Should developers care about search engine optimization (SEO)? Chris Love says yes! Carl and Richard talk with Chris about how SEO impacts consumer-facing websites and what developers can do to include SEO in their development process. The good news is, many of the things we do routinely in web development help with SEO, including mobile-first development, using HTTPS and focusing on performance. But there's more to be done, and Chris digs into important bits - check out the tools in the show no...
Jan 29, 2019•58 min
User Experience Design is on the rise! Carl and Richard talk to Billy Hollis about his latest thoughts and efforts around getting developers to design UX as part of their development process. The conversation dives into the change of thinking it takes to really understand how users work with your software and the interfaces change as you think about what someone needs to see and when. Billy also brings up the advantage of great UX - happier users, more users and more profitability. Software is a...
Jan 24, 2019•1 hr 1 min
How do you get into test automation? Carl and Richard talk to Arnon Axelrod about his new book on Test Automation and the concept of the Test Automation Maturity Model - the steps you take along the way to getting testing to be a key part of making quality software. Arnon digs into building the right kinds of tests, what tools help you move in that direction, and where skills need to be grown to make better tests and automate them in a way that they are part of every build, whether you ship the ...
Jan 22, 2019•43 min
It's 2019, do you know where your containers are? Carl and Richard talk to Jessica Deen about her work with containers and how Kubernetes has come to dominate the container space, especially in the Microsoft arena. Kubernetes is a container orchestration engine that runs on-premises and all the major cloud vendors - but it is so much more than that, with an ecosystem growing up around it providing an array of tools that can handle your CI/CD pipeline and a huge array of elements for deploying ap...
Jan 17, 2019•48 min
How do you make .NET Core go even faster? System.Memory! While at the Update Conference in Prague, Carl and Richard sat down with .NET Core team member Adam Sitnik to talk about his work on Span of T and System.Memory. Adam talks about .NET Core 2.1 and C# 7.2 giving access to unmanaged heap and stack memory. Used right, you can get huge performance boosts and decreased memory footprints for certain classes of work - at the risk of a stack overflow! Great conversation about when and where you sh...
Jan 15, 2019•43 min
What does it mean to be cloud native? Carl and Richard talk to Vishwas Lele of Applied Information Sciences about his on-going evolution to be a cloud-native, and what means in 2019. Vishwas talks about the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, an organization independent of the major cloud vendors that helps with identifying and managing tools that make cloud native applications work! Vishwas digs into a variety of tools, starting with Kubernetes and with many more tools coming! The cloud is only ...
Jan 10, 2019•50 min
How do you debug? Carl and Richard talk to Omer Raviv about OzCode Debugging, including its ability to do 'time travel' or 'reverse' debugging - rather than stepping through code forward line-by-line, you can go any direction you want with any rules that you need. Omer talks about the years of work in OzCode and the array of features including understanding what your LINQ queries are doing in detail, writing conditional breakpoints and more. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-ro...
Jan 08, 2019•44 min
Ready to add blockchain to your repertoire? Carl and Richard talk to Marc Mercuri about the Azure Blockchain Development Kit. Blockchain is full of hype, especially in relationship to cryptocurrency, but there are so many other possibilities. The idea of a distributed ledger of transactions has huge potential for reducing costs of transactions and allowing the sharing of information about those transactions up and down the chain. But how to make it work? That's where Microsoft comes in with some...
Jan 03, 2019•54 min
The .NET Foundation is changing! Carl and Richard talk to Jon Galloway and Beth Massi about the changes in the .NET Foundation and what it means to the average .NET developer. The first announcement is that the .NET Foundation is moving to an open membership model - if you have made a contribution to .NET in any way, be it code, documentation or other, you can apply for membership and expect to be accepted. Next up, the expansion of the .NET Foundation board to seven directors and open elections...
Jan 01, 2019•44 min
What can you do with the Bot Framework? How about make old-school 8-bit adventure games? While at UpdateConf in Prague, Carl and Richard chatted with Edwin van Wijk and Sander Molenkamp about the GameATron4000 open source project that ties the Bot Framework together with Phaser.io graphics to make simple, funny adventure games. The conversation explores how the Bot Framework simplifies the whole command engine of the game, being able to deal with the variations in language to still get to the in...
