Michele is back and surviving microservices! Carl and Richard talk to Michele Bustamante about her work with microservices and the challenges that her customers have. Starting with the normal problems innate to any re-architecting exercise - what is the benefit to the customer? You can't make microservices because they're fun, they have to solve a particular problem - and typically it's the problem of over-coupling within a group of services. Update one and you derail the others. Picking what se...
Mar 20, 2018•1 hr 1 min
How do you have success with Azure? Carl and Richard talk to Microsoft PFE Christos Matskas about some of the projects he's been involved in helping organizations deploy apps and services into Azure. As Christos says, it's not an all-or-nothing thing - some applications and services make more sense in the cloud, and some work great on-premises. But there are a bunch of moving parts to organize and understand to have success with Azure. Christos tells stories of where things go right, things go w...
Mar 15, 2018•54 min
What is coming up for .NET Core? Carl and Richard talk to Scott Hunter, who leads all of .NET at Microsoft, about the road ahead for .NET Core. But first, a quick look back at where .NET has come from, including a discussion around performance and the impact of the Meltdown and Spectre CPU security flaws impacting performance across the board. Then into a huge raft of features coming up in the next year in .NET Core, including compilation and performance enhancements, as well as some old favorit...
Mar 13, 2018•51 min
How do you know how your software is working? While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard talk to Jessica White about her experience building dashboards to instrument operations, management and development. The conversation dives into what needs to be measured as well as how to represent those measurements in ways that help people understand - do it wrong and you can actually confuse people, or have your dashboard ignored. Jessica talks about how dashboards have to evolve with business needs. With ...
Mar 08, 2018•54 min
SharePoint development continues to evolve in 2018! Carl and Richard talk to Sahil Malik about his view on the latest offerings around SharePoint. At the Ignite event in 2017, Microsoft announced SharePoint 2019, so there's definitely a new on-premises version of SharePoint coming. Obviously, it's taken from the cloud edition, which is why the development model has changed so substantially. Sahil talks about the SharePoint Framework as the model for doing SharePoint customizations, and the codin...
Mar 06, 2018•55 min
What does it take to build an application where the UI is strictly voice? While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard sat down with Heather Downing to talk about her experiences building voice-driven applications with a variety of tools, including Alexa and Google Voice. Heather digs into the challenges of thinking through what the voice interface is really good at, versus more traditional screen, keyboard, and mouse driven software. This leads to a broader discussion about getting away from the de...
Mar 01, 2018•54 min
What goes into a Docker stack? Carl and Richard talk to Rob Richardson about how containers are evolving in the .NET world. Rob talks about how the Windows side of Docker is actually getting stronger - most developers using Docker use Linux as the template OS. The conversation focuses on moving existing .NET applications into Docker - aka, without .NET Core. It's certainly possible, and you get some of the container advantages. But with containers comes new thinking around architecture, the abil...
Feb 27, 2018•52 min
Modern software development is complex, how do you teach it to beginners? While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard sat down with Maria Naggaga to talk about her approaches to teaching software development, both to children and adults, from the very beginning. Maria talks about using more approachable cause-and-effect type tools at the beginning to learn about procedural programming, and how the latest bits actually allow you to take that code forward into more advanced tools. Interactive documen...
Feb 22, 2018•53 min
C# continues to evolve - there's more to learn! While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard talk to Jon Skeet and Bill Wagner about their on-going work on C#. For Bill, he's now part of the docs team helping people understand C#, and for Jon, it's his contributions via GitHub to ideas and features for C#. Both write great books and talk about the challenge of how C# is evolving as open source and in public. What features matter, and where does it all lead to? Will C# ever be finished, or is this an...
Feb 20, 2018•1 hr 1 min
Whether you're a multi-national NGO or your local church group, every non-profit has cybersecurity issues! Carl and Richard talk to Cameron Birge and Tarek Dawoud about tools, techniques and mindset to protect data and resist hackers. While the practices are broadly applicable to any organization and applications, non-profits have specific challenges that make cybersecurity all the more challenges - how do you train volunteers that turn over steadily? How can you be sure that a volunteer softwar...
Feb 15, 2018•54 min
How is machine learning different over in the land of Amazon? While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard talked to Kesha Williams about her work building machine learning solutions using various Amazon technologies. The conversation starts out talking about the challenges around bias being amplified by machine learning technology - there are no simple solutions. Kesha talks about building a crime risk evaluation system using image recognition and machine learning. Just a prototype, but it opens th...
Feb 13, 2018•54 min
What does it mean to build a cloud-native application? While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard talked to Scott Guthrie about the latest features available in Azure. While there are always the Infrastructure-as-a-Service options of VMs and the like, you don't really get the power of the cloud until you move into more of the platform features. Scott describes how existing applications and be lifted-and-shifted into VMs in the cloud, and then broken apart to take advantage of various services. The...
