How do you handle credit card payments in your applications? Carl and Richard talk to Craig McKeachie about his work with different payment solutions, including Stripe. The conversation digs into the challenges of building your own payment system versus using a third-party system - starting with PCI compliance! Craig talks about different tooling for embedding payment, including the stripe.net library on GitHub for plugging into Stripe, and so on. Taking payments is important, so is doing it rig...
Oct 15, 2015•1 hr
Hang on to your hats, here comes a ServiceStack update! Carl and Richard talk to Demis Bellot, who for the past couple of years has been full time on ServiceStack, and wow, a ton of development has been done! Demis (at very high speed) rattles through the feature list of ServiceStack, talking about the array of platforms it supports - which is pretty much everything from the phone to the cloud. While the focus has always been on providing web services, Demis also talks about running the entire s...
Oct 14, 2015•1 hr
How much can a language do with only 25 keywords? Carl and Richard talk to Michael Van Sickle about Google's Go Language. The focus in Go is on simplicity and structure - it's amazing what you can do with so few keywords, plus fixed locations for braces, indentations, and so on. The benefit of Go is easy-to-read code that has great concurrency capabilities - the Actor model is a standard pattern of development for Go. Michael also digs into the tooling around Go, using Atom for an editor and var...
Oct 13, 2015•53 min
There's more great stuff in Studio than you realize! Carl and Richard talk to Charles Sterling about the web performance testing tools built into Visual Studio 2015. Actually, the testing tools have been there since 2008, but only in the test edition, and after that they were moved to the Ultimate Edition - they were part of what made that product so expensive! But as of 2015, the testing tools are available as part of Visual Studio Online, which means they're free for teams of five or fewer as ...
Oct 08, 2015•1 hr 6 min
If you've been listening to the latest episodes, you've heard Omnisharp mentioned - time for a show on it! Carl and Richard talk to David Driscoll about his efforts contributing to Omnisharp. Omnisharp is a set of tools to bring .NET development to all sorts of different development environments, including Visual Studio Code. David discusses the impact that working on a dev tools project like Omnisharp has had on his own career, changing the way he thinks about development - for the better! If y...
Oct 07, 2015•53 min
Rob Conery has the Elixir bug! Carl and Richard chat with Rob about being on show 1200, and how Elixir has sucked him in. Elixir is the syntactically friendly language over top of Erlang that has gotten a lot of attention lately. The conversation digs into the strategies around learning a new language, starting with building a good old fashion forms-over-data application. Rob used the Phoenix MVC framework with Elixir to build web pages quickly. He also talks about changing your thinking - how h...
Oct 06, 2015•59 min
Kathleen Dollard has been exploring different development environments and wants to tell the world! Carl and Richard talk to Kathleen about her experience using Python and Django with JetBrain's IntelliJ development environment. As Kathleen says, it's the whole development suite, not just a given language, that you have to evaluate as a whole. But if you're going to live in the dynamic language like Python, you need to take testing seriously - and Kathleen dives into her experience of doing sema...
Oct 01, 2015•53 min
Ready to do some method interception? Carl and Richard talk to Ricardo Barbosa about CodeCop, his method interception library that you configure with JSON. The conversation starts out talking about why you would want to do method interception in the first place - aspect oriented programming, instrumentation, isolating plumbing code, and so on. There are a bunch of ways to address these problems, and method interception has some advantages. Ricardo talks about building the tool and its gradual ev...
Sep 30, 2015•53 min
Document databases as a service? For sure! Carl and Richard talk to Ryan CrawCour about Azure DocumentDB. DocumentDB is a JSON store - with an amazing set of features, including SQL querying. What? Ryan talks about how DocumentDB provides a fast, scalable place to store objects and write your queries any way you like. You write the rules for how your data partitions between collections, as well as the performance of each of those collections, and you can change them on the fly. More sophisticate...
Sep 29, 2015•59 min
The most requested (and most postponed) Geek Out of them all - Quantum Computing. How much is hype, and how much is real? Richard walks through the history of quantum computing, starting with the understanding of quantum mechanics in the first place, and how modelling that in a classical computer created problems. As it turns out, there are many approaches to quantum computing, and no "one right way" has appeared yet. The state of quantum computing today is like the state of classical computing ...
