations need to work closer together to continuously deliver value to the customer - which is more about culture and process than it is about tools. Su...
Jun 25, 2013•58 min
While at NDC, Carl and Richard talked to Scott Guthrie about the latest Azure features including the announcements from TechEd. Scott talks about new support for developers in Azure, including monthly Azure credit for all MSDN subscriptions and per minute billing for developer testing on Azure instances. Even if your app isn't running in the cloud, you can use the cloud to do your testing. The conversation digs into continuous delivery in the cloud - Scott mentions New Relic as an instrumentatio...
Jun 20, 2013•1 hr 6 min
While at the Norwegian Developers Conference, Carl and Richard chatted with Jon Skeet about Async and Parallelism. The conversation starts out with a BKaF on parallel exception handling and a reader comment about F# and parallelism. Jon chimes in on both these subjects, talking about all the challenges around error handling, parallel or otherwise, and he knows (and doesn't know) about F#. Throughout the conversation there are short discussions on his effort to teach his sons programming as well....
Jun 18, 2013•56 min
Carl and Richard talk about space telescopes - but first, a comment about Thorium Molten Salt Reactors and a Kickstarter for a Thorium documentary called The Good Reactor. Also on Kickstarter is Arkyd, the space telescope that anyone can use - get a picture of yourself in space! The conversation then digs into space observatories, there are literally dozens up there today. Everyone knows about Hubble, but what about Compton, or Spitzer or Chandra? There are different observatories for different ...
Jun 13, 2013•41 min
At DevTeach, Carl and Richard talk to Kate Gregory about smart clients. As Kate says, quoting Don Box, 'they're not dead, they're done.' The conversation digs into WinForms, Silverlight and WPF. They aren't changing much, but they definitely work. Kate talks about the various projects she's working on that depend on smart clients - accessing different processes, specific hardware requirements, etc. It's old developer day! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations...
Jun 11, 2013•54 min
Carl and Richard talk to James Kovacs about functional programming with JavaScript. Functional programming with JavaScript? What can't JavaScript do? James starts out talking about underscoreJS, a key library to simplify functional programming and provide some awesome features to keep your web pages running well. The conversation also digs into Single Page Applications in the context of functional programming, where you can go wrong, and why you want these tools in your toolbox to build the best...
Jun 06, 2013•51 min
While at DevTeach, Carl and Richard talk to Kathleen Dollard about going beyond Async. And when she says beyond Async, she means the other amazing things in .NET 4.5. First up, the portable class libraries. Then Kathleen dives into Event Tracing for Windows classes that can let you do advanced logging in your applications. The conversation also dives into the dangers of the inline update that is .NET 4.5 from .NET 4.0... especially with the updates! Lots of subtle challenges with the latest inca...
Jun 04, 2013•55 min
Carl and Richard talk to Kevin Kline about the latest features in SQL Server 2012. The conversation starts out talking about the new features that developers will love, like windowing - no need for cursors anymore, you can request a window of records from a set and move easily window-to-window. Kevin also talks about the new column store index that is especially useful with repeating data. There's also a discussion on the role of SQL Server in an increasingly NoSQL world, along with cool new tec...
May 30, 2013•59 min
Carl and Richard talk to John Papa about Single Page Applications (SPA) - building web applications that operate on a single page for the duration of execution. John talks about the evolution of web design that has led to the SPA concept - the pros and cons of the approach as well. From there the conversation digs into the sets of open source libraries for making SPA easier to build and maintain. There is no one right way and lots of choice out there, check out the links below! Support this podc...
May 28, 2013•52 min
Carl and Richard talk to Michele Leroux Bustamante about her experiences creating startup companies. Michele talks about getting started with a new company, deciding whether or not to take external funding from investors or just bootstrapping the company yourself, and how cloud technologies like Azure and programs like BizSpark have lowered the cost of infrastructure so that the main expense of a startup is wages. The conversation also digs into all the important things that developers don't kno...
May 23, 2013•1 hr
Carl and Richard talk to Derik Whittaker about his experiences migrating from being a XAML developer to being an HTML developer. The conversation starts out talking about the death of Silverlight - or at least the severe neglect! From there, Derik describes the group of tools he uses to bring MVVM design patterns to HTML development. Along with some weird digressions on WinForms, this is a fun show and a great starting point for anyone ready to leave Silverlight behind! Support this podcast at —...
May 21, 2013•50 min
Carl and Richard talk to Tim Huckaby about the latest developments around gesture computing. The conversation covers the latest version of the Kinect SDK (with grip!), as well as SoftKinetic, Panasonic D-IMager and Leap Motion. Tim also speculates on some of the new things coming from Microsoft with Xbox and Kinect (leaked specs in the links below), and how gesture is here to stay. It's everywhere already! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations...
May 16, 2013•1 hr 1 min
Carl and Richard talk to Marc Mercuri and Mark Simms about resilient cloud architecture. The conversation starts out focused on the white paper called 'FailSafe' and the guidance it provides for building resilient cloud applications - but the information is applicable to any large scale system running on any sort of infrastructure. While the topic area is huge, Marc and Mark break down the concepts into understanding your application, finding failure points, planning for failure (it's going to h...
May 14, 2013•1 hr 1 min
Carl and Richard geek out on nanotechnology - and it's a huge subject! The conversation starts out with a proper definition of nanotechnology, as well as the original thinker in the space: Richard Feynman. Nanotechnology is far more than the original science fiction ideas of tiny robots and 'grey goo', it has expanded into super strong materials, particles that transport medicine and amazing two-dimensional crystals with remarkable properties, like graphene. We're only scratching the surface of ...
