Carl and Richard talk to Rockin' Ronnie Shewchuk about making barbeque - real barbeque, the low heat, slow cooking approach that turns tough hunks of meat into yummy goodness. The conversation starts out talking about the different regions of barbeque, like Texas, Tennessee, North Carolina and more! Ronnie also talks about different cooking systems - smokers, grills, charcoal, wood, and more! Barbeque is chemistry, delicious, delicious chemistry - you need to do this! Support this podcast at — h...
Oct 17, 2013•57 min
While on the .NET Rocks NDC UK Tour, Carl and Richard stopped in London to talk to the one and only Dan North. Dan discussed his latest projects, changing the way large organizations (like Bank of America!) do development, making work more fun, more creative and more efficient at the same time. Disruptive change? You bet! Disruptive change for the better! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations
Oct 15, 2013•51 min
Carl and Richard talk to Troy Hunt about hacking yourself - testing your web site's defenses before someone else does! The conversation starts out talking about FireSheep and the need to use SSL everywhere. If you log in, you should be using SSL! Troy runs down a list of the common exploits you should test against, like SQL injection and cookie spoofing. There's also a discussion around cross-site scripting and X-Frame-Options. There are some simple things that script kiddies can do to exploit y...
Oct 10, 2013•1 hr 1 min
Carl and Richard talk to the one-and-only Kim Tripp about physical database design - and why it's still important. The conversation starts out talking about the state of SQL Server today, its maturity and how it works well enough that it's often ignored until there are problems. Kim talks about a 30-day blog series written by the SQLSkills team about being an accidental DBA - you didn't want to take care of a SQL Server, you just are! Always fun to talk to Kim! Support this podcast at — https://...
Oct 08, 2013•59 min
Carl and Richard try something new - doing a mob style interview about mob programming! Mob programming takes agile to a new extreme where several people (more than two) work together to write code... resulting in very high quality code! The conversation digs into the actual process of writing code (drivers and navigators), the various roles that participants fall into, how more minds end up with more code reuse, testing, QA and the great sense of connection that comes with mob programming. You ...
Oct 03, 2013•52 min
Carl and Richard talk to Todd Anglin from Telerik about cross-platform development for mobile. The conversation focuses on Telerik's Icenium hybrid mobile development solution. Todd announces that Icenium now has a Visual Studio plug-in so that you can do your development in the environment of your choice. This leads to interesting possibilities with KendoUI, another library from Telerik that lets you build mobile web apps with native look-and-feel on different phone platforms - now you can turn...
Oct 01, 2013•54 min
Carl and Richard talk to Andrea Magnorsky and Andrew O'Connor about their experiences building games in .NET. The conversation starts out talking about the role of MonoGame and how Andrea and Andrew switched to Duality to build Honorbound. Andrea talks about working with artists and the need for visual editors that Duality provides. Andrew talks about the loss of XNA and the challenge of being an indie game developer - there are no good homes these days! Lots of discussion about the right way to...
Sep 26, 2013•56 min
Carl and Richard talk to Rob Eisenberg about DurandalJS. DurandalJS is a library for facilitating building Single Page Applications (SPAs). It works along side jQuery, Knockout and RequireJS as well as CSS libraries like Bootstrap and Foundation. Rob talks about how DurandalJS came to be as a logical path from his MVVM framework, Caliburn.Micro. Much discussion about interoperating with other libraries like RequireJS, jQuery, Knockout as well as comparisons with Angular and Ember. Rob builds gre...
Sep 24, 2013•1 hr 7 min
Carl and Richard geek out on asteroid mining - the goal that could change mankind forever! After an initial conversation about the problems with sending humans to Mars (in a word: RADIATION), the topic turns to asteroid mining and those crazy folks at Planetary Resources. Richard attacks the idea of justifying asteroid mining with high value minerals and digs into the cooler idea - manufacturing in space. Once you solve the problems of prospecting, extraction and refining resources in space, you...
Sep 19, 2013•48 min
Carl and Richard talk to Matthew Podwysocki about the latest news around Reactive Extensions. Matthew starts out talking about how Reactive Extensions has moved into open source in a big way, with lots of cross platform support - .NET, JavaScript, C++, Ruby, Python, even Java itself! The conversation digs into the thinking around the reactive approach to development, dealing with massive streams of data and tying event trapping over it. Lots of great thinking about modern development concepts! M...
