One girl shy of a Mondays - Carl and Richard try and stay on topic with Mark Miller while they explore the science of great design. The truth is that Mark has been working for decades to build software that is truly intuitive to use, and the talks about all the subtle, but broadly applicable details that can make an application truly a pleasure to use. As is typical of Mark, this is nothing vague, but concrete, detailed and repeatable steps for making better designed software. You need to check ...
Aug 06, 2015•55 min
And he's back! Carl and Richard talk to Shawn Wildermuth about his year-long journey around the world, part honeymoon, part working trip. The tour ended abruptly when an accident broke Shawn's arm, but he's home now and on the mend. The conversation digs into the huge array of developers and cultures that Shawn spent time with in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Shawn also talks about some ideas around building VR apps - is there something beyond games worth making? Is this technology going to take off...
Aug 05, 2015•51 min
So what does it take to make scalable, resilient services in the cloud? Carl and Richard talk to Mark Fussell about Azure Service Fabric, the underlying infrastructure inside Azure to provide these capabilities. And the Azure Service Fabric doesn't only run on Azure - it runs on Windows Server too! Mark talks about creating your application in a way that allows it to scale into the cloud, whether its running there or not. In theory the fabric is just plumbing, but its the kind of plumbing that's...
Aug 04, 2015•56 min
You write a lot of code, but how often do you read it? And how do you read it? Carl and Richard talk to Tudor Girba about getting better at reading code by using tools that help you organize it. The conversation starts out with a simple idea - how do you get to understand the codebase of an existing application? Do you really just open a code window and start reading? Couldn't you use some tools that would help organize the code into some sort of summary that could get you moving faster? Tudor t...
Jul 30, 2015•49 min
So what's happened with Glimpse? Carl and Richard talk to Anthony van der Hoorn and Nik Molnar about the latest developments with their web instrumentation library Glimpse. First news - Anthony and Nik have joined Microsoft's cross platform team! The conversation digs into the history of Glimpse, its support by the community and Red Gate, and how it has progressed to live as an open source project with Microsoft. If you haven't worked with Glimpse, you're missing out on a great way to understand...
Jul 29, 2015•57 min
How much of a language is essential? Carl and Richard chat with Mark Seemann about what features are critical to a language, and which ones are redundant. Who would put redundant features in a language? Mark talks about how languages evolve, and how more advanced features can supercede older features, but the old features can never be removed without breaking existing code. And worst still, when building a language is your business, you'll add features whether they are needed or not - you need s...
Jul 28, 2015•1 hr 1 min
So what is the state of Artificial Intelligence today? Carl and Richard geek out about what AI means today. The conversation starts out as usual with a bit of a history lesson - many things that were once called AI are now common, reliable technology like speech synthesis, natural language recognition, even vision systems. Once they work, they aren't AI any more. But the idea of an Artificial General Intelligence is much more challenging - and potentially risky. Richard digs through the key elem...
Jul 23, 2015•56 min
Peer-to-Peer is more than BitTorrent! Carl and Richard talk to Matthew Podwysocki about the Thali Project, using peer-to-peer technology to put more power in the hands of the users. Matthew talks about being able to communicate between your various devices using WiFi and Bluetooth while maintaining privacy and not bouncing off a cloud server. The cornerstone is security, using TLS to encrypt all traffic in and out of your device. Messaging strategy, data synchronization and more are all part of ...
Jul 22, 2015•56 min
What's your DevOps plan? Carl and Richard talk to Vishwas Lele about taking a comprehensive, model-driven approach to DevOps. What does it mean to be model-driven? Working with a strategic approach that is agnostic to any given technology or platform - but in the end, the tools do matter! Vishwas talks about common elements like a single repository for all assets, repeatable deployment processes, instrumentation and feedback mechanisms that enable the entire team to see how the software is being...
Jul 21, 2015•51 min
How do the SOLID principles apply to .NET? Carl and Richard talk to Chris Klug about his experiences using SOLID to build reliable, maintainable and scalable project. The conversation walks through the five principles of SOLID with an eye to practical applications in .NET - what does a well implemented single responsibility look like? How does it work with patterns like MVVM? Chris shares his thoughts and coding approaches on a great debate about practical vs ideal implementations in SOLID. Supp...
