How do you improve your CSS skills? Carl and Richard talk to Martine Dowden about her new book, Tiny CSS Projects. The book is built around twelve progressively more complex CSS tasks - you can follow along to learn in general or pick a particular chapter for a specific skill you want to exercise. The conversation digs into thinking about the architecture of styling beyond the particular page and how those styles can be updated version-to-version without frustration. You can improve your CSS gam...
Feb 15, 2024•51 min
What's the latest with gRPC? Carl and Richard chat with Irina Scurtu about her latest work with gRPC. Irina talks about the improved tooling with gRPC, including tools like Postman to help you see what's happening in a gRPC interaction, even decoding the binary data! The conversation also digs into the complexity of metadata with headers and trailers and the challenges of supporting multiple platforms and multiple type systems - but it works if you take the time to learn the details. And the res...
Feb 08, 2024•49 min
How do you handle background tasks? Carl and Richard talk to Sergey Odinokov about Hangfire, his open source project for background job processing in .NET. Sergey talks about his experiences building applications that needed background processing and hoping to find a library similar to other platforms - and eventually creating Hangfire. The conversation dives into the array of different processing options, state management, and the challenging problem of building and maintaining an open-source p...
Feb 01, 2024•42 min
What can Uno do for you? Carl and Richard talk to Nick Randolph about the latest from the Uno platform. Nick talks about how Uno has continued to evolve into a broad and effective cross-platform client tool while also adding integrations for design and continuous integration. The conversation digs into the challenge of getting from design to development and how the Figma Plugin makes it easier to take designer Figma docs and make them into actual code in Uno. There are also wizards for helping y...
Jan 25, 2024•1 hr
Coming out of .NET Conf, one of the big announcements was .NET Aspire. Carl and Richard talk to David Fowler about his work creating the tools to make building cloud-native .NET applications easier. David discusses the challenge of not re-creating the past - tools like Azure Service Fabric. However, the complexity of containerized applications is real. Aspire can make it simpler to take advantage of being in a container, on the cloud, with all the telemetry, observability, scalability, and flexi...
Jan 18, 2024•1 hr 1 min
How do you migrate to .NET 8? Carl and Richard talk to Jimmy Bogard about his experiences helping teams migrate from .NET Framework 4.8 to more modern versions of .NET. Jimmy talks about the team wanting to be able to use ASP.NET Core in their applications as the incentive to make the migration in the first place. The conversation digs into landing on .NET 6 to make migration easier but then wanting to move quickly to later versions to take advantage of the latest features. And no dead-drop migr...
Jan 11, 2024•49 min
Let's start 2024 with a conversation about energy! Richard chats with Carl about ongoing developments in power generation around the world. Wind technology is maturing but also hitting size limits. Solar is the fastest-growing power generation source on the planet now - and there are recycling options! There are exciting new developments in power storage, some applied hydrogen power projects, and new concepts in geothermal and small modular nuclear. Richard wraps up with thoughts on COP 28 and o...
Jan 04, 2024•2 hr 52 min
Time for the annual Space Geek Out! Richard summarizes many of the important space stories of the past year, including SpaceX's record number of Falcon 9 flights and the first two flights of Starship. The conversation also explores the state of the International Space Station, Dream Chaser, Artemis, and other moon missions, including India's successful landing! Richard then digs into the Crisis in Cosmology - how the James Webb Space Telescope has changed our understanding of the universe, and h...
Dec 28, 2023•2 hr 47 min
How do you improve the performance of your .NET applications? Carl and Richard talk to Daniel Marbach about his work building high-performance .NET applications and the process he goes through to get them to perform at the level his customers need. Daniel talks about profiling and benchmarking - understanding where your time passes in your code and how to measure it to know if you're making it better. The good news is that great tools are out there to help you; check the show notes for links to ...
Dec 21, 2023•56 min
It's almost 2024, do we still need to talk about securing our apps? Carl and Richard talk to Laura Bell Main about her ongoing efforts to get everyone involved in creating and operating software to be part of making that software secure. Laura talks about committing one hour of each sprint to security and how, over time, those small efforts can build up to excellent secure guardrails that make our software more resistant to exploitation. Don't push security issues off to someone else - we can al...
