Azure with no servers? Carl and Richard talk to Jeff Hollan about Azure's Serverless offerings. The idea is to stop worrying about virtual machines and operating systems and focus on the stuff you really need. Jeff talks about Logic Apps, which provide workflow and connectors between your code and a ton of other services, some coming from Azure and many coming from other service providers. Credentials for the services are kept in the Azure Key Vault rather than your code (or in the heads of your...
May 09, 2017•53 min
How are software careers changing? Carl and Richard talk to Erik Dietrich about his new book, Developer Hegemony. Erik digs into the struggles that many developers have with the typical large enterprise, where software developers are treated more like cogs in the system, with limited amounts of information and flexibility. Leaving the company and contracting back increases your wages and flexibility, although now you are responsible for all the things that make your job your job - things like ac...
May 04, 2017•51 min
Angular or Aurelia? Carl and Richard talk to Brian Noyes about his experience building Single Page Application (SPA) style web sites using Angular and Aurelia. No, not both at the same time, but separately. Angular is all the rage these days, but Brian talks about the confusion around Angular caused by the breaking changes from 1.x to 2.x, the skipping of 3 and now settling on Angular 4. The discussion also digs into convention-over-configuration, Brian identifying Aurelia as a convention-driven...
May 02, 2017•50 min
Where is your DevOps at? Carl and Richard talk to Jez Humble and Nicole Forsgren about DORA, that is the DevOps Readiness Assessment. DORA helps you understand where your organization is at in the spectrum of DevOps, from low to medium to high. The conversation digs into what it takes to improve operational capability, focusing on understanding exactly how your organization delivers software so you can improve it. Along the way there are challenges, it is never easy to change an organization, bu...
Apr 27, 2017•53 min
You can make a game in Xamarin Forms? Yes! Carl and Richard talk to Jonathan Peppers about his latest work on NBA Life, a role-playing game for iOS and Android built with Xamarin Forms. Jonathan talks about the process they went through to decide on this particular architecture for the game, having done prototyping with Unity and Xamarin Native. The conversation also digs into the back end using Azure Service Fabric and it's Actor Model support - yes, everything is an actor! Lots of discussion a...
Apr 25, 2017•54 min
Most of us have taken antibiotics at some point in our lives, but how do they work? Time for a Geek Out! Richard talks through some fundamental cell biology to be able to set the stage for what antibiotics are, where they come from and how they work. Why do antibiotics work on some illnesses and not others? Why are some bacteria becoming antibiotic-resistant and what can be done about it? What's the alternative to antibiotics? As with most Geek Out subjects, the answers are complex, but worth it...
Apr 20, 2017•1 hr 6 min
C# 7 and Visual Studio 2017 are shipped - now what? Carl and Richard talk to Kathleen Dollard about her experiences working with folks that are trying to dig into the latest version of Microsoft development tools. Kathleen talks about the various approaches she's taken to teaching both C# and effective use of Visual Studio, there are so many little things to know, it's hard to take it all in. The conversation dives deep into understanding async and await so that you actually get real benefit fro...
Apr 18, 2017•1 hr 2 min
The whirlwind of DevOps is back! Carl and Richard talk to Donovan Brown about his on-going mission to get everyone into a DevOps practice - in fact, he talks about getting to a place where continuous delivery and monitoring are just the way you make software. Donovan talks about a session he has been giving where he creates four different delivery pipelines in an hour, with different programming languages, platforms, testing and deployment tools. And if he can make four in an hour, there's reall...
Apr 13, 2017•1 hr 2 min
What does it take to build great multi-tenant apps on the cloud? Carl and Richard talk to Joe Audette about his set of open source tools called cloudscribe to make multi-tenant apps easier to implement. The conversation starts out with managing IdentityServer, the great open source library for handling single-sign-on across multiple applications. Cloudscribe helps you manage the sites, users, roles and claims for IdentityServer. But there's more to multi-tenancy than just authentication and auth...
Apr 11, 2017•1 hr 1 min
MVVMCross has grown up! Carl and Richard chat with Martjin van Dijk about his work on MVVMCross. Past guest Stuart Lodge started MVVMCross way back in 2012 when it was focused on building MVVM apps in Silverlight, but today the focus is on Xamarin. Martjin talks about how MVVMCross works with Xamarin forms to make it easier to build, test and debug mobile apps, bringing inversion of control and dependency injection as part of the library. The conversation also turns to navigation being moved to ...