May 09, 2013•50 min
Carl and Richard talk to Pablo Santos about Plastic SCM. Plastic SCM is a free ALM tool for managing source and tracking for up to 15 developers - after that you have to pay. The conversation starts out with the concept of task-driven development, letting many developers work simultaneously on a project while each focusing on individual tasks. The challenge is excessive forking of the code - how do you get everything merged together again? Pablo talks about the powerful merge system of PlasticSC...
May 07, 2013•50 min
Carl and Richard talk to Lynn Langit and Llewellyn Falco about how developers can teach their kids to program. While Lynn and Llewellyn have been teaching all sorts of kids how to program (check out the links below), they've recently published a Pluralsight course specifically for developers to teach their own kids how to program. The course is completely free - you don't need to sign up for anything! And the course lets you as a developer work with your children step by step to learn how to dev...
May 02, 2013•56 min
Carl and Richard talk to Mårten Rånge about Microsoft's Text Template Transformation Toolkit (T4). Don't call it code generation - Mårten talks about how T4 takes away code repetition and keeps you focused on the important stuff. The challenge is learning to build your own maintainable templates. The conversation explores a variety of examples of using T4 effectively for SQL, XAML as well as C# and C++. Mårten has a project on GitHub called T4Include to help you utilize them more effectively. Th...
Apr 30, 2013•56 min
While at DevIntersection, Carl and Richard host a panel discussion on the state of cloud development. No clouds were harmed in the making of this podcast. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations
Apr 25, 2013•54 min
Carl and Richard talk to Hendrik Lösch about his experiences doing testing with Visual Studio 2012. Henrik starts out talking about unit testing, the different approaches with various tools, including mocking, moles and fakes. He talks about how MSTest has substantially improved in Studio 2012, but still needs help in the form of NUnit and/or xUnit.net. The conversation also digs into new generation tools like NCrunch and SpecFlow, rationalizing BDD, TDD and ATDD and ultimately dealing with the ...
Apr 23, 2013•1 hr 2 min
Carl and Richard talk to Donald Larson, a combination technology and nuclear scientist, about power from thorium. The conversation begins with thorium, a low-level radioactive metal that is three times more abundant than uranium and available all over the world, often found as a byproduct of other mining efforts. Don talks about the advantages of the thorium fuel cycle, how it cannot be used to make weapons-grade radioactives and doesn't require expensive pre-processing to be usable for power. F...
Apr 18, 2013•1 hr
Dominick Baier returns to talk to Carl and Richard about the current state of security in .NET 4.5. Dom starts out talking about how WebAPI has impacted the development of web services without much in the way of new security features - so he built some for everyone to use (check the links below). The conversation then digs into the challenges around OAuth 2 and the challenges of building specifications by committee when you're dealing with security. Also listen for a great dig into the real goal...
Apr 16, 2013•56 min
Carl and Richard talk to Anthony van der Hoorn and Nik Molnar about their open source project called Glimpse. Glimpse provides instrumentation for the server and client side components of your web app, displaying it in a tabular format at the bottom of your browser. Anthony and Nik discuss the extensiblity model allowing additional components to be instrumented with Glimpse - and how they've only built five of the thirty packages available today! This is open source at its best, and an awesome w...
Apr 11, 2013•56 min
Carl and Richard talk to Justin Beckwith about the recently released WebMatrix 3. Justin talks about the vision of keeping web development simple while still having access to all the latest features of the Web. And yes, sites built with WebMatrix can be worked on with Visual Studio as well! The conversation also digs into building mobile web sites and the various modules you can add into WebMatrix to extend functionality including Git integration, LessCSS and more... lots of links! Support this ...
Apr 09, 2013•48 min
Carl and Richard talk to David Pitcher, part of Microsoft's internal IT team, about his experiences instrumenting applications. The conversation digs into the application in question, a Windows Phone app for allowing tech support personnel manage tech support problems on the go. Then David discusses the impact of instrumentation on the application in the form of PreEmptive Analytics, a free version of which is included with Visual Studio 2012. David describes how instrumentation has changed the ...
Apr 04, 2013•56 min
Carl and Richard talk to Amir Rajan about his Oak project on GitHub. Amir discusses his approach to building Single Page Applications (SPA) using an array of open source tools including Rake (from the Ruby stack), nSpec, Canopy, Growl and more. The conversation digs into how C# fits into the equation and how Oak provides the dynamic typing that C# needs to work well in the JavaScript driven world of SPA. Amir also talks about how this development stack works well with different editors since it ...
Apr 02, 2013•54 min
Carl and Richard are geeking out again, this time about geothermal energy. The conversation starts out focusing on household geothermal heating, which is really a form of heat pump technology. After that, the boys dig into the hard stuff - geothermal energy. After talking through the various techniques of generating power from the ground, the focus goes to the key to all power systems: water. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations...
Mar 28, 2013•40 min
Carl and Richard talk to Andreas Hakansson and Steve Robbins about NancyFX. NancyFX is an open source project to provide a lightweight framework for building web applications. Andreas and Steve talk about NancyFX focusing on the Super-Duper-Happy-Path of web development. The conversation also digs into the diversity that NancyFX supports, running in IIS, with ASP.NET (or not), WCF, Azure, OWIN, Umbraco, even Nginx on Ubuntu! Andreas and Steve also dig into how NancyFX handles testing, different ...
Mar 26, 2013•56 min
Carl and Richard talk to Brian Summers and Dave Harrison of Columbia Sportswear about their work with Team Foundation Server. Brian and Dave discuss how TFS has allowed them to build a common work planning environment for almost all of the developers at Columbia, including .NET, Java and ABAP (SAP) programmers. The conversation dives into how the different teams are able to collaborate, how they've built a service bus based on Biztalk and the future of even more rapid application development wit...
Mar 21, 2013•58 min
