Once more into the breech for the last of the fusion power GeekOuts, at least for now. Carl and Richard dive into the most controversial aspect of fusion power, so-called "cold fusion." This is a sensitive topic in the scientific community, so much so that it's name changes on a regular basis. The current popular name is Low Energy Nuclear Reactions. And the name is a big deal - Richard starts off the conversation by digging into the idea that there is more than one kind of cold fusion. Then the...
Sep 18, 2014•1 hr 4 min
Carl and Richard chat with IdeaBlade man Ward Bell about the latest in Breeze and the whole concept of building web clients that can function in a disconnected state. It's possible with modern browsers to store information locally, which can help your web app survive an intermittent connection. Ward talks about how Breeze, his open source tool for caching, validation and querying, helps solve the disconnected problem. The challenge is finding the right patterns of development so that you don't h...
Sep 17, 2014•54 min
Carl and Richard talk to Kathleen Dollard about her deep dive into Roslyn. The conversation starts out with a great question from a listener about using Roslyn to step into the compiler and understand how syntax trees would look... and what the potential for visualization is. Kathleen talks about her own open source project RoslynDom to help understand what's going on inside of Roslyn. The discussion also gets into some of the cool new capabilities coming in the next version of Visual Studio, an...
Sep 16, 2014•56 min
Carl and Richard chat with Robert Bogue about the adventure that is requirements gathering. The conversation starts out with a sharing of war stories, talking about finding the right people to talk to in order to understand the overall application requirements in general, much less individual specifications. Robert talks a bit about a variety of techniques for requirements gathering, referencing some of the Agile Manifesto in the process, but recognizing that requirements themselves are largely ...
Sep 11, 2014•59 min
Carl and Richard talk to Paul Sheriff about his work building mobile web apps using ASP.NET WebForms. Yeah, that's right, WebForms! Paul talks about the problems with WebForms and how they can be overcome with some careful configuration and understanding of how WebForms really works. The conversation digs into adding Responsive Web Design to a WebForms page to make it work well on a mobile browser using Twitter's BootStrap - and also how to use WrapBootStrap to make your pages not look like Boot...
Sep 10, 2014•51 min
Carl and Richard chat with Dan Wahlin about his latest open source project, building a Single Page Application (SPA) using AngularJS interfacing with Microsoft Azure Active Directory Services (MAAD) and Office 365 API. Called OfficeDev and published on GitHub, this project demonstrates interacting with Office documents, Sharepoint and traditional enterprise authentication systems from within a browser. Dan discusses the thinking behind the project and some of the more challenging parts to it - b...
Sep 09, 2014•55 min
Time for some more IoT! Pete Brown checks in with Carl and Richard to talk about Microsoft's continuing announcements in the Internet of Things space. The conversation starts out with a discussion about Pete's work in the music side of things and the Windows 8 API for MIDI - helping musicians use a Windows 8 tablet as the hub of a music system. Then it's on to several important announcements, including the implementation of C# with the Intel Galileo board, and the announcement of two new hardwar...
Sep 04, 2014•1 hr 3 min
Carl and Richard talk to Glenn Howes about Apple's new programming language for IoS and MacOS: Swift. As Glenn explains, Swift builds on the same compiler that Apple's Objective-C uses (LLVM), but optimizes a number of key aspects that were known to be slow. Swift goes beyond performance improvements to add language features like generics, type safety and more! The conversation also digs into the future of Swift running on Mac OS X as well, which then digs into the differences between apps on th...
Sep 03, 2014•57 min
Carl and Richard talk to Bill Wagner about some of the features coming in C# 6.0. The conversation starts with the history - the internal Microsoft project known as Roslyn has become an open source project on Codeplex. Bill runs down a number of cool features coming in C# 6.0, including primary constructors, improvements to Await and more. No idea when the shipping date is, but C# 6.0 is in the Visual Studio 2014 CTPs and is available for download any time you like! Support this podcast at — htt...
Sep 02, 2014•54 min
Carl and Richard talk to GitHub denizen and former Microsoftie Phil Haack about what it means to build open source software. The conversation starts off with a reminder that back in Phil's Microsoft days, he was a huge advocate of taking various Microsoft products open source - and today it's actually happening! Phil may have moved on to GitHub, but the spirit of open source has permeated the web team at Microsoft, the ultimate manifestation being ASP.NET vNext! So what about your projects? What...