Sep 24, 2015•1 hr
So what does a web development stack look like today? Carl and Richard talk to Dan Wahlin about his explorations with the new ASP.NET vNext stack, checking out Angular2 (as opposed to the separately developed Angular1) and getting into using containers for development. Containers take virtual machines to the next level, with lower resource requirements and detailed manifests. As Dan points out, container technology comes after the configuration-as-code movement, and is a key part of the containe...
Sep 23, 2015•56 min
It's been on the news, but do you really understand what happened with the Ashley Madison hack? Carl and Richard talk to Troy Hunt about his experiences around his web site Have I Been Pwned and how the Ashley Madison hack blew up his traffic and made him think deeply about privacy. You may not care for the company, but you can't deny the significance of a multi-million dollar business blown up by hackers. Digital security is no joke - a failure can cost millions and destroy lives. Support this ...
Sep 22, 2015•1 hr 1 min
Universal Apps are all about XAML! Carl and Richard talk to the original XAML believer, Billy Hollis, about the new Universal App model and its focus on XAML. As Billy says, both Windows 10 and Office 2016 are using XAML now, so it's not going away. But first a quick digression on Windows Phone and Android - is the Universal App model going to save Windows Phone? Or should it all be Android in the end anyway? The conversation also ranges over some of the new opportunities coming in the future, l...
Sep 17, 2015•1 hr
Heard of NativeScript? Carl and Richard talk to Sam Basu from Telerik about NativeScript, a dev stack using JavaScript to build native mobile applications. Sam describes how NativeScript is different from Cordova, since it doesn't use HTML or a runtime that essentially hosts a browser - instead it has a custom UI markup language that is rather similar to XAML and compiles into native code on iOS and Android (Windows Phone coming soon). So if you like working in Javascript but want native perform...
Sep 16, 2015•52 min
Ci with SQL Server? Are you crazy? Carl and Richard talk to Ike Ellis about what it takes to get databases changes happening as smoothly as application changes. Really! Ike talks about the concept of database lifecycle management and how it is orthogonal to application lifecycle management. The tricky bit is managing the data! And to help with that, Ike discusses a great tool chain of source code management, testing and deployment tools that work with databases like SQL Server and integrate into...
Sep 15, 2015•1 hr 1 min
So what about building apps with Unity 3D? Carl and Richard talk to Brice Fernandes about what it takes to build using this cross-platform 3D framework. Brice talks about the important elements of gaming, including the art, user experience and game play itself. You need all three to some degree, great games do all of them well. The conversation digs into the variety of styles of games and the strengths and weaknesses of Unity in those different roles. Could you build things other than games in U...
Sep 10, 2015•58 min
Ready to React? Carl and Richard talk to Cory House about his experiences building applications using Facebook's React library. The conversation digs into the philosophical differences to web page design that React is focused on - and how they upset a lot of folks! Cory describes React as an approach for building UI components, which means combining HTML, Javascript and even CSS together! He also digs into the challenges of assembling the right tool stack - React is not an all-in-one library, yo...
Sep 09, 2015•55 min
So what's it like to build web apps with ASP.NET 5? Carl and Richard talk to Rick Strahl about his experiences with the rapidly evolving open source project that is ASP.NET today. As Rick says, it might be called a beta, but it is acting more like an alpha at this point - new features and breaking changes are occurring regularly as the toolset develops. On the plus side is the server-side cross-platform of running on Linux and OSX, plus a design that is far more focused on what modern web develo...
Sep 08, 2015•1 hr
Are you a social developer? Carl and Richard talk to Jeremy Clark about his experiences trying to draw developers at events out of their shells. In the end, especially at an event, people want to talk - you just have to get the conversation started. The conversation turns to skills that can benefit your career, including public speaking and writing. Being able to communicate effectively in various forms can help your whole team be more productive by getting people on the same page of an idea. It...
Sep 03, 2015•54 min
Web development is moving fast, and John Papa is in the race! Carl and Richard talk to John about his current views on Angular and other SPA frameworks - coming to Anglebrackets this fall! The conversation dives into the inevitable comparisons between Angular, Aurelia and others - but there is no one right way. Then John talks about the new Visual Studio Code, which really hasn't got much to do with Visual Studio at all - it's an editor, rather than an IDE. This leads to a conversation about dev...