Sep 17, 2013•55 min
Carl and Richard talk to Chris May about building applications for the Google Glass. The conversation starts out talking about the fundamental capabilities of Glass, how it works and when/where it makes sense to use - and apparently driving is NOT one of them! While the native programming environment is Android (and locked down for the time being), there is a cloud-centric REST model with programming support for almost anything including .NET! Lots of discussion around wearable computing in gene...
Sep 12, 2013•58 min
Carl and Richard talk to Eric Boyd about what the power of Netflix Chaos Monkey can do to your cloud application. The conversation digs into the thinking around deep testing for highly available systems - it's not what you think of, it's what you never thought about! Eric digs into the thinking around testing in production (what happens when you're too big to test?) and how the various part of the SimianArmy, including Chaos Monkey, are byproducts of very large scale applications in the cloud. Y...
Sep 10, 2013•56 min
While at That Conference, Carl and Richard moderated a panel on women in technology. Before the panel started the audience watched She++ the Documentary. Great thoughts on how to address the inequality of gender in technology! Make sure you activate your Windows Azure credits in your MSDN Subscription! You could win an Aston Martin! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations
Sep 05, 2013•58 min
Carl and Richard talk to Russ Unger about his work in wireframing user experiences. The conversation starts out talking about the differences between wireframing and prototyping, as well as the role of design in modern applications. And the occasional mention of the deprecated BLINK tag. Russ talks about a design effort between himself and three friends, each using different tools to design the same application. The results are a surprise! Make sure you activate your Windows Azure credits in you...
Sep 03, 2013•54 min
Carl and Richard talk to Chris Williams about building and programming robots - all kinds of robots! After Carl opens with a conversation about the Internet of Things, Chris digs into the cool tiny computers that make it possible, like Arduino and Raspberry Pi. Communicating with small computers takes cleverness too, so don't forget about serial and serial's grown-up cousin USB. From there, the conversation turns to different robots, especially quadcopters. Chris brings up his focus on getting k...
Aug 29, 2013•1 hr 1 min
Carl and Richard talk to Guy Starbuck about his use of Azure Blob Storage as part of his continuous delivery solution. Guy starts out talking about how blob storage was built to handle huge files (like VHDs) but works just fine with small files - and is very cost effective! From there, Guy talks about how he's able to use Blob Storage to place Click-Once applications of his clients for testing purposes, making it easy to include his remote customers in the continuous delivery process. Great way ...
Aug 27, 2013•50 min
It's show 900! While at That Conference, Carl and Richard recorded the 900th episode in front of an audience. The topic - geeking out on Automated Driving. The conversation starts with the history of automated driving, including the DARPA Grand Challenge initiatives. From there, the boys dig into how the Google car works, using LiDAR. Automated driving is inevitable (Sergey Brin says five years!), to the show ends with a discussion of how these cars will come into the market - you'll probably ne...
Aug 22, 2013•1 hr 3 min
Carl and Richard talk to Bob Uva about instrumenting production software with New Relic. New Relic works with Ruby, Java, .NET and more, able to instrument applications end-to-end in production. And there's a free version you can use forever - how cool is that? Bob talks about how the instrumentation system works, reporting back to New Relic servers to give you great visualization of what is actually going on in your web application. Listen also for a great digression on engaging kids with progr...
Aug 20, 2013•56 min
Carl and Richard talk to Jeremiah Peschka about implementing Hadoop in the .NET world. Jeremiah starts out the discussion pointing to a blog post he's done on the Basics of Hadoop (check the links) and how the focus of Hadoop is on the cloud - pre-configured Hadoop solutions in the cloud make life easier, but you have to get the data there. Jeremiah digs into the diversity of tools available to work with Hadoop - you can use SQL-like commands, or build your own controlling code in C#. And what a...
Aug 15, 2013•1 hr 1 min
Carl and Richard talk to Chris Sells about his experimentation with TypeScript. The conversation starts out with a discussion about the pervasiveness of C# and how the Mono Project brought .NET to a wider audience than just Windows. From there, Chris talks about a variety of languages beyond JavaScript, including TypeScript and others (check out the links). Ultimately the conversation circles back to JavaScript and mobile development, talking about the use of WinJS and the Cordova-derived web-ba...