Aug 28, 2014•53 min
Carl and Richard circle back with Mark Miller for a whirlwind discussion on the biology of user interface design. Actually, it's the biology of humans as it relates to UI, focusing (no pun intended) on the eyes - how exactly does eyesight work? What cultural and psychological conditioning affects how you see? And ultimately, how can we apply the understanding of eyesight to make applications that are easier to use, easier to understand, and more enjoyable? Mark has years of experience in buildin...
Aug 27, 2014•1 hr 1 min
Carl and Richard talk to Daniel Piessens about building continuous delivery solutions. The conversation starts out with an explanation of the differences between continuous integration, deployment, and delivery - and the fact that there are business decisions to deal with there, not just technical decisions! Daniel also digs into the challenges around getting Operations deeply involved in the testing process so that they have control over features as they are developed and can be turned off and ...
Aug 26, 2014•58 min
Carl and Richard talk to Denise Jacobs about creativity. Denise starts out talking about her work with developers, mostly focused around understanding just how creative the software development process is. The conversation digs into the idea that flow state, which has been a talking point in a number of shows of late... is it inherently a creative state? Denise also digs into the battle with your internal critic, how to stop that critic from holding you back. Lots of personal empowerment thought...
Aug 21, 2014•55 min
Carl and Richard talk to Chris Love about building mobile web apps for the enterprise. The conversation starts out with a reference to a comment made on a previous show about the problems with web apps not being built well enough for your device - that they feel too webby. And Chris agrees - it's very challenging to build a web app that feels great on a mobile device. So what's the problem? Chris digs deep into what it takes to make web pages render fast and clean on phones and the biggest bugbe...
Aug 20, 2014•56 min
Carl and Richard talk to Julie Lerman and Steve Smith about the fundamentals of Domain Driven Design (DDD). Julie and Steve have collaborated on a very popular Pluralsight course about DDD that has made the methodology more approachable for more people. The conversation digs into the fact that DDD has been around for more than a decade, but hasn't caught on near as much as it should - and why is that? There's at least one alphabet soup moment: What about DDD, BDD, TDD, PDD, ADDDD and SJDD? Liste...
Aug 19, 2014•1 hr 4 min
Well, here we go - the second installation of the fusion power geek out. While the first show focused on the "Big Science" fusion power projects like NIF and ITER, this time around Richard digs into smaller hybrid projects, like General Fusions Magnetized Target Fusion as well as Colliding Beam Fusion Reactors being built by Helion Energy and Tri Alpha Energy. These fusion approaches combine magnetic and inertial plasma confinement to make fusion a little less extreme and more manageable - with ...
Aug 14, 2014•55 min
Carl and Richard chat with Scott Hunter about how Microsoft is working to evolve web development for ASP.NET developers. While the focus of the discussion is on ASP.NET vNext, you can't talk web without also talking cloud, and that means Azure. Scott digs into many of the new features in Azure that can make a web developer's life easier, before digging into ASP.NET vNext. No punches are pulled - vNext represents some breaking changes, especially for web forms developers. But web forms continues ...
Aug 13, 2014•57 min
Carl and Richard talk to Seth Juarez about the latest developments in the machine learning space for the Microsoft space. The conversation starts out focused on Seth's open source library for doing machine learning in .NET. Seth talks about the challenges of getting your head around machine learning, building models and testing data. Then the discussion turns to the Azure Machine Learning tools, at the moment in preview. This can greatly simplify your experiments with machine learning, providing...
Aug 12, 2014•55 min
Carl and Richard chat with Dan Rosenstein about his work bringing the Windows Developer Program for Internet of Things (IoT) to life. The conversation starts out with a discussion about Microsoft's focus on IoT and the recognition that this a thing that is happening, and developers need tools to be productive. Dan focuses on the work Microsoft has done with Intel's Galileo device, which can work with Arduino, but uses a full x86 chipset. And while there isn't .NET available for the system yet, "...
Aug 07, 2014•54 min
Carl and Richard chat with Rick Strahl about his latest efforts to build mobile web applications. The conversation starts out with a recap of the continuing debate about native vs web on mobile devices. As Rick says, there are no easy answers there. Every approach to cross-platform development (and different browsers on different phones represent different platforms) have compromises that need to be made. There is no "one size fits all" available. But the web continues to evolve, and Rick is opt...
