While at NDC is Oslo, Carl and Richard talked to Chris Hardy about Xamarin's latest work - Xamarin.Forms. As Chris explains, Xamarin.Forms brings a XAML-like experience to building forms for iOS, Android and Windows Phone. The conversation focuses in on what Xamarin.Forms is best suited for, when you should stick to the standard class based tools for building clients, and what it takes to have 100% code sharing. Is it worth it? Depends! Chris also digs into the role of MVVMCross in Xamarin devel...
Jun 11, 2014•1 hr
While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard chat with Dominick Baier and Brock Allen about their latest thinking on consumer and enterprise identity solutions. Dominick talks about the conflict between WS-Federation, the confusion that is OAuth2 and how OpenID-Connect is bringing them together in a better solution. Brock digs into how a centralized security service simplifies coding for developers as well as strengthening the overall security of the system. Overall, the news is good - granular authen...
Jun 10, 2014•50 min
Carl and Richard chat with Anthony Eden about his work creating DNSimple and the languages he uses to create awesome. Yeah, the boys fangirl a bit on DNSimple, since they do love it so. But so what? It's a great product and you should use it. Anthony talks about his inspiration for building DNSimple, his experiences working in Erlang to build parts of the server, as well as Google's super-cool language Go. This is what polyglot programming is all about - using the best languages for the job. Sup...
Jun 05, 2014•1 hr 1 min
Carl and Richard bring Stuart Lodge back to talk about the latest development in MvvmCross. Previously on The Tablet Show, Stuart talked about how he helped lead the MvvmCross open source project to make cross platform mobile applications easier to build. Now as MvvmCross moves into its third version, the number of contributors has jumped and its capabilities have also. Check out the awesome links for more info on MvvmCross! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations...
Jun 04, 2014•53 min
Carl and Richard talk to Clemens Vasters about his latest work at Microsoft around making the Internet of Things (IoT). Clemens starts with a definition of IoT, describing massive numbers of devices sharing data seamlessly... and confusing people at the same time. What's an IoT device and what isn't? The conversation digs into the challenges around connectivity, thinking through the architecture and security necessary to deal with huge numbers of occasionally connected devices with data demands ...
Jun 03, 2014•1 hr
Carl and Richard talk to Shawn Wildermuth about his experiences in code reviews - what good and bad reviews look like and what he's learned reviewing lots of different projects. Shawn runs down the challenges of team dynamics when it comes to code reviews, how some folks don't dare show their code, and how to get past those types of hurdles. Then the conversation turns to the brass tacks - common problems, different styles of coding, and so on. The more code you look at, the more you learn! Supp...
May 29, 2014•57 min
Carl and Richard talk to Amir Rajan about an amazing tale of getting to the number one spot on the Apple App Store! The app in question is called A Dark Room, a simple text-based game with an awesome story and experience. Originally a web game, Amir helped build an iOS version of the game. The conversation then digs into all the subtle things done in the game to help encourage players to promote it - when to ask for a review, when to put the game on sale, the impact of magazine reviews of the ga...
May 28, 2014•54 min
Carl and Richard chat with Vishwas Lele about the architectural patterns of cloud development. Vishwas talks about how the cloud influences application design, focused on more asynchronous, scalable and flexible messaging focused architecture. While the patterns could be applied to any cloud technology, Microsoft Azure is particularly well-suited to these architectural patterns, providing services that cover each pattern approach for optimal results. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.c...
May 27, 2014•58 min
Carl and Richard chat with SharePoint legend Ted Pattison about his experiences with the latest version of SharePoint. Microsoft is pushing hard to make SharePoint a service that you pay by the month for - but is that what customers actually want? Ted discusses his customer's ongoing focus with on-premise SharePoint, how development models are evolving, and the best opportunities for developers going forward. Ted sees SharePoint changing significantly in the next few years - both users and devel...
May 22, 2014•51 min
Carl and Richard chat with Jonathan Peppers about his experiences building phone games for different languages and cultures. The conversation starts out talking about Jon's game Draw a Stickman, originally made for the US market. The game was also very popular in China, but as a pirated game. Jon tells the story of how they evolved Draw a Stickman to be a free game with in-game purchases and culturally oriented for China to make it profitable and successful there. Can your game be successful acr...
