The Chuck Norris of C# is back! While at NDC London, Carl and Richard sit down with the indomitable (and always humble) Jon Skeet to talk about what he's been working on in the past year. First up is nodatime, an open source library for doing date, time and timezones correctly. Why is time so hard? Because politics and science! Jon talks about crazy time zone challenges, solutions for leap seconds and more. Next up is Google Cloud Platform which has gone all C# friendly! Jon talks about building...
Jan 31, 2017•58 min
The beatings will continue until morale improves! While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard talk to Louise Elliott about the idea of punishment driven development - that is, workplaces where blame is a driver. Louise talks about getting rid of blame and punishment, whether self-inflicted or team-inflicted, so that the individual unique contributions and capabilities of every member of the team are valued. The conversation also dives into creating constructive incentives - not pitting team members...
Jan 26, 2017•54 min
So what's the right way to use ASP.NET Core? There may not be one right way, but there are plenty of opinions, and Scott Allen has some! While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard chat with Scott about his preferences for building ASP.NET Core apps. Scott digs into project organization, keeping projects and folder structures aligned, keeping elements related to features together and more. Many of the defaults around an ASP.NET Core project are arbitrary - you can do things the way you want to do t...
Jan 25, 2017•58 min
Can you help a charity move to the cloud? Carl and Richard talk to Jeremy Pitman of Microsoft Philanthropies about the new offering to provide $5000 worth of Azure credit to any qualified non-profit organization. The offering includes tools like Office 365 and Dynamics CRM - things that are pretty straightforward to implement. Even using Azure to set up a WordPress blog is simple - but what if you want to lift-and-shift an existing charity website? Perhaps .NET Rocks listeners could be helping t...
Jan 24, 2017•49 min
2016 was an amazing year for space - what happens in 2017! Time for a Geek Out! Richard pulls together all his notes on the various players in the US space industry (and a few beyond the US). The big player, of course, is the United Launch Alliance (ULA). With pressure from SpaceX, ULA is starting to innovate - is this a good thing? And what about SpaceX? After the accident on Sept 1 2016, they're pushing hard to return to flight (and as this show publishes, should have just flown). There's also...
Jan 19, 2017•1 hr 3 min
Where do your keep your secrets? Carl and Richard talk to Sumedh Barde about Azure Key Vault - the perfect place to keep all your secrets for your Azure applications. Sumedh talks through the issues around securing Azure applications properly and needing to store certificates and other secrets (including username/password logins) in a very secure place. Azure Active Directory plays a critical role in making everything work by providing identity services so that you can decide who/what has access...
Jan 18, 2017•55 min
How do you monitor your applications in Azure? Carl and Richard talk to Tom Kerkhove about his work with Azure Application Insights. AppInsights works with .NET, Java and nodeJS apps to allow detailed instrumentation of how your application is being used. Tom talks about doing deep tracing with AppInsights to be able to see a request come in on the front side of the application all the way back to the database. The conversation also digs into other levels of instrumentation including Operations ...
Jan 17, 2017•52 min
How do you rewrite critical code safely? Carl and Richard talk to Phil Haack about his work on Scientist.NET. Phil talks about the challenges of rewriting code, which means taking something that works (more or less) and trying to make it better, at the risk of breaking it. Yes, test suites would help, but who has those on legacy projects? The Scientist library makes it easier for you to build a new version of a function in your legacy application and run it in parallel to the old function, so th...
Jan 12, 2017•1 hr 1 min
How do you migrate to Azure? Carl and Richard talk to Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Christos Matskas about his work helping companies move workloads to Azure. The conversation starts out focused on what you can move to Azure - which is less a technical problem and more of a political one. Christos discusses Azure Site Recovery as a sort of gateway drug for getting organizations into Azure - much cheaper than running a backup data center, Site Recovery keeps images of all your active servers s...
Jan 11, 2017•55 min
Are there new C++ programmers, or just old people? Carl and Richard chat with Kate Gregory about her discovery of a whole new generation of C++ programmers, who just haven't had to go through the same pain that the old folks once did. Kate talks about going to cppcon, the premier C++ conference in the world, and seeing packs of young people getting into C++. The good news is that C++ has evolved and the coding techniques are very different than they used to be. Yes, you can still build drivers a...