Aug 06, 2014•57 min
Carl and Richard talk to Mike Wood about migrating your applications to Azure. The conversation starts out thinking through the fundamentals of working in the cloud - how architecture and deployment are different. This inevitably leads to the hardest debate: Is your organization okay with data in the cloud? After that, Mike gets into some of the more interesting angles on cloud development - actually using virtual machines for your development environment. Is it cloud or is it virtual? Is there ...
Aug 05, 2014•54 min
Carl and Richard talk to Adam Tornhill about his work understanding the psychology of programming. The conversation starts out with some thinking around getting into "the flow," being able to focus effectively on programming. Adam then digs into where bugs come from and the role of complexity in code. He has been studying code repositories to determine where bugs are likely to appear based on the idea that complex code changes more than simple code. The discussion also explores the idea that whi...
Jul 31, 2014•54 min
Carl and Richard talk to Rocky Lhotka about what it means to build modern apps today. In past shows, Rocky has been pretty frustrated with the native development options and focused primarily on web development with HTML 5 and JavaScript. But things on the native side have gotten better, and Rocky talks about his experiences with Xamarin and the potential of the universal app template in Visual Studio. Could native be making a comeback? Rocky talks about the advantages of the native model with c...
Jul 30, 2014•57 min
Carl and Richard chat with Jeff Fritz about ASP.NET vNext - and yes, ASP.NET is now open source! So what does that really mean for ASP.NET developers? Jeff digs into the impact of taking open source on the development process of ASP.NET and how we can all get more involved! This leads to a discussion about the expanding reach of .NET into other platforms such as Linux using OWIN and Katana, and the Microsoft stack being a friendly place for developers of all kinds to hang out. Azure is also a bi...
Jul 29, 2014•57 min
In what is likely to become a multi-part series, Richard and Carl chat about fusion power, focused on the "hot" side of fusion - megaprojects like the National Ignition Facility (NIF) and the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). But first, a review of what is actually involved in fusing atoms together and how it differs from fission (as discussed in the older nuclear power shows. Richard then delves into a quick history lesson of power demand and why we need fusion as well as...
Jul 24, 2014•1 hr 5 min
Carl and Richard talk to Atley Hunter about how he monetizes phone apps. A newcomer to .NET Rocks, Atley was a regular guest on the TabletShow and has talked about monetization before - but now he's learned even more techniques! Atley talks about the advantages of in-app purchases over try-before-you-buy, as well as asking for donations. He also digs into the idea that you can offer a variety of prices and how to encourage your customers to spend more! Lots of great thinking on how to make an in...
Jul 23, 2014•54 min
Carl and Richard talk to Daniel Simmons about his work with PasTrak, building RFID tools for small businesses. The first half of the conversation focuses on what RFID is all about - different types of tags, scanners, security concerns, and so on. There's a lot of choice out there when it comes to RFID and its cousin Near Field Communications (NFC). Then Danny digs into the coding side of things - the various APIs you work with to handle different readers, how your code responds, how to deal with...
Jul 22, 2014•57 min
Carl and Richard chat with David Graham about what it takes to create a new developer. David starts out the conversation talking about the shortage of developers today, and how the shortage is getting worse, not better. This leads to a conversation about existing training approaches, such as a four-year computer science degree. While we all agree that the best way to learn to program is to actually program, what are the best tools to start out with? How do you get out into the industry and conti...
Jul 17, 2014•42 min
Carl and Richard talk to Jason and Brian Kriesel about their work building Amazon Fire Tablet applications. The conversation starts off talking about the differences between the Android world and the Amazon world - they aren't that far apart! The brothers Kriesel talk about what it takes to maintain an application that runs in regular Android tablets and phones as well as the Amazon Fire world - what features Amazon brings to the table and the strengths of their platform and app store. The discu...
Jul 16, 2014•50 min
Carl and Richard talk to Michelle Smith about building great development teams. Michelle talks about what a great team looks like, the differences in productivity and focus. This leads to a conversation about team building, creating trust within the team and dealing with remote workers - how do you create trust when you can't see each other. Then there's the process of recruiting and interviewing, where Michelle focuses on the interaction with the team even more than technical skills. Great team...
Jul 15, 2014•41 min
