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
The Software Craftsmanship Calendar is back for 2016! After a one year hiatus, Steve Smith and Brendan Enrick have made a new calendar with the help of .NET Rocks listeners and others via Kickstarter. The conversation starts out with the challenges of crowd funding a project like this, including some mistakes made... but overcome! And then the fun starts, talking through some of the hilarious anti-pattern software craftsmanship elements in the calendar - many that were suggested as part of the f...
Dec 03, 2015•58 min
So what does developing web apps with F# look like? Carl and Richard talk to Henrik Feldt about his efforts to use F# end-to-end when building web sites and web services. The conversation starts out with suave.io, a nodeJS-like web server written in F# that runs in a totally non-blocking fashion across Linux, OS X and Windows. Henrik also digs into WebSharper, a web framework for building functional and reactive .NET applications - a natural for F#, although WebSharper works fine with any CLR la...
Dec 02, 2015•50 min
HTTP/2? No really! We're only now getting to the second version of HTTP! Carl and Richard talk to Robert Boedigheimer about the next version of HTTP. In truth, this will be the fourth version of HTTP. Robert talks about how long-in-the-tooth HTTP/1.1 has gotten and the need to update the protocol to reflect the reality of the web - much bigger pages with many more resources on them. While a portion of the change represented by HTTP/2 is plumbing - modern browsers already support it, the web serv...
Dec 01, 2015•59 min
How do you stop your data lake from being a data swamp? Carl and Richard talk to Tom Kerkhove about Azure Data Lakes. The conversation digs into the impact the cloud has had a data warehousing - when you have as much compute and storage as you need on demand, does it still make sense to jump through all the hoops that data warehousing requires? Tom talks about Data Lakes storing all data as it arrives from a huge variety of sources and leaving that data in its native format, so that it is availa...
Nov 26, 2015•52 min
How do you make the Single Page Application (SPA) better? Carl and Richard talk to Benjamin Howarth about his experiences with building SPAs and solving some of their limitations. Users love the look of a SPA, its responsiveness and styling are powerful. But SPAs have problems - they are very hard to test properly, they resist search engine indexing, are bandwidth hungry and not accessible to folks with visual impairments. Benjamin talks about his library RomanSPA (see what he did there?) that b...
Nov 25, 2015•58 min
Microservices and Azure together! While at the Stockholm stop of the Azure Tour, Carl and Richard chatted with Corey Sanders in front of a live audience about the announcement at the Microsoft Connect event about Azure Service Fabric's direct support for microservices. Corey digs into the core concepts of microservices, focusing on single domain APIs that use HTTPS and REST to connect and communicate. The challenge of microservices is proliferation - between redundancy and scalability, a large a...
Nov 24, 2015•1 hr
So what does the future hold for commercial air travel? Carl and Richard chat about the on-going evolution of airliners, starting with the latest generation: the Airbus A380 and the Boeing 787. They represent the pinnacle of traditional airliner design so far. But is it time for a radical break? How can airliners be improved to lower costs, emissions and so on? Richard digs through the on-going evolution in turbofan engines, and looks to the future of more radical engines. Will supersonic flight...
Nov 19, 2015•1 hr 4 min
How is mobile development evolving? Carl and Richard talk to Lino Tadros about his current work building mobile apps with lots of different technologies. Lino talks about build mobile apps natively with Objective-C and Java as well as a variety of hybrid approaches: C# using Xamarin, Javascript/HTML with Cordova and even good old fashion responsive web design. So what works best for you? Lino highlights some strengths and weaknesses of the different platforms, recognizing that it mostly comes do...
Nov 18, 2015•56 min