Jan 10, 2017•52 min
Have you seen the new docs for C# (and many other Microsoft products)? Carl and Richard talk to Bill Wagner about his work with Microsoft getting great C# docs together on http://docs.microsoft.com . But first, a conversation about side projects, including Carl's work bringing the Polly library to the .NET Foundation as well as Bill and Richard's work on Humanitarian Toolbox. Then on to the docs - which are fully editable via GitHub, so anyone can help build the docs. Lots of interactive code op...
Jan 05, 2017•52 min
How do you make your website progressive? Carl and Richard talk to Christian Heilmann about the latest approach in web development - the progressive web app (PWA). Christian talks about how PWAs really are progressive - you can add bits of these new capabilities to your existing web sites and see some benefit. It starts with the manifest that helps create an icon on a desktop or smartphone to get access to the website, so your user doesn't have to type the URL anymore. And it goes from there, ad...
Jan 04, 2017•1 hr 1 min
You need to markdown to make good markup! Carl and Richard talk to Rick Strahl about his work building Markdown Monster, which is a Windows-based editor for creating markdown code that ultimately becomes HTML. Or leave it as markdown, which is a popular format (going back to 2004) for blogs, readme docs in GitHub and more. Rick talks about his experiences putting together a desktop app (WPF!) but still keeping it open source. Pay for it if you use it, but try it for free, or fork it on GitHub! L...
Jan 03, 2017•55 min
What happens when your college buddy decides later in life that he wants to switch to software development? Carl and Richard talk to Will Gant about his efforts bringing BJ Burns into his organization and apprenticing him as a software developer. What can you build with the earliest set of skills in modern development? How is an apprenticeship different from more traditional schooling? Will and BJ tell the story of how the apprenticeship came to be and where it is today - a great story of becomi...
Dec 29, 2016•49 min
With the release of Visual Studio 2017 Release Candidate, the truth is out - no more web essentials! Carl and Richard talk to Mads Kristensen about his decision to stop making Web Essentials, but not to stop making all the Web Essentials goodness! Rather than make one big bundle of tools for web developers, Mads has broken down the package into individual add-ins that you can download separately and install. It all comes down to manageability - not everyone wants everything, so now you can pick ...
Dec 28, 2016•1 hr 1 min
Friendship bracelets that teach girls to code! Carl and Richard talk to Sara Chipps about her experiences bringing Jewelbots to life. Sara talks about her idea to get girls more interested in coding by creating something programmable that girls will like - a friendship bracelet! Sara and her team put together a kickstarter in 2015 to raise $30,000 and ultimately raised $167,000 - the product was a hit right from the beginning. The story digs into the challenge of actually making a physical consu...
Dec 27, 2016•51 min
What does it take to keep AngularJS moving forward? Carl and Richard talk to Jules Kremer about her work as the head of Angular Developer Relations at Google. Angular started out as an internal library at Google and is widely used all over the organization. But as it's popularity grew, the outside world became interested in it also. Jules talks about learning how the rest of the world uses Angular and the role that played in the significant shift that happened in Angular 2, including the move to...
Dec 22, 2016•54 min
Ionic is growing up! Carl and Richard talk to Justin James about his work building mobile apps with Ionic Framework, now at version 2! Justin talks about the tight relationship between Angular and Ionic, including the significant changes from V1 to V2 - mostly due to Angular, but still. As such, Justin recommends sticking with Ionic 1 for existing apps but building new apps with Ionic 2. The conversation also digs into tooling choices (Visual Studio or not?) deployment options, emulators and sid...
Dec 21, 2016•53 min
There are more ways to go serverless! Carl and Richard talk to Glenn Block about his work with WebTask. WebTask uses nodeJS to build services that are unique units of work with their own scalability. Glenn also talks about using WebTask as a Webhook, allowing you to do call backs based on an activity - it's this tooling that can help you automated builds and deployments and more. Using the Webhook approach, Glenn digs into techniques for building custom commands for Slack and a bunch of other en...
Dec 20, 2016•1 hr 2 min
As requested by a listener, a Geek Out on worldwide energy production! Richard starts out with a discussion on how to measure the energy production of humanity, and explores how energy is used on the planet - it's not just about electricity! Then into the hard stuff, looking through all sorts of energy sources including oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind, solar and even geothermal. There's a lot of ways to make and consume power, some with more impact on the planet and some with less. What ar...