May 21, 2014•50 min
Carl and Richard chat with Brian Randell about the latest version of Team Foundation Server and it's ability to support a DevOps practice in your organization. The conversation starts off with Brian's thoughts on DevOps in general, focusing on automation of deployment and package management. Brian also talks about the role of the cloud in building software fast, as well as the challenges around instrumentation in production. While the tools are still evolving, Microsoft is making some serious st...
May 20, 2014•54 min
Carl and Richard welcome coffee roaster Hugh Griffin to chat about liquid sleep, otherwise known as coffee. Coffee has a *ahem* rich history, and while we know what we like, many of us don't know our blonde from our Sumatra from our Colombian. So pour a cup and listen up! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations
May 15, 2014•53 min
While at DevIntersection in Orlando, Florida, Carl and Richard chat with Douglas Crockford about the better parts of JavaScript. Douglas wrote JavaScript the Good Parts back in 2008 and was a key influencer in making JavaScript the important language it has become. The conversation digs into the strengths and weaknesses of JavaScript and how it is evolving. Douglas also talks a bit about JSON and the wonders of not recreating the wheel. Great thinking from one of the important minds of the Web t...
May 14, 2014•50 min
Carl and Richard chat with Christian Weyer about his experiences working with cloud technologies in Germany. The conversation starts out pretty grim, digging into how the NSA revelations have chilled interest in cloud technology because of security and privacy concerns. Christian talks about how the technology of Azure is more compelling than ever, but customers just aren't willing to use it. This leads to a conversation about Windows Azure Pack for Windows Server, which brings many Azure techno...
May 13, 2014•54 min
Carl and Richard chat with Mary Jo Foley about her impressions at Build. The Build conference in San Francisco had six hours worth of keynotes including the first keynote given by new CEO Satya Nadella. MJ talks about what she saw as most important at Build, including Windows 8.1 Update, Phone 8.1, the Internet of Things and more! Ultimately, the conversation focuses in on how Microsoft is changing and what MJ is looking forward to for Microsoft in 2014. Support this podcast at — https://redcirc...
May 07, 2014•56 min
While at DevIntersection in Orlando, Carl and Richard talk to Billy Hollis about WPF. Having established that WPF is not dead a few weeks back at Build, Billy admits that he's never stopped developing for it. His work is all about client applications, and HTML just won't do. The discussion digs deep into user interaction patterns that WPF is strong at and how user interfaces and interactions continue to evolve. Touch is not the end of the road! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net...
May 06, 2014•58 min
Carl and Richard talk to Francesco Balena about migrating VB6 applications to .NET. Yes, that's still happening! With Microsoft ending support for Windows XP in April 2014, folks that have been hanging onto old platforms and applications are taking another look at migrating. Francesco makes an amazing tool called VB Migration Partner that analyzes VB6 apps to identify what parts of an application can be converted into VB.NET (or C#) and what parts need to be rewritten. While migration is never s...
May 01, 2014•58 min
Carl and Richard chat with James Montemagno about his experiences building Xamarin applications. But first, a little history, James first getting involved in mobile development, finding Xamarin, culminating with being hired by Xamarin and going on the road trip with .NET Rocks! James talks about the kinds of apps he's been building using the tools, how he organizes his projects for cross-platform development, what's in his toolbox and what he's adding to the community-at-large to help developers...
Apr 30, 2014•55 min
Carl and Richard talk to Udi Dahan about the state of NServiceBus. NServiceBus is Udi's on-going development effort to make the development and maintenance of complex, distributed systems easier. The conversation digs into how developers fall into the N+1 trap of adding more and more interactions between different applications until the system becomes unmanageable - or force the interaction to take place at the very back end of the system, like the database, leading to slow interactions and comp...
Apr 29, 2014•56 min
Carl and Richard talk to Tim Thomas about his thoughts around holistic design. And Tim means it - thinking about all levels of design, not just the UI, but how the whole application goes together. The conversation digs into the debate around skeuomorphism and how technology users themselves are evolving. Lots of broad thinking about the state of technology and how to best interact with your users to inspire and delight! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations...