Apr 06, 2017•42 min
What can analytics around development do for you? Carl and Richard talk to Steven Borg about his work with Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), especially around understanding developer productivity. The conversation starts out with a comment around Team Foundation Server and VSTS, the former being the on-premise version of the latter. But why run your own infrastructure when you don't have to? Then Steven dives into different kinds of analysis, looking for the best quality code. Can analysis tel...
Apr 04, 2017•1 hr
Scripting with C++? Of course! Carl and Richard talk to Jason Turner about ChaiScript, his open source project that simplifies adding C++ as a scripting language to any application, but especially other C++ applications. The conversation turns to how C++ has evolved and some amazing tools available today to help you understand what C++ is doing, right down to the CPU level! Check out the links in the show notes for some of the cool tools that Jason and his associates have built! Support this pod...
Mar 30, 2017•50 min
Visual Studio on a Mac! Carl and Richard talk to Mikayla Hutchinson who's been with Xamarin since the very beginning, about her work on the preview of Visual Studio for Mac. The product comes from MonoDevelop, which is Xamarin's IDE that runs in Windows, Mac and Linux. Mikayla talks about how Visual Studio for Mac focuses on both the client side of mobile devices and Mac OS as well as the cloud - there are templates included that will generate a basic app for iOS, Android and the back end layer ...
Mar 28, 2017•45 min
How do you manage legacy code? Carl and Richard talk to David Bernstein about his book Beyond Legacy Code. The conversation starts out talking about what legacy code is - and David brings up the idea that code is legacy if you don't have confidence in it. Now how do you get confidence? This is where the rewrite behavior comes from: You're naturally more confident in your own code. But is it a good idea? David talks about nine practices that are most effective at getting your application under co...
Mar 23, 2017•58 min
How do you bring a DevOps practice to an existing application? While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talk to Damian Brady about his experiences working with teams trying to get better at building, deploying, instrumenting and maintaining existing applications. Often the processes put in place when an application is first developed stay the same - new techniques are applied to new apps. But it doesn't have to be like that! Damian talks about engaging everyone involved in the app, including manage...
Mar 21, 2017•58 min
Should we go back to the moon? Richard says yes - time for a Geek Out! In recent months conversations around the Moon have surged - Richard discusses both the SLS EM-1 mission to the move and the SpaceX space tourism flight. And then on to the main topic: Why should we go back to the moon? Richard focuses on four points: We have not explored much of the moon at all, we can extract fuel and manufacture things on the moon, we need to understand how humans function long term in low gravity (rather ...
Mar 16, 2017•56 min
Ready for another actor framework? Carl and Richard talk to Roger Johansson about his work on proto.actor, and ultra-light-weight, easy to get into actor framework for .NET and Go. The conversation starts out with Akka.NET, the framework that Roger worked on a few years ago, and how it's origins in Java gave it a certain amount of ceremony that Roger thought could be simplified - hence proto.actor! With a focus on speed and simplicity, proto.actor uses libraries like Google's protocol buffers to...
Mar 14, 2017•56 min
Visual Studio 2017 ships! Carl and Richard talk to Tim Sneath about his role in this version of Studio. Tim talks about speeding installation of Visual Studio by modularizing the various elements so you don't install things you don't need - but it's always easier to add more in! The conversation also digs into the extensibility model that makes it easier to build new features into Studio, and a great marketplace to share and sell them. Studio continues to evolve, the 2017 edition is awesome! Sup...
Mar 08, 2017•53 min
Visual Studio is twenty years old! Carl and Richard chat with Julia Liuson, who has been involved with Visual Studio since its very earliest days in the 90s. Julia talks about how Microsoft decided to build a unified IDE for all its various development products including Visual Basic, C++, FoxPro and their new web development tool, Visual InterDev. But following quickly on from the 1997 edition was .NET and the complete change that it created for Visual Studio. Lots of great stories from someone...
Mar 07, 2017•50 min
How do you evolve your team when it triples in size? Carl and Richard talk to Ryan Stelly about his experiences working at Rally Health when an acquisition grew the development team from eight people to 30. The conversation begins with a look at where they came from, building ASP.NET MVC apps. The new team used Scala and Angular together - how do you move forward? Cross team training, exploring new technologies and a lot of fun leads to React/Redux, a new DevOps stack and a culture that you'd wa...
