How do you write XAML? Carl and Richard chat with Dmitry Lyalin about Microsoft's on-going efforts to make coding in XAML faster, easier and more reliable. Dmitry starts out talking about how there are different dialects of XAML, including WPF, UWP, Xamarin Forms and more - although there are concerted efforts to keep them more in sync. And that helps with tooling also! Dmitry dives into Blend, XAML Designer and the power of coding XAML directly with IntelliCode, hot-reload and more! Support thi...
Jan 09, 2020•57 min
Are we actually making progress on quantum computing? While at .NET Developer Days in Warsaw, Carl and Richard talked to Johnny Hooyberghs about quantum computing and Microsoft's Q# language. The discussion begins with some definitions around quantum computing including qubits, superposition, and entanglement. Google's announcement on quantum supremacy is debated, as is the idea that quantum computers could ever be general-purpose computing devices. Back in the 1950s, we didn't think computers w...
Jan 02, 2020•50 min
Memory Leaks in .NET? How is that possible? While at .NET Developer Days in Warsaw, Carl and Richard talked to Adam Furmanek about modern memory leaks - the things we can do in .NET that cause more memory to be consumed over time. Adam talks through various aspects of .NET that have a risk of causing memory leaks, how to detect them and then the hard part - how to fix them. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations...
Dec 26, 2019•54 min
Containers sound like a good idea - but can you get your application live on them? Carl and Richard talk to Michele Bustamante about her on-going work migrating existing applications to microservices on containers, as well as greenfield development. Michele discusses the balance of complexity and flexibility that containers bring, and the challenges of getting an organization comfortable operating an entirely new architecture of applications. But the payoff is big - scalable, reliable and cost-e...
Dec 19, 2019•1 hr 6 min
Do you Python? Carl and Richard chat with Michael Kennedy about the current state of Python and how .NET developers can learn it! Michael talks about the many flavors of Python out there today and the tremendous number of libraries available. The focus of Python on machine learning, scientific computation and more makes it great for all sorts of applications outside of regular dev. But if you wanna make a web site - it kicks butt there too! Check out Michael's course on Python for .NET Developer...
Dec 12, 2019•56 min
How do you improve the performance of your application? While at .NET Developer Days in Poland, Carl and Richard chatted with Steve Gordon about his work writing high-performance C#. The conversation digs into the larger picture of why and how you improve performance - don't guess, use method profiling, benchmarking and great measurements to know if you're fixing the right thing, the right way. That being said, there are a bunch of techniques available to improve performance - check out Steve's ...
Dec 05, 2019•1 hr 2 min
How can you be more productive with Visual Studio? Carl and Richard talk to Kendra Havens about all the built-in productivity gadgets in Studio - plus the ones you can build yourself! Kendra talks about putting those red and green squiggles, lightbulbs and screwdrivers to work communicating with developers about standards of development within your organization using Roslyn Analyzers, as well as taking advantage of the huge number of productivity features including regex completion, type recogni...
Nov 28, 2019•1 hr 1 min
How do you configure your cloud? Carl and Richard talk to Joe Duffy about Pulumi, a tool that lets you use your favorite programming languages to provide Configuration-as-Code. Joe Duffy talks about the new addition to Pulumi - .NET Core languages including C#, F#, VB.NET... even COBOL.NET if you really want to! The conversation then turns to the process of creating better code for managing configuration, getting real testing, building our modules. Configuration-as-Code is code, give it the love...
Nov 21, 2019•58 min
What's up with Entity Framework? Carl and Richard talk to Julie Lerman about the latest updates to Entity Framework, both EF 6 and Entity Framework Core 3.0. The discussion dives into this transitory time in the world of .NET, where .NET framework and .NET Core live side-by-side, and looking to a future of a unified .NET 5. Julie talks about the new features in EF Core 3.0 and what's coming shortly in EF Core 3.1. There are more breaking changes than new features, but it should all be worth it, ...
Nov 14, 2019•59 min
What's happening with Windows client-side development? Carl and Richard talk to Ryan Demopoulous about WinUI 3.0, the next version of the WinUI stack, which represents a major shift in how Windows applications are going to be built and supported in the future. Ryan starts the conversation focused on the current WinUI 2, which is open source, but largely focuses only on UWP. WinUI 3 expands the horizons to support .NET Core and more - the alpha bits shipped at Ignite, check it out! Support this p...