Aug 13, 2013•1 hr 3 min
Carl and Richard talk to Joe Kuermerle and Alex Papadimoulis about automating deployment as the path to a DevOps world. The conversation starts out talking about the real impact of DevOps, bringing developers and operations folks closer together. A key part of the process is to automate everything you can, including deployment. Part of the conversation is BuildMaster, which is free for up to five seats, providing the glue to get automated deployment working effectively. You need the process and ...
Aug 08, 2013•1 hr
Carl and Richard talk to Chris Riley of Cloudshare about testing applications in the cloud. Chris talks about how the cloud provides a low-cost diversity of environments so that you can iterate more quickly through designs and implementations of code. Even if your organization isn't prepared to put their applications into production in the cloud, taking your testing environment there is possible and palatable! Don't forget to activate your MSDN Azure account and be automatically entered to win a...
Aug 06, 2013•54 min
Carl and Richard talk to Fabio Matsui about working effectively with creative personnel in an organization. The conversation starts out just defining what we mean by design - the different types of designers (UX, visual, motion, graphics, etc) and their role in the team. Fabio then dives into the challenges of putting different mindsets together to create synergy - where the result is greater than the sum of its parts. Great teams make it possible to do amazing things! Support this podcast at — ...
Aug 01, 2013•1 hr 3 min
Carl and Richard talk to Scott Stanfield about his experiences with Node. The conversation begins with a discussion on building software in the heterogeneous client environment of today. Scott also digs into his love of programming at the command line and how he configures his Mac in the CLI style. He also digs into his love of Node and the power of Node Package Manager (NPM) along with a number of other libraries (check out the links! Scott sees Node as a key ingredient in getting people engage...
Jul 30, 2013•59 min
Carl and Richard chat with legendary Mark Minasi of Mastering Windows fame. While Mark largely focuses on the IT side of Windows, this conversation digs into the topics that developers will find especially interesting. Mark talks about the good and bad of Windows 8, how PowerShell is an awesome tool for IT Pro and an even more awesome tool for developers! The line between the roles has blurred! There's also a brief discussion about side-loading Windows 8 applications, it's still harder than it n...
Jul 25, 2013•1 hr 2 min
Carl and Richard talk to Cory Fowler from Microsoft about how developers can put together a continuous delivery solution on Azure. The conversation starts out with a discussion about the core concepts of continuous delivery - integrating build and testing together with lots of automation to create a minimum number of manual steps as possible. Cory describes how Azure becomes the environment for development, QA and production, and how the MSDN subscription can help at each step of the way. Lots o...
Jul 23, 2013•53 min
Carl and Richard talk to Phil Haack about his latest work at GitHub. The conversation starts out talking about semantic versioning, just trying to establish a coherent set of documents about how versioning should work. Phil then talks about licensing around GitHub, discussing a new service at GitHub to make it easier to select a software license - running down the differences between MIT, Apache and GPL licenses, and more! The discussion then digs into GitHub for Windows, or rather Phil's effort...
Jul 18, 2013•48 min
Carl and Richard talk to Dan Wahlin about his experiences building web pages from a Silverlight perspective. The conversation starts out talking about how XAML isn't going away - there's lots of WPF development going on out there today. And Silverlight too! Microsoft has finally published some guidance around all of these technologies, check the links for the white paper. Dan also digs into how skills and expectations like data binding from technologies like Silverlight have changed web developm...
Jul 16, 2013•57 min
Carl and Richard talk to G. Andrew Duthie about his work with .NET Gadgeteer. The whole concept of .NET Gadgeteer is to make it easy to build small electronic devices without needing to solder anything together AND be able to program in .NET! Andrew talks about his projects, including a hand-controlled helicopter, and his experience building custom modules for .NET Gadgeteer. The conversation explores a bunch of projects, availability of hardware and the vast array of community built hardware av...
Jul 11, 2013•37 min
Well, you knew it was coming - a geek out on whiskey. Carl and Richard talk about all kinds of whiskey, starting with Scotch whiskey as the foundation for how whiskey is made, and then digging into the differences in Irish whiskey and bourbon. The different grains, maltings, fermentation, barreling and post-processing techniques are all discussed. Making whiskey is an amazing and ancient art, and the boys have been studying it for awhile... perhaps a bit too closely! Support this podcast at — ht...
Jul 04, 2013•1 hr 2 min