Sep 02, 2015•54 min
Roslyn is out - and it's awesome! Carl and Richard talk to Dustin Campbell about his work building Roslyn over eight years. Eight years is an awful long time, but when you're rebuilding a codebase from scratch, it's hardly unprecedented. Dustin talks about some the decisions made in the re-engineering of C#, including whether or not to keep in the bugs! Taking Roslyn open source is also a huge aspect of Roslyn and it's impact on the rest of the open source products Microsoft is making including ...
Sep 01, 2015•57 min
What will it take to send humans to Mars and back? And what about actually colonizing Mars? Time to Geek Out! Richard talks through the history of manned missions to Mars, starting with Werner Von Braun's own Das MarsProjekt. The story evolves with Robert Zubrin's Case for Mars and the idea (and technology) behind In-Situ Resource Utilization - refuelling ships on Mars by making methane. That's the beginning elements of humans actually living on Mars. Elon Musk talks about creating an independen...
Aug 27, 2015•1 hr 1 min
How do you make a mobile web site go fast? The same way you make any web site go fast! Carl and Richard talk to Chris Love about his strategies for making fast web pages. The conversation starts out discussing how mobile apps are even more performance sensitive than regular web pages, because mobile devices typically have less bandwidth and more limited processing power for rendering. Chris points to one of his favorite tools - WebPageTest, as a great starting point for knowing where to look for...
Aug 26, 2015•59 min
Unifying your Git GUI experience! Carl and Richard talk to Amy Palamountain from GitHub about how GitHub Desktop is bringing together the separate GitHub for Mac and GitHub for Windows products. Amy explains that in the past, there were separate GUI clients for Mac and Windows, with separate feature sets and styles. Bringing the codebase together keeps the releases more consistent, but it also represents an interesting unified coding approach using technologies like Reactive Extensions and other...
Aug 25, 2015•51 min
So how do you get to "yes" with business decision makers? Carl and Richard talk to Eileen Fisher about how tech folks can be more effective communicating with folks that aren't in technology but make decisions on what technology to use. Eileen runs through seven key points for talking to decision makers - staying clear of technical jargon when dealing with business people and focusing on the things that matter with those folks. They may think differently than you, but that doesn't mean they aren...
Aug 20, 2015•57 min
So what happens when you dive head-first into the latest Javascript libraries? Carl and Richard chat with Julie Lerman about her experiences playing with Rob Eisenberg's Aurelia library. Of course, it doesn't stop there: If you're going to learn Aurelia, you're going to change the whole stack - including node, expressjs and DocumentDB! Julie walks through the process of adding each of the bits into the stack, learning online through search engines and twitter, and what she brought back from this...
Aug 19, 2015•56 min
Have you automated your deployment infrastructure? Carl and Richard talk to Matt Wrock about his tool chain for doing deployments. The raft of tools is long, but largely familiar: NuGet, Chocolatey, Boxstarter, Vagrant. Matt continues on with Atlas, Packer and Boxcutter to put together a completely automated process to build new VMs with services, tools and your software all pre-configured and ready to go. More good thinking about getting your configuration down as code! Support this podcast at ...
Aug 18, 2015•1 hr 3 min
How do you manage version numbers? Carl and Richard talk to Jake Ginnivan about his open source project called GitVersion. GitVersion works to automate the semantic versioning of your software. The conversation starts out focused on the details of semantic versioning - beyond the major.minor.patch, there are the alpha, beta and release candidate builds. Jake walks through the process of automating versioning, being able to understand what changes you've made to your code to know what numbers nee...
Aug 13, 2015•59 min
Messaging in browsers? Carl and Richard talk to Derick Bailey about messaging patterns in Javascript. Yes, browsers always use messages, that's what HTTP is about - but there are messages, and there are messages. Derick talks about using the publish/subscribe pattern with RabbitMQ to build a highly scalable system. These are patterns that are popular outside of the web, but the modern web can do anything any other system can do - so it's time to put these messaging patterns to work in your web a...
Aug 12, 2015•59 min
How does Windows 10 change NuGet? Carl and Richard talk to Jeff Fritz about the new features being added to NuGet to support Windows 10 Universal Apps. The core feature is the ability to build a NuGet package that will run on all the Windows 10 universal platforms - PC, tablet and phone. The conversation then switches to the Visual Studio 2015 launch and the crazy three day hackathon preceding it that Jeff participated in, building the AllReady applications for Humanitarian Toolbox and the RedCr...
Aug 11, 2015•51 min