Nov 07, 2019•59 min
What does it take to move away from AngularJS? Carl and Richard talk to Jennifer Wadella about so-called legacy Angular apps, that is, web apps built using Angular 1.x - known as AngularJS. The discussion calls back to the issues around AngularJS, that its flexibility led to a huge array of programming approaches, making it difficult to manage projects in the long term. The opinionated approach of Angular from version 2 dealt with that issue, at the price of making upgrading hard - but today the...
Oct 31, 2019•54 min
Software-as-a-Service is getting more common, what does it take to make a good app in that world? Carl and Richard talk to Tom Kerkhove about building multi-tenant cloud apps today. While multi-tenant apps have been around for a long time, the cloud offers new ways to build, monitor and maintain them. The conversation starts out digging into the challenge of data - do you really want a database for each customer? Tom talks about the new data capabilities Azure offers and how that impacts your ch...
Oct 24, 2019•52 min
What does client-side development look like today? Carl and Richard talk to Tim Corey about WinForms, WPF and other ways to build applications that live on a client. The conversation digs into the fear that client-side developers have around WinForms going away - which does not appear to be happening with a new version appearing in .NET Core 3. But Tim does dive into how you can spend time organizing your application in a way that tolerates changes to UI... but what to change to? Support this po...
Oct 17, 2019•47 min
Ready for a tale of migration? Carl and Richard enjoy a tale by Elias Puurunen who tells the story of migrating a 90's era Delphi app to .NET. The application in question was an air quality simulation application with some serious math equations in it that was written in the 90's in Delphi. The original developer long gone, there is source code but no operating development environment for it. Elias describes the various tactics he used to get the application into .NET so that it could have a fut...
Oct 10, 2019•58 min
The ASP.NET Core Ecosystem is thriving! What does that mean for you? Carl and Richard talk to Jeremy Miller about how the latest versions of ASP.NET Core are building an ecosystem of third-party tools in the open-source world. Jeremy talks about looking at different approaches to building web apps with ASP.NET Core, the variety of backend libraries available, and takes a short trip down memory lane to talk about ALT.NET, an open-source movement he was a part of going back to 2007! Support this p...
Oct 03, 2019•48 min
.NET Core 3 has shipped - what did we get? Carl and Richard talk to Scott Hunter about the announcements at .NET Conf around .NET Core 3 and the cool stuff still coming from the latest version of .NET. .NET Core 3 continues to expand on the ability to work across platforms, while also adding the new Windows SDK that contains a new version of WinForms and WPF. More compiling options, installation features, monitoring and more - it's a great time to be a .NET developer! Support this podcast at — h...
Sep 26, 2019•54 min
How do you build software for a diversity of customers? Carl and Richard talk to Lily Dart about what it takes to really build diversity-sensitive software, and it starts with understanding the difference between sympathy and empathy. Lily talks about how folks fall into the trap of avoiding diversity using empathy training - but real empathy takes understanding, and that means living with diversity. There's no substitute for a diverse team, and even then, you'll still need to research into area...
Sep 19, 2019•54 min
Blazor is coming on strong - should you migrate to it? Carl and Richard talk to Jeff Fritz about what's happening with Blazor and how server-side Blazor is going to ship with .NET Core 3. But what about moving existing web forms apps to Blazor? The developer ecosystem seems to be building controls for Blazor, so perhaps there are options there, but first, make sure your web forms apps are using the latest .NET bits - then you'll have a better grasp of what's possible and where to go! Support thi...
Sep 12, 2019•52 min
What is gRPC and why should you care? Carl and Richard talk to Shawn Wildermuth about the new hotness that is gRPC - or is it? Shawn talks about all the different approaches we've taken over the years to communicate over the wire, whether with SOAP, REST or all the other flavors in-between. What makes sense for your application? Shawn talks about how gRPC has a solid cross-platform solution for streaming connections and how that is probably the main reason you should consider gRPC at all - and i...
