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
.NET used to be all about Windows - but it's not anymore! How do you market something so diverse? Carl and Richard talk to Beth Massi about her new role as the Marketing Manager for .NET. Today .NET runs on all sorts of platforms, and you can develop .NET code on multiple platforms as well. Beth talks about reaching out to the new audiences that may have never considered .NET before because of it's former focus on Windows. Now .NET runs everywhere, on all sorts of devices, and into even more ope...
Nov 22, 2016•53 min
So many amazing things announced at Connect! Carl and Richard talk to Scott Hunter about his favorite bits of Connect, including a ton of important announcements including new support in Visual Studio for containers, cool new integration with SQL Server 2016, the on-going evolution of .NET Core and it's tooling and so much more! You've seen the keynotes, now listen to a deeper dive with one of the key people behind .NET today! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations...
Nov 17, 2016•57 min
Functional programming for mobile development? Carl and Richard talk to Scott Nimrod about his experiences building mobile apps with Xamarin using F# as the primary programming language. Does functional make sense for mobile development? Sure, but F# can handle OOP problems too. Scott calls it "functional first". The conversation digs into the power of staying within Visual Studio - tools that you know and understand! But there are also features in Visual Studio that don't necessarily work well ...
Nov 16, 2016•52 min
How do you get to coding quickly with the new web development frameworks? Carl and Richard talk to Steve Sanderson about JavaScriptServices, which is actually a set of templates for helping you set up your development environment for Angular, Knockout, React and/or React-Redux. Steve talks about all the bits and pieces necessary to actually get to your code-run-debug cycle of development. Along the way he mentions a number of tools involved to make life easier, including Yeoman and WebPack. The ...
Nov 15, 2016•56 min
DC Lighting real, and Richard has installed it! Time for a Geek Out! You've heard bits and pieces about the flood in Richard's basement and the year long effort to get it restored and renovated - including DC LED lighting! Richard discusses his experience getting the LumenCache lighting system working in his basement, along with the various kinds of lights possible: new dedicated LED light fixtures, refitting existing light fixtures with LED and custom making LED lighting with aluminum extrusion...
Nov 10, 2016•50 min
Making mobile apps is never simple - but it can be made easier! Carl and Richard talk to Matthew Robbins about MFractor, a tool designed to help you build mobile apps using Xamarin across platforms more easily. Matthew talks about the challenges of trying to create common code (typically C#) in Xamarin that actually runs correcting in Android and iOS. A big part of MFractor is the code analysis tooling that helps you verify correctness for schema assignments, references, and so on. There's also ...
Nov 09, 2016•47 min
So many versions of .NET Framework, so little time! Carl and Richard chat with Immo Landwerth about the .NET Standard specifications. Now that .NET has gone cross-platform, the sheer number of implementations of the framework can be overwhelming. And if you're building products for .NET, how do you communicate with your customers about what your product will work with? This is what the .NET Standard is all about - setting specific rules on what needs to be implemented to comply with a specific v...
Nov 08, 2016•1 hr
Data Lakes are growing up, and you want one! While at Ignite in Atlanta, Carl and Richard sat down with Michael Rys to talk about Azure Data Lakes - a place to store your data "as is" so that you can easily query and organize the data for further analysis. Michael discusses the problems of data warehouses, with their Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) processes that manipulate the data into a particular shape for the warehouse - and make it harder to ask new questions of the data. Leave the data as it...
Nov 03, 2016•56 min
What does it take to make the web more accessible? Carl and Richard talk to Aaron Gustafson about his years of work helping to create and support standards for accessibility on the web - all kinds of accessibility. While supporting visual and hearing impaired is important, there are so many more aspects to accessibility, especially today where those capabilities translate into new devices that make focus on speech or other completely different UI paradigms. The good news is, the tooling is getti...
Nov 02, 2016•56 min
Are you afraid to make your API public? You should be! Carl and Richard talk to Vishwas Lele about Azure API Management, the safe an effective way to expose your API to the world and not take down your system. Vishwas talks about the array of problems in front of you once the public has access to your API: What happens if it's too popular for it's own good? Or someone builds runaway software that hammers it constantly? Or you want granular control over who can call your API, how often, and how f...
Nov 01, 2016•56 min
Installation is in chaos! Carl and Richard talk to Rob Mensching about the crazy amount of change that has come to distributing and installing software. The conversation references a comment from a listener about the diversity of server installation solutions including MSDeploy. But what about the desktop? As Rob says, things have been pretty stable for a long time with the MSI - and Rob led the WiX Toolset project to make MSIs. But with AppStores, MSIs are looking long in the tooth. What does t...