Dec 14, 2023•54 min
A new version of Polly is out - and it's a special one! Carl and Richard talk to Joel Hulen and Martin Costello about the release of Polly V8. Joel tells the story of Microsoft reaching out about Polly - because it is heavily utilized inside of Azure and at cloud scale, it needed further optimization. The results are a very high-performance library focused on resilience as a whole - with lots of smart defaults so that you can write even less code to have even more resilient applications!
Dec 07, 2023•54 min
How do we put large language models to work? Carl and Richard talk to Vishwas Lele about his work using LLMs with his customers. Vishwas talks about focusing on specific data sets for building LLMs and how size matters - things are simple when the source data is small, but as it grows, you need more complex tools to be able to allow the LLM to perform. Lots of cautionary tales and ideas on how to get great results from these new automation tools!
Nov 30, 2023•1 hr 3 min
How do we make our software greener? While at NDC in Porto, Carl and Richard talked to Lea Mladineo about her work in sustainable development. Lea talks about the impact of digital technology on the environment and how, with some thought and effort, we can make a real difference to that impact. The conversation explores how cloud computing can worsen the problem - or better! Software efficiency can reduce the number of cycles needed to complete a task, which is good for the environment and could...
Nov 23, 2023•47 min
How can React Server Components make your website better? While at NDC in Porto, Carl and Richard talked to Aurora Walberg about her work with RSC and Next.js 13. Aurora discusses mixing server and client rendering - and server rendering within client rendering! While it's still early days, if you're looking for options in the React development space, RSC is worth a look!
Nov 16, 2023•43 min
How do you commercialize open-source products? While at NDC Porto, Carl and Richard talked to Victoria Melnikova about her work with Evil Martians, helping startups make open-source products and make a living at the same time. Victoria talks about various revenue strategies, but always with a mind to providing a "forever free" tier to be responsible to the open source community. Charging for pro-features, limiting the number of uses before a paid tier... there are several approaches to revenue t...
Nov 09, 2023•49 min
Are you ready for .NET Conf? Carl and Richard talk to Jeff Fritz about the latest version of .NET coming out - and the online event that celebrates it! Jeff talks about his top ten favorite sessions in the show, the ones you definitely don't want to miss. And if you have folks that are new to .NET, you want to check out the pre-event day that can help folks get started! See you online Nov 13-15!
Nov 02, 2023•54 min
What is observability engineering, and why do you need some? While at NDC in Porto, Carl and Richard recorded a .NET Rocks Live with Charity Majors, one of the founders of Honeycomb. Charity talked about her experiences trying to understand how complex applications worked and failed at scale over her years of experience at Facebook and other companies. Ultimately, those experiences led to a book and the creation of Honeycomb. Lots of fun insight from someone who has fought the good fight - and s...
Oct 26, 2023•50 min
What's the latest with bUnit? Carl and Richard chat with Egil Hansen about his excellent testing library for Blazor. Egil digs into the ongoing improvements being made in Blazor and how bUnit can support those changes without having to rewrite tests - even .NET 8 shouldn't be a huge problem! The conversation also digs into the different sorts of open-source projects out there, including tooling like bUnit. Not all open source is created the same! Great thinking from an experienced builder of tes...
Oct 19, 2023•56 min
What is data sharding, and why do you need it? Carl and Richard talk to Oren Eini about his latest work on RavenDB, including the new data sharding feature. Oren talks about the power of sharding a database across multiple servers to improve performance on massive data sets. While a sharded database is typically in a single data center, it is possible to distribute the shards across multiple locations. The conversation explores the advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches, includ...
Oct 12, 2023•1 hr 4 min
How do you make Kubernetes easier to use? While at the Copenhagen Developers Festival, Carl and Richard talked to Annie Talvasto about her work with Kubernetes and the Cloud Native Compute Foundation. Annie talks about the easy and hard ways to work with Kubernetes and why you might choose either approach - it comes down to how much control you want. The CNCF supports many tools for Kubernetes in various stages of development to make your life easier to orchestrate containers at scale - when you...