Dec 27, 2018•46 min
Merry Christmas! For your Christmas listening pleasure, Carl and Richard chat with former .NET Rocks co-host Rory Blyth. Rory chats a bit about what has happened to him lately, and how he's gotten more engaged with the community after a long break. Lots of conversation about the past and a little bit about some of the new things that he's playing with, Rory is always a fun and freewheeling conversation. NOTE - this show is PG-13 and there are a few bleeps, but nothing too awful. It's just like C...
Dec 25, 2018•1 hr 10 min
What's new in Node development? While at DevReach in Bulgaria, Richard moderated a panel of David Neal, Brandon Satrom and Tara Manicsic about their experiences with Node. There's a huge array of application types that make sense for Node, starting with IoT solutions, but also exploring the more traditional web applications. Node works great in the serverless role as well, it's low-ceremony approach works great with Azure Functions and AWS Lambdas. The continuing improvements to Javascript help ...
Dec 20, 2018•56 min
What can you do wrong with Azure security-wise? Lots! While at Update Conference in Prague, Carl and Richard talked to Karl Ots about all the things that can go wrong with security in Azure. Karl starts at the top with one of the main reasons you should consider Azure - physical security. Those data centers are safe! From there, the conversation dives into choices you make when setting up Azure that can cause trouble - what email addresses to use, what privileges each account requires, and so on...
Dec 18, 2018•1 hr 1 min
How do you build a mobile app in 2018? Or should you? Richard moderates a panel from DevReach in Bulgaria with Sam Basu, Jen Looper and Jo Franchetti about their experiences with different tools building mobile apps. The conversation ranges over Xamarin, Cordova, NativeScript and good ol' fashion mobile web. Is the Progressive Web App good enough now to skip going to the app store? Or do you want your PWA to appear in the app store? How awful are app stores? Great thoughts around testing, access...
Dec 13, 2018•54 min
What can edge computing do for you? While at the Update Conference in Prague, Carl and Richard chatted with Jared Rhodes about his work building Internet of Things solutions with a variety of hardware and software. Jared talks about building reliable IoT solutions that are simple of customers to interact with - or work without any interaction at all. There are a lot of different choices in the IoT space right now, and no one right way - it is worth experimenting! Support this podcast at — https:...
Dec 11, 2018•52 min
Windows represents the single largest Git source control library in the world at 300GB - but what does it take to work on it? Carl and Richard talk to Ed Thomson and Jill Campbell about how Azure DevOps (formerly known as VSTS) functions under the load of 33,000 people working on the Windows project with 11 million work items. There are many things in Azure DevOps that can cope with that scale, but some aspects don't make sense to add directly, like moving millions of work items. For that, the t...
Dec 06, 2018•52 min
What's your dependency injection solution? Carl and Richard talk to Steven van Deursen about his work building SimpleInjector and why there seem to be so many different dependency solution options out there. Steven talks about how he came to build SimpleInjector and what makes different DI solutions valuable - including when the .NET Core team tried to build an abstraction over dependency injection that resulted in an anti-pattern! Dependency injection helps you code in a maintainable way, but t...
Dec 04, 2018•53 min
Is there a morality to software development? Carl and Richard talk to Microsoft Principal Researcher Bill Buxton about his thoughts on what software can do and what our responsibility as software creators is. Bill talks about Melvin Kranzberg's Laws of Technology, starting with the idea that technology is neither good nor evil, nor is it neutral. Ultimately software is a tool, and people decide how that tool is going to be used. We shape tools, but tools ultimately shape us as well. It's always ...
Nov 29, 2018•1 hr 3 min
You need more actors in your life! Carl and Richard talk to Aaron Stannard about the latest around Akka.NET, an open source actor model framework that has been evolving and growing for a number of years. Aaron talks about how his company Petabridge is providing professional services around Akka.NET including some custom tooling like a CLI tool called CMD. The conversation also dives into utilizing actors outside of just the server - actors make sense in mobile devices and IoT to name two! It's a...
