Ready to talk about Thorium again? Since the last Thorium Geek Out in 2013, there have been a number of important developments. Richard takes Carl on a tour of why we want Thorium as a fuel, molten salt as a reactor design, and the choices we can make around different turbine technologies. Aspects of molten salt reactors continue to mature, offering continuous fuel reprocessing that means more of the dangerous radioactive material can be used for heat and left with safe residuals. Is it time to ...
Jul 21, 2016•55 min
How do we get all our IoT devices talking to each other? While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard chatted with Jimmy Engstrom about AllJoyn, a Qualcomm started project now part of the Linux Foundation that provides a common language for devices to communicate with. Jimmy talks about the different elements of AllJoyn, servers and clients and how they share information about their capabilities. There's a plugin for Visual Studio to make it easier for you to implement AllJoyn in your IoT applications...
Jul 20, 2016•49 min
ASP.NET Core is released, now what? Carl and Richard talk to Shawn Wildermuth about his efforts to migrate to the RTM of ASP.NET Core. As Shawn points out, the framework is ready, but the tooling is still in preview, so more changes to how you build your web sites and services will happen before everything is said and done. Lots of digressions in the show too, talking about the road trip, being an old developer and trying to do things right - a fun conversation! Support this podcast at — https:/...
Jul 19, 2016•53 min
What's the best way for you to learn new technology? Carl and Richard talk to Ben Hall about his latest creation, KataCoda. KataCoda is a free web site that hosts tutorial systems for a variety of technology content including Docker, Erlang, C#, Jenkins and so on. Rather than make you set up an environment to experiment with new tech, KataCoda is all set to go and has great scenarios and walkthrough for you to practice with. And when you're ready to try your own thing, there are playgrounds also...
Jul 14, 2016•45 min
Write your build scripts in C#! While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard talked to Gary Ewan Park about Cake - aka C# Make. Cake is a cross platform build automation solution - it works on Windows, OSX and Linux. Gary talks about being able to work in C# to define everything that needs to happen in your build process, including testing, documentation generation and so on. Your script can call other scripts so that you can contain complexity based on task. And since it's an open source project, if ...
Jul 13, 2016•53 min
Quick, how long can a file path in .NET be? Carl and Richard talk to Jeremy Kuhne, who has taken on the challenge of breaking the 260 character limit on file paths in .NET. Why has this problem persisted for so long? Jeremy references some blog posts from Kim Hamilton back in 2007 when the issue came up big - at the time, .NET was deeply intertwined with Windows, and there were too many things to fix. But the creation of .NET Core presented an opportunity to fix the problem once and for all, and...
Jul 12, 2016•57 min
The Hololens SDK edition is out - are you ready to write some code? Carl and Richard talk to Rene Schulte at NDC Oslo about his work building apps for the Hololens. The conversation explores the differences in virtual reality and augmented reality and the huge number of possibilities out there for Hololens. Rene talks about what it's like to develop for Hololens, discussing the relative merits between writing code in Unity3D and the Universal Windows Platform (XAML!) - it's all C# in the end! Th...
Jul 07, 2016•51 min
How does testing contribute to the failure of a project? Todd Gardner chats with Carl and Richard at NDC Oslo about his experiences with failing projects and testing. More than just the usual case that a lack of testing led to unreliable software, Todd also talks about how testing the market is important too - what if you build software nobody wants? The focus has to be on relevant tests, because every test represents an overhead of computing and maintenance. This ultimately comes back to unders...
Jul 06, 2016•54 min
What does it mean to build for the cloud? While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard chatted with Paul Stack about thinking about architecture specific for the cloud - not necessarily Azure or AWS, but the overall concepts of what it means to be in the cloud. It starts with the idea of everything you build being virtual and portable, whether than be VMs or containers. But there's also so-called 'server-less' designs as well, where your software runs on a platform in the cloud. If you could get rid o...
Jul 05, 2016•50 min
Can you detect lies with machine learning? Jennifer Marsman can! Carl and Richard chatted with Jennifer while at the NDC conference in Oslo. Jennifer talked about gathering EEG data with Emotiv headsets to do lie detection by taking base line (known true and known false) questions and then applying Azure Machine Learning to classify the data. The conversation dives into the different machine learning techniques available on Azure and how certain algorithms are more effective on different data se...