Dec 15, 2016•1 hr 5 min
How many different decisions do you need to make before starting web development? Carl and Richard talk to Cory House about picking out a JavaScript development environment. Cory talks about his own experiences getting into the groove with the React stack, but that is certainly not the only way to build a web application. When you think more broadly about building web apps, the number of decisions can be daunting, and hence the increase in starter kits and other tools like the JavaScript Service...
Dec 14, 2016•52 min
How are containers doing in the world today? While in Haarlem for DevIntersection Europe, Carl and Richard hosted a panel with Michele Bustamante, Dan Wahlin and Rick Van Rousselt about how they are currently working with containers and what they see coming in the future. The panel discusses how making containers work is really about working with Linux, which is entirely viable in the .NET world with .NET Core, but Windows Containers looks to change that in the coming years. What will modern dev...
Dec 13, 2016•49 min
Are you an imposter? Carl and Richard talk to Rob Conery about his battle with imposter syndrome - starting with a definition. Rob talks about how often folks that don't have formal computing science education feel like they are faking it when it comes to software development, no matter how significant their contributions are. And part of his process for dealing with his own issues was to write a book on the subject - self-published. One of the focuses of the book is to dig into core concepts in...
Dec 08, 2016•57 min
How does security work in ASP.NET Core? Carl and Richard talk to Roland Guijt about the security features of ASP.NET Core - many of which are the same as the original .NET, but there are some significant changes! The conversation starts out dealing with the idea that retrofitting security at the end of a project is fraught with perils that ultimately endanger your application and users. It's worth taking some time to figure out how security is going to be part of your app from the beginning. Rol...
Dec 07, 2016•49 min
Entity Framework Core has shipped - now what? Carl and Richard talk to Julie Lerman about what this new version of Entity Framework does to the data layer. Julie digs into how EF Core has the same relationship with EF 6.x as ASP.NET Core has to ASP.NET 4.x - they are parallel versions aimed at different goals. The Core editions are all about cross-platform where the originals continue to be Windows-centric. Both versions of Entity Framework are open source on GitHub so you can see the developmen...
Dec 06, 2016•1 hr 4 min
There are software design patterns and anti-patterns, but does the same hold true for business? Carl and Richard talk to Steve Smith about business anti-patterns, that is, practices and approaches to business that while they may appear to be useful on the surface, are actually quite harmful. While the problem tends to be around development, since it's often not understood by business, many of these anti-patterns affect all aspects of a business. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/ne...
Dec 01, 2016•50 min
What the heck is a Progressive Web App? Carl and Richard talk to Kirupa Chinnathambi about his experiences building at the edge of the modern web with Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). PWAs are trying to bridge the gap between traditional applications and web applications, starting with keeping a web app functional when there is an interruption in Internet connection. But it's more than that - how do you appear as an icon on a desktop or app surface, provide notifications and otherwise look and act l...
Nov 30, 2016•50 min
How hard is it to build a search engine? Carl and Richard talk to Anthony Brown about his efforts to build his own search engine using Azure and F#. The conversation starts out with the question "Why?" which quickly turns into an indictment of the modern search engine, which, while useful, is bothered by the necessities of business with advertising and gaming of the system. Anthony talks about getting effective at exploring web pages for meaningful content using the ability of F# to write intell...
Nov 29, 2016•48 min
The choices for SQL Server continue to expand! With last week's announcements at Connect, SQL Server is coming to Linux in a big way. What does that mean for the average consumer of SQL Server? Tony talks about the on-going evolution of the product to store data in lots of different ways, not just relational. And on top of that, the latest SQL Server is great at taking relational data and making it available in super-fast and efficient ways. There are more SQL choices than every before! Support ...
Nov 24, 2016•49 min
What does it take to make a really great UI? Carl and Richard talk to Mark Miller about his latest work on helping people build the best possible UI. Mark has developed an amazing course teaching all of the details of making a great UI, directly connecting it to how humans see, perceive and interact with technology. Color, contrast, hue and intensity all affect perception of information on the screen, and Mark has organized every bit of it with awesome examples to help you make a really great UI...
Nov 23, 2016•1 hr