Jul 16, 2015•59 min
How do you debug browser problems in your web apps? Carl and Richard talk to Kenneth Auchenberg about RemoteDebug, an open source tool to bring a common debugging solution across browsers. And Ken really means across browsers - you can connect Chrome, Opera, FireFox, Safari and Internet Explorer up simultaneously and see how your code changes affect the rendering of your page on all those browsers at the same time! Oh, and it works for mobile browsers also, so you can experiment with rendering o...
Jul 15, 2015•46 min
What's missing from the DevOps story in the Windows world? While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard sat down with Jon Arild Tørresdal to talk about his struggles to have an effective DevOps practice in his organization using Windows technology. Jon talks about getting his teams to continuous deployment, rather than continuous delivery, so that there is a human interceding before software is deployed to the customer. Lots of conversation about instrumentation approaches, and getting to a place wher...
Jul 14, 2015•59 min
Isn't all functional programming lean? What does that even mean? While at NDC, Carl and Richard chatted with Bryan Hunter about lean principles and how they apply to functional programming. After a quick debate around the merits of object-oriented programming vs functional programming, the conversation turns to the history and principles of lean. Bryan shows how lean informs your approaches to programming, how you can evaluate your tooling and techniques to build the best software possible. Is f...
Jul 09, 2015•1 hr 1 min
So what does it take to develop ASP.NET web sites on Linux? While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard sat down with Mark Rendle to talk through the ins and outs of ASP.NET on Linux. And we're not just talking servers either! Mark talks about what it takes to set up a desktop version of Linux and be able to do ASP.NET development with it, including debugging! The .NET framework is evolving for Linux beyond the Mono project, but there are a bunch of tools out there to help you be productive building ...
Jul 08, 2015•1 hr 5 min
Why in the world would you want to build a compiler? While at NDC, Carl and Richard talked to Philip Laureano about why he makes compilers! Philip starts out talking how building compilers helps you think about parsers and how that can help your development in every day life. The conversation turns to building your own language, or your own interpretation of a language, such as LISP! Philip digs into understanding IL directly - using tools like ILDASM and PEVerify to manipulate the underlying co...
Jul 07, 2015•54 min
How do you estimate your projects? While at NDC, Carl and Richard talk to Woody Zuill about delivering software WITHOUT estimates. Woody starts out with a clarification - it's not zero estimates, just no estimates around particular features for an application. But how? Your customers want estimates, the trick is to deliver so quickly that there isn't time to estimate before you've delivered code. And does it have to be code? Isn't our goal to solve problems, and code is only one possible solutio...
Jul 02, 2015•54 min
While at NDC, Carl and Richard talked to Chris McCord about Elixir - the friendly language on top of Erlang. Chris talks about his Phoenix framework which brings an MVC-style development approach to building web sites in Elixir. And because its the Erlang VM under the hood, it scales brilliantly! The efficiency of Erlang is remarkable as well, reducing the number of servers needed to provide a service, to the point where folks have been running a web site off of a Raspberry Pi 2! Phoenix is raci...
Jul 01, 2015•54 min
While at NDC, Carl and Richard chat with Justin James about his deployment tool chain of NuGet, Chocolatey, Boxstarter and Vagrant. Each of these tools builds on the other, starting at the lowest level with specific libraries, working up through package managers, configuring operating systems, even provisioning cloud services. Justin talks about using the tools to get you to a configuration-as-code scenario, making installation not only reliable, but fast. There are lots of different ways to get...
Jun 30, 2015•54 min
While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard talk to Troy Hunt about all the scary stuff going on in security today. The conversation starts out recapping some discussion on passwords - how do we get past them? Troy also digs into the on-going issues of SQL Injection, still the number one security risk for web sites. You can still use Google to find vulnerable web sites, and there are great free tools out there to find and exploit insecure SQL databases - don't be one of them! The discussion turns to ...
Jun 25, 2015•59 min
Where will .NET go next? Carl and Richard talk to Rocky Lhotka (who happily is still alive after having his entire aorta replaced) about the resurgence in .NET. Between the open sourcing of .NET creating a common codebase for Windows, OSX and Linux. But that codebase is server focused - what does it take to get to the client? And to that idea, should XAML be open sourced? Rocky drills into the challenges of making cross-platform mobile apps - it's still not simple enough yet. But things are look...