Jun 30, 2016•50 min
Ready to go deeper into Elixir? While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard caught up with Rob Conery to see how his obsession with Elixir and Erlang has evolved. Rob talks about getting comfortable in the space and getting serious about building software using the Phoenix MVC library and other tools. The conversation turns to the Actor Model pattern and how it becomes a way of life when you're working in Elixir - as fundamental as objects are to C#. Rob discusses the building, testing and deploying ...
Jun 29, 2016•50 min
What's next for C#? While at NDC Oslo, Carl and Richard talked with Mads Torgersen about what's coming up in C# 7. But first some fun, talking about how languages evolve and the challenge of bringing new features to life while avoiding breaking what has come before. It's not easy building languages, especially popular ones! Mads talks about the process of deciding what is in and what will be pushed out for the next version of C#. Along the way, the discussion turns to grabbing onto great ideas f...
Jun 28, 2016•1 hr 4 min
Time to get Geeky in space! Carl and Richard talk about what it takes to make a truly reusable spacecraft. First up is the venerable space shuttle, which wasn't so much reusable as rebuildable. It never really made economic sense, but it definitely drove the technology forward. SpaceX has been able to recover four first stage rockets from Falcon 9 flights, but hasn't reused any yet, and Richard gets into the nitty gritty details of the challenges of reusing rocket engines. It may require a diffe...
Jun 23, 2016•1 hr 2 min
It's an exciting time for .NET! While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard sat down with David Fowler and Damian Edwards to talk about the development of .NET Core, ASP.NET Core 1 and the Kestrel web server. The conversation digs into the challenges of writing a cross-platform web development framework, including some controversial pivots that have frustrated some developers - looking at you, RC2! Damian then discusses Kestrel, the cross-platform web hosting environment. This is a wide-ranging conve...
Jun 22, 2016•57 min
Time for a new version of CSLA! Carl and Richard talk to Rocky Lhotka about the latest incarnation of the venerable business object framework that started all the way back at Visual Basic 5! CSLA has always been about keeping business logic out of your user interfaces and databases - keep it in the middle where it belongs. And today that is clearly wise architectural design: The diversity on the client side means you have a lot more devices accessing your application, and CSLA supports most of t...
Jun 21, 2016•55 min
Virtual Reality is here, and there are choices! Carl and Richard talk to Jason Weimann about the HTC Vive, the competitor to the Oculus Rift. Jason talks about how the two devices are similar and how they are different. And one place they are similar is the programming model - it's all about Unity3D. The conversation focuses in on what it takes to really learn Unity - you're working in Visual Studio with C#, but the platform and tooling are quite a bit different. And don't worry too much about 3...
Jun 16, 2016•54 min
Do you know how people are actually using your mobile apps? Carl and Richard chat with Greg Shackles about his work instrumenting mobile apps in production. The low hanging fruit is actually gathering data about every crash or error that occurs in the field. Getting that information back to your dev team can make the application better, but what if operations were able to respond to the failure? What if you could turn a crash into a moment of delight for the user? The conversation then dives int...
Jun 15, 2016•50 min
Is DevOps dead, or just a fad? Carl and Richard talk to Wes Higbee about his experiences building great software. As Wes says, don't let any methodology stop you from doing the right thing. The conversation digs into the challenges that come around the term DevOps, much the same way they impact the term Agile. It's very easy to start using terminology to define practices rather than focus on the common goal of building great software. Do the labels developer, tester and IT separate us or unify u...
Jun 14, 2016•57 min
How can competition teach machine learning? Carl and Richard talk to Anthony Goldbloom of Kaggle about competitive machine learning. Kaggle hosts competitions provided by industry and academia to find machine learning solutions on different data sets. While the competitive aspects tend toward only particular types of data sets, Anthony talks about how two very different machine learning algorithms - Gradient Boosting Machine and Deep Recurrent Neural Networks - have risen to the top. Want to lea...
Jun 09, 2016•58 min
Here comes Windows Containers! While at Techorama in Belgium, Carl and Richard talk to Els Putzeys about the current technical preview of Windows Containers on Windows Server 2016. Els discusses how the Windows Containers can be built using templates so that you have a configuration-as-code capability, making repeated creation fast and easy. Now your documentation for building a system is code that actually creates it! We're still a few months away from Server 2016 being released, but it looks t...