Nov 27, 2018•57 min
Carl and Richard talk about the latest science in superconductivity Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations
Nov 22, 2018•59 min
Windows Server 2019 has shipped and Windows containers have improved! Carl and Richard talk to Elton Stoneman about the changes that have come with Server 2019 and the 1809 Update. Elton describes it as the second significant implementation of containers on Windows, although it has been steadily tested in the field over the past few years. For the most part, containers on Windows now have parity with the Linux containers - and the possibilities for migrating existing .NET applications to contain...
Nov 20, 2018•55 min
Looking for some build automation options? Carl and Richard talk to Matthias Koch about his open source project called Nuke - as in Nu-Make. Matthias discusses building a domain-specific language in C# that focuses on building software using fluent syntax, but looking beyond those options for more ways to work with third-party software and not getting too tangled in the details. This leads to an entire add-on model for Nuke that lets you encapsulate functionality and complexity. Check it out! Su...
Nov 15, 2018•48 min
How are user experiences evolving? Carl and Richard talk to Heather Wilde about her work with UX in a number of capacities, including helping to create the user experience of EverNote. The conversation dives into a number of poor UX designs, including frustrations around Windows 10 - but what's coming next? Heather talks about anticipatory design from the perspective of most people living with decision fatigue and being unwilling to make more decisions. So simplify your UI! Popular applications ...
Nov 13, 2018•54 min
How do you build out your cloud infrastructure? Carl and Richard talk to Luke Hoban about Pulumi, a start-up making open source software that helps you take Infrastructure-as-Code to the next level - not just simple scripts, but real programming languages. Luke talks about getting away from the cut-and-paste effects of Infrastructure-as-Code into building classes with enough sophistication that you're not creating technical debt each time you build a new cloud resource. With support for multiple...
Nov 08, 2018•47 min
Web performance is still important - what are you doing to keep your sites fast? Carl and Richard talk to Benjamin Howarth about his current approach to web site performance - with a focus on dealing with older smartphones and lower bandwidth. The conversation runs through a huge gamut of tools that help you understand what your customer experiences when accessing your website, and where to focus to make improvements. Not everyone has 4G connections and top-of-the-line phones - be kind to your u...
Nov 06, 2018•57 min
Functions are ephemeral and stateless - right? What if they weren't? Carl and Richard talk to Maxime Rouiller about durable functions in Azure. Maxime dives into the patterns that durable functions provide, starting with the chaining pattern, where you can declare a series (or chain) of function calls that only start when the previous function completes. And then onto the fan-out pattern that allows for an orchestrator to launch any number of simultaneous functions and then collect their results...
Nov 01, 2018•48 min
Is .NET ready for the Internet of Things? Carl and Richard talk to Bryan Costanich about the current state of IoT and how his startup Wilderness Labs is building next-generation hardware that runs .NET! Bryan talks about how microcontrollers have gotten much more powerful today, but the programming stacks are still back in the 80s. The expectations of customers today is cloud integration, auto-updating and mobile apps - which is expensive and time-consuming to write in C++! Enter Meadow, program...
Oct 30, 2018•53 min
Ready for a different database? Carl and Richard talk to Craig Kerstiens about his work with PostgreSQL. The conversation starts out with a little bit of the history of PostgreSQL being one of the original open source projects - and how it has evolved over the years. Today there is great support for Postgres in .NET, and in Azure as well! Craig is the editor of the Postgres Weekly newsletter, so if you're keen to get engaged with the Postgres community, sign up today! Support this podcast at — h...
Oct 25, 2018•48 min
Call it an impromptu Geek Out! While at NDC Sydney, Carl and Richard talked to Agustinus Nalwan about his work with artificial intelligence technology in his company. This leads to a larger conversation about the risks around AI and the idea that we may be approaching the Singularity - which according to Gus is where technology continues to teach itself. Richard chimes in on the debate around the Singularity from Ray Kurtzweil, exploring how humans could integrate with technology and what that w...
Oct 23, 2018•55 min
Ready for some functional thinking? While at NDC in Sydney, Carl and Richard chatted with Daniel Chambers about his experiences in functional programming, starting with F# and moving to Haskell. Daniel talks about how F# serves as the gateway drug for functional programming, living within Visual Studio and still interoperating nicely with the object-oriented world. But sometimes you want pure functional, and Haskell can help you - communicating with it via web service models, you write purely fu...
Oct 18, 2018•56 min