Mar 02, 2017•52 min
What's your strategy for moving to containers? While at NDC London, Carl and Richard chat with Michele Bustamante on how she talks to companies about utilizing container technology effectively. Michele discusses the fact that implementing containers represents more than just a technology investment - it's also a change in culture and process. This means that buy-in for container technology has to start at the top and permeate through the organization. And the benefits are just as comprehensive; ...
Feb 28, 2017•55 min
What is Conway's Law and how does it apply to your organization? Carl and Richard met up with Mark Seemann in Copenhagen to chat about how organization structure affects the structure of software. That is the essence of Conway's Law, going all the way back to the 1960s, where he talked about how committees designing software end up making software that reflects the structure of the committees themselves. This leads to a broad conversation about how virtually every company today is actually a sof...
Feb 23, 2017•55 min
Windows Containers are here! While at NDC London, Carl and Richard chatted with Ben Hall about his on-going exploration of container technology. Windows Server 2016 shipped in late 2016 with support for two kinds of Windows containers. Ben talks about migrating an existing web application, IIS and all, over to Windows containers, providing some great deployment automation and scalability. There are still more bits to be built, but you can be productive with Windows containers today - check it ou...
Feb 22, 2017•57 min
What are the twelve factors that go into a successful cloud architected application? While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard sat down with Ian Cooper to talk through the twelve factors approach to building software. Ian talks about focusing on building software-as-a-service style application, likely in the cloud (and certainly using cloud architectures), with continuous delivery of new features. While agnostic to any particular technology, there are lots of common practices here that make sense...
Feb 21, 2017•1 hr
Will fusion power ever be real? Time for a geek out! Since the original fusion shows in 2014, there has been a bunch of progress in the field of fusion... okay, some progress. Richard talks about how ITER is delayed another ten years, the Wendelstein 7-X is actually up and running and the rest of the billionaire-funded fusion projects are somewhat quiet. Does that mean they have enough money so their working, or are they stuck? The discussion dives into a key challenge of fusion - more powerful ...
Feb 16, 2017•52 min
Mixed reality is coming! While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard sat down with Jessica Engstrom to talk about her work with virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality. And yes, they are all different, with the conversation starting off with definitions of each. Jessica talks about some of the projects she's done using the mapping capabilities of the HoloLens to re-create 3D spaces. There's a new diversity of hardware in the space coming as well, with more vendors making augmented real...
Feb 15, 2017•52 min
Are your machines learning? While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard hosted a panel of Jennifer Marsman, Evelina Gabasova and Barbara Fusinska talking about their work in machine learning. The conversation ranges over the variety of projects they've worked on, including using machine learning to analyze Stack Overflow data, building a machine learning-driven lie detector, doing sales data analysis with R, and more. The machine learning space is vast, and there are plenty of opportunities for eve...
Feb 14, 2017•1 hr
With apologies to Jane Austen, Carl and Richard talk to Dan North about the modern operations environment as one of the first NDC London shows of 2017. Dan digs into the challenges of operating modern applications and how a constant demand for new features can be destabilizing to software. The conversation explores getting to the root of concerns in systems so that everyone understands what is hard and what is easy. When people are misunderstood, fear and resistance almost always follow. Take th...
Feb 09, 2017•57 min
What's the right way to make a Xamarin app? While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard sat down with Gill Cleeren to talk about using the MVVM pattern as part of an overall mobile development stack. As Gill describes, MVVM brings consistency to the plumbing of the mobile app so that you can focus on the important (hard) stuff, getting the UI right, and trying to get as much common code as possible. In the end, the views end up being more device/OS specific, while the model and view-model can be sh...
Feb 08, 2017•57 min
Ready to build a chatbot? While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talk to Galiya Warrier about the different chatbot technologies available today. The focus is on the Microsoft Bot Framework, which under the hood uses LUIS - that's Language Understanding Intelligent Service. Galiya also talks about the QnA Maker, which sits on top of the Bot Framework to automate the creation of a chatbot that can use an FAQ as content. The discussion explores different chatbot platforms you can use, the integrati...
Feb 07, 2017•51 min