Apr 24, 2014•54 min
Carl and Richard talk to Neil Black from the XBox team about SmartGlass. SmartGlass is Microsoft's technology for utilizing smartphones and tablets as an extension of the XBox. Neil talks about the various roles that the 'second screen' can play in XBox applications and games. The conversation digs into how SmartGlass works with television events to create a more social experience, how you can provide secret information to game players on an otherwise shared screen, and more! If you're up for do...
Apr 23, 2014•45 min
While at DevIntersection in Orlando, Carl and Richard sat down to chat with Zoiner Tejada about his work instrumenting cloud-based web sites. Zoiner talks about using a wide variety of features in Google Analytics to instrument his Azure apps, including going directly to the Analytics APIs to do instrumentation of other kinds of apps, connecting up just about anything that can speak HTTP! The second half of the conversation dives into utilizing this analysis - with a long chat about what a real ...
Apr 22, 2014•52 min
Carl and Richard chat with Brian Noyes about the state of affairs with WPF, Windows 8 and the Prism project. Brian starts out the conversation talking about WPF is far from dead - Microsoft continues to invest in it, and lots of folks, including Brian's customers, are building great applications with WPF. This leads to a discussion about how the changes to Windows 8 at Build affect the WPF story and development in general - a huge topic area that warrants a bunch more shows. Finally, Brian digs ...
Apr 17, 2014•56 min
Carl and Richard talk to Burke Holland about building mobile apps. But the conversation starts out with an announcement - Telerik's KendoUI is going open source! Burke talks a bit about the history of KendoUI and how it has evolved over the years, including a KendoUI Mobile (which is also open source). That leads to a discussion about mobile development as a whole, including his preferred tools and styles for building apps across different mobile platforms, comparing native, hybrid and web devel...
Apr 16, 2014•54 min
Carl and Richard chat with Richard Astbury about the Microsoft Research project known as Orleans. Orleans brings the Actor model of development to C# - the Actor model is typically found in functional languages, but you can write functional C#, so why not? Richard talks about Orleans being used to run Halo 4, where hundreds of thousands of players connected with each other between hundreds of Azure instances. Orleans was officially released into the wild at Microsoft Build. Looking at scalable s...
Apr 15, 2014•54 min
Carl and Richard go back to space with Uncle Bob! What started at NDC last Fall finishes today! But first, a quick conversation about an episode with Alan Stevens around the software craftsmanship movement, which Uncle Bob is a key part of. Then off to interstellar space! Bob pulls no punches, jumping straight into why nuclear technologies are key to significant space travel. Lots of history in this show too, talking about NERVA engines, Project Orion, Bussard Ram Engines and more! No warp drive...
Apr 10, 2014•51 min
Carl and Richard talk to John Papa about the current state of Single Page Application development. John digs into his latest focus on libraries, the constant evolution in the Javascript world, and how AngularJS is still a big pile of awesome. The conversation also turns a bit philosophical, with a discussion of Javascript being the assembly language of the web, and how languages like Dart, CoffeeScript and TypeScript create abstractions over assembly language to make web applications more mainta...
Apr 09, 2014•52 min
Carl and Richard chat with Nicholas Blumhardt about his work on Serilog, a structured logging tool. But first, the conversation dives a bit into Octopus Deploy, an awesome tool for helping you manage your application packages and help deploy them to testing, pre-production, production, and so on. Then on to the main event - Nicholas' amazing Serilog product. Logging is a pain, and Serilog makes it as painless as possible - one line per log entry, and configuration to write your log anywhere: tex...
Apr 08, 2014•48 min
Carl and Richard talk to Hugh Jones about EU Data Protection laws. But first, a long discussion about the NSA revelations and the surveillance culture we're living in today. Hugh talks about the evolving perceptions around privacy and how data needs to be better protected. From there, Hugh dives into the EU Data Protection laws, which apply not only to companies doing business in the EU, but companies outside of the EU that are handling EU citizen data. The focus is on personally identifiable in...
Apr 03, 2014•52 min
The first of the new Tablet Shows as .NET Rocks episodes, Carl and Richard talk to Scott Allen about the continued evolution of JavaScript. The conversation starts out with a comment from a listener about a past show with Scott on Modernizr, and Scott talks about how things have changed since then - the focus on newer browsers (if IE9 counts as new) means that the tool needs change. Scott also talks about what new features are moving into the browser, reducing the library load your web page need...
Apr 02, 2014•52 min