Sep 05, 2019•54 min
In the age of the cloud, does performance matter? Carl and Richard talk to JD Trask of Raygun software about his work making applications run fast - and knowing how to do it! JD talks about the various ways that you can measure the performance of different types of applications, especially in this modern day where you can instrument in production and actually see what your customers are experiencing. The trick is to not look at averages - individual experiences matter, and figuring out where and...
Aug 29, 2019•56 min
Server-Side Blazor is poised to ship at the end of September 2019 - are you ready? Carl and Richard talk to Shaun Walker, formerly of DotNetNuke fame, about server-side Blazor - starting with, how does server-side Blazor even make sense? Blazor has been a client-side technology using web assembly since Steve Sanderson showed off the prototype in 2017. But as the product matured, a server-side model from the Razor world emerged as a hugely powerful way to build forms-over-data web applications - ...
Aug 22, 2019•53 min
How do you integrate accessibility into your applications? Carl and Richard chat with Elle Waters about her on-going work helping educate developers and organizations to include accessibility features as part of their user experience design. Elle digs into how accessibility should become part of your workflow - it takes time to learn, but once understood, it doesn't cost much in terms of routine work. The same applies to client-side and mobile tech. In the end, accessibility *is* user experience...
Aug 15, 2019•59 min
What is Rust and why would you use it with C#? While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard chatted with Ashley Mannix about he and the team at Datalust build Seq, a structured log server, using Rust on the back end and C# on the front. Rust looks a lot like C++, but with a great type safety system and a smart compiler that can help catch memory leaks before they happen. Rust is a modern language with modern capabilities and well worth the look! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rock...
Aug 08, 2019•55 min
Artificial Intelligence is happening - are we using it correctly? While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard talked to Amber McKenzie about the challenges of building AI applications that are ethical and unbiased. Doc Am discusses how the AI term is over-used, and how often there are simpler technologies that can solve business problems. But where AI is applied, it comes with some ethical needs about how it is used, and an understanding that there is always bias in the data that trains AI . Tread ca...
Aug 01, 2019•55 min
Can software summarize documents? While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard talked to Masa Nekic about automated text summarization. Masa walks through a few cases where text summarization is valuable, such as search optimization. There are a variety of strategies to automate text summarization, and there are plenty of 'it depends' cases, but it's a cool tech to explore! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations...
Jul 25, 2019•55 min
WCF isn't coming to .NET Core 3 - what to do? While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard chatted with Mark Rendle about his new project called Recode. Mark talks about how Microsoft came to the decision that they could not migrate WCF to the open-source, cross-platform .NET Core and what that means going forward. Mark's solution is a tool called Recode that can convert WCF code to gRPC - check it out! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations...
Jul 18, 2019•57 min
How does UX work in your organization? While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard talked to Debbie Levitt about how UX can help make software better and the development process less difficult. Debbie talks about UX being part of the initial requirements gathering process, talking to users and looking through how business processes actually work. UX can help you build the right thing! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations...
Jul 11, 2019•59 min
What can HashiCorp's Packer do for you? Carl and Richard talk to Jamie Phillips about how Packer helps to make golden images of hypervisor machines - that would be Hyper-V, VMWare or any of the container solutions so that you can ship them out to whoever needs them. The images can be used as part of your pipeline to push cloud products into a store, or for developers to work from production-configured images, and so on. Packer is a powerful open source solution that can be part of your CI/CD pip...
Jul 04, 2019•50 min
What's your authentication solution? Carl and Richard talk to Vittorio Bertocci, now an architect at Auth0, about building pure identity solutions that work for all platforms and languages. Vittorio digs into why you want an authentication solution that stands independent of any given cloud vendor, and what capabilities you need to get authentication right! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations
Jun 27, 2019•54 min
How do you use messaging? Carl and Richard talk to Jimmy Bogard about his work developing messaging architecture for applications. Jimmy talks about the mistakes he's made along the way, starting with not using formal messaging systems - yes, you can use a text file or a database table as a queue, but should you? And when you do embrace messaging, there is an overhead of code and effort to work with queues properly. Is it worth it? The answer is always, it depends! Support this podcast at — http...
Jun 20, 2019•57 min