Oct 27, 2016•57 min
How can you be successful with a product without good documentation? You can't! Carl and Richard talk to Ward Bell, who is serving as editor in chief for Angular docs. After complaining about the quality problems with the Angular documentation, Ward found himself in charge of the problem - and has taken it on in a big way. The docs themselves are developed in GitHub, so anyone can contribute. The challenge is making sure they're good - everything is driven by coding samples that are as simple as...
Oct 26, 2016•57 min
Time for a Xamarin update - things are moving fast! Carl and Richard talk to James Montemagno, now a Microsoft employee since the Xamarin acquisition, about the on-going evolution of the Xamarin tools for building mobile and UWP applications. The conversation starts out with a comment about folks coming to mobile development for the first time: Less rocket science, more building data-over-forms apps for internal use. James dives into the expanding set of capabilities that Xamarin Forms has to ma...
Oct 25, 2016•59 min
On September 27, 2016, Elon Musk held a press conference that was more like a rock concert to an excited crowd at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico. At the event, he announced the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) and a plan to move a million people to Mars by 2050. How viable is this? Time for a Geek Out! Richard reviews the design of the Raptor engine, the ITS booster and spacecraft and the entire plan. This rocket is many times more powerful than anything eve...
Oct 20, 2016•59 min
What does it take to move an existing application to Docker? Carl and Richard talk to Elton Stoneman about his experiences migrating applications to Docker. The power of containers is obvious, with the ability to run common configuration across development, QA and production. But how do you retrofit your existing application into that new model? It's not a simple lift and shift - Elton talks about breaking down your application into the relevant pieces that make sense for individual containers. ...
Oct 19, 2016•52 min
Serverless is the new hot buzzword - but what does it really mean? Carl and Richard talk to Ben Godwin about his work building serverless applications - no servers, but lots of services! Ben talks about Amazon Lambda, which is similar to Azure Functions. Both these environments allow individual bits of code to run within them, written in a variety of languages, but often that language is Javascript in the Node style. The advantage of this approach is eliminating a lot of the ceremony around your...
Oct 18, 2016•52 min
Are user groups obsolete? Carl and Richard talk to Blake Helms and Robb Schiefer about their experiences starting and growing a .NET Meetup Group in Birmingham, Alabama. Modernizing on the user group with Meetup doesn't change the fundamentals - it takes dedicated volunteers, a good location, great speakers and consistency to make a group grow. Are meetups still worth your time? Definitely! The conversation turns to the power of networking: Not TCP/IP, but actually meeting and talking with peopl...
Oct 13, 2016•54 min
What role does distributed caching play in applications today? Carl and Richard sit down with Iqbal Khan to talk about nCache, an open source product built to do distributed caching in the .NET world. The conversation starts out with the traditional role of a distributed cache - state storage for a large scaling websites. It's never as simple as it sounds! From there, Iqbal dives into comparing caching to noSQL stores and RDBMS - they can all have a role in your application. The discussion then ...
Oct 12, 2016•50 min
What the heck is Hybrid Transactional Analytical Processing (HTAP)? While at Ignite, Carl and Richard sat down with Lindsey Allen to talk about taking SQL Server "beyond relational." HTAP focuses on being able to do data analysis as data arrives in the database, independent of the transaction that actually wrote it. Lindsey talks about the power of being to get to near-real time with data analytics, rather than batch processing. Different than streams, you're still talking about data written to ...
Oct 11, 2016•47 min
Has voice control come of age? Carl and Richard talk to Austin Dimmer about his efforts to build a great voice control system - including for Visual Studio! The conversation digs into the complexity of recognizing a diversity of voices and being fast enough to get the words right. Then the hard stuff: How to keep words in context so that you can derive enough meaning from them to be useful. This isn't just about transcription, it's about control. Austin also talks about all the different voice-r...
Oct 06, 2016•58 min
Compiled PHP on .NET! Carl and Richard talk to Benjamin Fistein and Jakub Míšek about Peachpie, and open source project to implement PHP on the .NET Core. While the project isn't complete yet (you can help - it's open source!), the potential power is huge - taking existing PHP code and being able to compile it down to the CLR. Ben and Jakub talk about the challenge of mapping functionality across the languages, and the huge performance boost that compiled CLR code gets. How fast could WordPress ...
Oct 05, 2016•47 min