Jun 24, 2015•1 hr 1 min
If it's on the cloud, it'll scale and perform, right? Carl and Richard talk to Christopher Bennage about his work at Patterns and Practices helping understand where performance can go wrong with Azure. It's on GitHub to provide code samples and analysis on the various problems you can find with scaling your Azure app. Christopher discusses eight different anti-patterns the PnP folks have found in their travels that can impair performance. Included in each are code samples and analysis of perform...
Jun 23, 2015•1 hr 2 min
Time for an Energy Storage Geek Out! The most requested Geek Out on FeatHub as Battery Technology, Carl and Richard discuss a wide range of aspects of energy storage. The conversation starts out on electrochemical batteries, which are only about 200 years old. Richard digs through the technical aspects of anode, cathode and electrolyte, dry cells, wet cells and polymer cells. And why do some batteries explode, anyway? Then the focus is on Tesla's new PowerWall battery products, what they're good...
Jun 18, 2015•58 min
So how are you instrumenting your applications? Carl and Richard talk to Jason Taylor of Stackify and Michael Paterson of Carbonite about the power of great instrumentation to make awesome software. Stackify provides a set of free tools if you're working in Azure. And speaking of Azure, Carbonite lives on Azure and uses Stackify for instrumentation. Michael talks about how Stackify helped Carbonite understand performance problems and errors that were occurring in production that were very hard t...
Jun 17, 2015•54 min
How do you extend C#? Carl and Richard talk to Simon Cropp about his open source project called Fody. Simon talks how Fody allows you do do "weaving" of .NET assemblies to add capabilities. Sounds simple, but it's not - it's hugely powerful and has to be handled carefully. To make it even more amazing, there are a ton of add-ins built for Fody to open the door to all sorts of aspect-oriented programming, simplifying testing, instrumentation and other sorts of coding extensions. So many possibili...
Jun 16, 2015•58 min
So how deep are you into Domain Driven Design? Carl and Richard talk to David Rael about his work applying DDD principles to the systems his customers develop. David focuses in on the idea of the ubiquitous language, something Eric Evans admits he wishes he'd put earlier in his seminal book on DDD. The ubiquitous language is the assembly of all the terms needed and agreed upon about the particular domain that the application has being built for. Most of what you need to know to build an applicat...
Jun 11, 2015•57 min
Microservices? Carl and Richard talk to Howard Dierking about his work building microservices starting with the name - Howard hates the term microservices. He prefers to call them focused services, which only makes sense. The goal is to write as little code as possible while delivering the capabilities needed, not all that different from most modern development approaches. The conversation turns to how we've twisted service design because deployment and versioning were so difficult. Today its be...
Jun 10, 2015•54 min
Have you been building web apps with TypeScript? Carl and Richard talk to Steve Ognibene about his work with TypeScript projects. The discussion starts with dispelling myths about TypeScript - no, it doesn't exist just to make C# developers more comfortable in web development! Steve compares how development is different in the strongly typed world of C# where the compiler does a bunch of testing for you versus the dynamically typed space of JavaScript where you're responsible for managing type r...
Jun 09, 2015•1 hr 1 min
What do developers like on their calendars? Carl and Richard talk to Steve Smith and Brendan Enrick about the making of the new 2016 developer calendar. They have been the team behind the NimblePros and later Telerik developer anti-pattern calendars for years. But there was no calendar in 2015 for a variety of reasons, leading to an outcry. In an effort to bring back the calendar, Steve and Brendan have launched a kickstarter campaign to raise enough funds to make the calendar, and a feathub sit...
Jun 04, 2015•54 min
Do you fear the CSS? You're not alone! Carl and Richard chat with Elijah Manor about his experiences becoming a "real" front end developer and embracing CSS development. Elijah talks about making the leap from hiding behind Twitter Bootstrap and actually starting to think about CSS as its own thing. The conversation turns quickly to tools - LOTS of tools. Elijah explains his CSS stack of Sass, CSSLint and AutoPrefixer. But many other tools get mentioned along the way for the variety of services ...
Jun 03, 2015•56 min
Remember Orleans? Once an MSR project to scale Halo 4 multiplayer mode, it has grown into a full blown actor model implementation. Carl and Richard chat with Barry Briggs about bringing Orleans to your project. Barry talks through some great ideas on the actor model and it's focus on building distributed highly scalable applications. Orleans is now an open source project hosted on GitHub, and is worth a look - compare it to Akka.NET! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/dona...
Jun 02, 2015•50 min