Oct 05, 2023•47 min
Azure and GitHub - better together? While at the Copenhagen Developer Festival, Carl and Richard talked to April Edwards for a special .NET Rocks Live. April talked about how Azure and GitHub work well together, discussing Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions on the CI/CD pipeline side and how other services can interact. Lots of laughter and great questions from the live audience!
Sep 28, 2023•56 min
Data Science and UX should be the best of friends! While at the Copenhagen Developer Festival, Carl and Richard talked to Grishma Jena about her work in data science at IBM - and working closely with the UX teams to understand how customers use software and the opportunities to improve it. Grishma talks about the quantitative side of analytics regarding application telemetry, including the ability to predict when a customer is about to abandon an application. The conversation also digs into usin...
Sep 21, 2023•48 min
What can you do with a Particle Photon? While in an aluminum Airstream trailer in a thunderstorm at the Copenhagen Developers Festival, Carl and Richard talked to Colleen Lavin about her work with the Particle Photon IoT device - and its many maker possibilities! Colleen talks about making it easy to start building a device - but the struggle with so many choices to actually pick a project. The conversation also digs into making production versions of your device so that they are smaller, cheape...
Sep 14, 2023•51 min
How about some in-process messaging with no dependencies? Carl and Richard chat with Jimmy Bogard about his work with MediatR, a simple mediator pattern implementation in .NET. Jimmy talks about how MediatR emerged from his work with customer applications having controllers and/or managers that slowly got bigger and more complicated... and how they became difficult to maintain. Using the mediator pattern to break down those blocks of code into more manageable chunks needed a bit of tooling that ...
Sep 07, 2023•56 min
How can a large language model help your application? Carl and Richard talk to Brian MacKay about his work with large language models, including ChatGPT - and others! Brian talks about how LLMs continue to evolve and the limitations they have. But identifying language inside your applications can be powerful, and Brian talks through a few scenarios his company uses in production today. Work could you be taking advantage of today!
Aug 31, 2023•1 hr 5 min
How much architectural ceremony is enough? Carl and Richard talk to Jeremy Miller about his minimal approach to architecture when building software, including his products Wolverine and Marten. Jeremy talks about how good tooling can simplify architecture, ultimately by writing less code - so that you are writing only the code that is unique to your customer needs.
Aug 24, 2023•56 min
How is Chocolatey evolving? Carl and Richard talk to Gary Ewan Park about the latest with the open-source Windows package management solution. Gary discusses some of the differences between the various package managers for Windows these days, including WinGet. Each product has its niche, and Chocolatey has done a good job of evolving into a broader product, including Chocolatey for Business, to allow a view of applications installed across all your machines - and being able to push updates out t...
Aug 17, 2023•58 min•Season 18Ep. 1859
How's your architecture game? Carl and Richard talk to Thomas Betts about being a better architect. Thomas focuses on the key aspect - communication! An effective architect can talk to all the stakeholders in the language of the stakeholder, whether that's speaking business with business stakeholders, coding with developers, and understanding the needs of the security and operations folks. All those aspects (and more) go into an effective architecture and then come the changes as the implementat...
Aug 10, 2023•1 hr 1 min
Large Language Models like GPT-4 are all the rage - how do we use them well? Carl and Richard talk to Amber McKenzie about the challenges and concerns around LLMs, especially regarding the data involved. Amber talks about the risks of creating products around LLMs while the technology is so young and constantly evolving, especially with how the general public reacts to conversational AI. Education is key, and constantly fact-checking - good advice for a lot of technology, but LLMs are making fac...
Aug 03, 2023•55 min
Microservices or Monoliths? Carl and Richard talk to Layla Porter about choosing a middle ground between microservices and monoliths, with modular monoliths. Layla talks about the pushback from the community around microservices and the insistence that there is "one right way." Monoliths have their advantages until they are a problem - but that doesn't mean that re-architecting everything is the right way to go. Chipping off parts of the monolith into satellite modules strikes a balance of flexi...
Jul 27, 2023•56 min