Jun 08, 2016•55 min
How do you do continuous deployment? While at Techorama in Belgium, Carl and Richard sat down with Marcel de Vries and Rene van Osnabrugge to talk about their efforts working with various customers trying to help them get further down the DevOps line of productivity. The conversation digs into the various elements that go into getting to continuous delivery, including a lot of conversation about automating testing - if you're going to build fast, you need to test fast too! Marcel also talks abou...
Jun 07, 2016•51 min
Ready to think differently about programming? While at Techorama in Belgium, Carl and Richard chatted with Mark Seemann about his experiences with Haskell, helping him to be the best functional programmer he can be. Mark talks about the battle of developing in F#, and how it's easy to fall into object-centric development methods, even when F# strongly encourages function-centric coding. By spending time in a pure functional language like Haskell, you strengthen those functional reflexes! The lan...
Jun 02, 2016•52 min
Even more new stuff from Xamarin! While at Techorama in Mechelen, Belgium, Carl and Richard sat down with James Montemagno to talk about all the goodness that came out of the Evolve conference. The conversation focuses first on the new edition of Xamarin Forms, building UI abstracts for your mobile apps to increase your code sharing across platforms. James also talks about data pages as a way to present data on your mobile apps, with some great styling options. Xamarin is continuing to build awe...
Jun 01, 2016•54 min
How do you manage your non-relational data? While at Techorama in Belgium, Carl and Richard talk to Oren Eini about his work with RavenDB and getting companies to really think about organizing non-relational data in a sensible way. The conversation focuses on how much relational database methodology (like normalization) has permeated thinking in development, so that we tend toward similar behavior when working on a non-relational data store. Store the objects as objects, it's going to be okay! S...
May 31, 2016•1 hr 1 min
How do you change a developer's mind? While at Techorama in Belgium, Carl and Richard talk to Julie Lerman about her experiences working with a variety of teams moving into new technologies and techniques. While some folks are happy to jump into the latest-and-greatest, others are more cautious or even resistant - and often for good reason. There's always a productivity hit with changing up tooling and process, with substantial benefits coming further down the path. How can you help people "get ...
May 26, 2016•53 min
What does modern open source look like? While at Techorama in Belgium, Carl and Richard moderated a panel of Bill Wagner, Udi Dahan, Nik Molnar and Jimmy Bogard to discuss their experiences working in open source in this day and age. Much of the discussion focuses the various approaches that folks make a living while building and maintaining open source projects. Does it make sense for a commercial product to be open source? What's the right way to go about that? Why would someone put their proj...
May 25, 2016•53 min
How can you keep your customer identity information safe? While at Techorama in Mechelen, Belgium, Carl and Richard talk to Vittorio Bertocci about Microsoft's offerings around Azure Active Directory. With all the data breaches going on these days, its wise to consider offloading the work of managing your customer's personally identifiable information to a service that has as much security around it as possible. Vittorio talks about the new B2C service on Azure offering the ability to store cust...
May 24, 2016•56 min
More Geeking Out on GMO Foods! This time, Richard digs into the more controversial side of genetic modification - making crops that are resistant to pests and pesticides. And to make it even more fun, part of the conversation includes scientists from Monsanto! First up is Bacillus Thuringensis, better known as BT - a biopesticide that is a naturally occurring bacteria found back in 1901. BT is used on organic crops! Today, key genes from BT have been incorporated into plants so that you no longe...
May 19, 2016•1 hr
Where is the .NET community going? Carl and Richard talk to Sam Basu and John Bristowe of Telerik about the data they've gathered in their 2016 Developer Report. The conversation explores what languages and tools developers visiting the Telerik site are using, with lots of exploration around the evolution of mobile development. Desktop development plays a role as well - and lots of folks are still building WinForms apps! The latest news out of Microsoft has piqued folks interest in open source a...
May 18, 2016•59 min
What is slowing your web site down? Carl and Richard talk to Matt Watson, CEO of Stackify, about their free product called Prefix. Method profiling has been around for awhile, but it takes a lot of time and tuning to get right - and running profilers on production servers can be a career limiting behavior. Prefix runs on your development workstation so that you can see what parts of your code are taking time - including how much is involved in communications time, query processing, and so on. Ta...
May 17, 2016•57 min