Feb 08, 2018•1 hr 3 min
What if you could program in C# in your browser? Carl and Richard talk to Daniel Roth and Steve Sanderson about the evolution of Blazor - Steve Sanderson's amazing project using WebAssembly to put .NET In the browser. The big news is that Blazor is moving from a Sanderson research project into the ASP.NET GitHub repository - the team is going to work on it! Still experimental, the Microsoft team is keen to see what all of us will do with Blazor. If you want a C# experience end-to-end in web deve...
Feb 06, 2018•54 min
How can space science help you learn Postgres? While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talk to Rob Conery about his latest book, A Curious Moon. Rob talks about being inspired by Andy Weir's The Martian to write a book that teaches Postgres by using the data from the NASA Cassini mission to Saturn. The book is part story, part tutorial about using Postgres, data loading and analytics. And the data is real - you're working from the actual data from the Cassini mission. The book is an innovative way...
Feb 01, 2018•59 min
Another year goes by, time for an identity update! While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard talk to Dom and Brock about the latest updates to IdentityServer. A key aspect of the past year was two versions of .NET Core - both 1.1 and 2.0. Dom and Brock talk through all the twists and turns that it takes to keep IdentityServer up to date with the latest .NET Core pieces. So what about authentication? The conversation turns to the new PolicyServer available as both an open source and a retail produ...
Jan 30, 2018•57 min
How do you get girls interested in programming and help them learn? While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard talk to Jennifer Wadella about her experience building Kansas City Women in Technology. Jennifer talks about trying to build a community of women peers in Kansas City, only to discover a huge group of women who wanted to get involved in technology. So off into the teaching practice, aimed at girls called Coding and Cupcakes and for women, an event called Coding and Cocktails. Lots of grea...
Jan 25, 2018•1 hr
Still exploring options for cross-platform mobile development? Carl and Richard talk to Tim Sneath and Adam Barth about Google's Flutter - using the Dart language to build mobile applications that compile to iOS and Android. Tim has only recently joined Google but has dived head-first into this new approach to mobile development. Adam as one of the originators of the project talks about his key focus - the architecture that allows you to build for both platforms from one code base, and a rapid c...
Jan 23, 2018•43 min
How can storytelling advance your career? Carl and Richard talk to James Whittaker, who recently published The Storytellers Spellbook, about the power of stories to help people understand you and the things that are important to you. James tells his story about realizing how important storytelling was to his career and what it could do for him - and the additional challenge of teaching others how to tell stories. He breaks down three key aspects - the story you tell, how you tell it, and what yo...
Jan 18, 2018•56 min
How do you make sure your APIs can interop across languages and other complexities? Carl and Richard talk to Darrel Miller about OpenAPI, the open source specification for standard aspects of APIs like collections, security rules and more. The specification is now at version 3 and starting to really mature - all the big players are involved, and you can contribute as well! Darrel discusses how Microsoft has been implementing OpenAPI standards to their own APIs and what it takes for you to do it ...
Jan 16, 2018•51 min
How do you get a job in software development that you love? Carl and Richard talk to Chuck Max Wood about his experiences teaching people to get jobs in software development. Chuck starts with finding a job you really want - there are lots of options in software development. He talks about LinkedIn as a great source of information about companies and the people that work at them. Making connections to people in companies, understanding what the company does and who is responsible for hiring is a...
Jan 11, 2018•58 min
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are here, and Chris Love has some thoughts! Carl and Richard talk to Chris about his view on PWAs and their impact on building great web applications. Chris talks about the power of service workers to increase the performance of a web application through pre-loading of caching, tolerating unreliable connections, even cool event features that allow web apps to light up when they are needed, especially in a mobile scenario. Graceful degradation of features means that yo...
Jan 09, 2018•59 min
Artificial Intelligence has transformed vision technology! Carl and Richard talk to Tim Huckaby about his latest work with vision systems for retail, security and more. Tim talks about how AI has fundamentally changed the way you implement vision systems, taking away many of the limitations on number of people tracked, object and face recognition and so on. The conversation digs into the demonstration done at the Build conference for using regular security cameras to implement a real-time safety...
Jan 04, 2018•58 min
A new year, and new features for ASP.NET! Carl and Richard kick off the new year by talking to Jeff Fritz about his on-going work on ASP.NET - both the framework and core editions. The conversation naturally turns to web forms, the big exclusion from the core edition, but new features continue to be released in .NET Framework 4.7.1. Jeff talks about what modern development looks like for ASP.NET web forms, and the power of continued support for existing web applications, while providing approach...
Jan 02, 2018•53 min
Last show of 2017, how about a story about changing the world? Carl and Richard talk to Stephen Forte about the Laudato Si Challenge, a startup accelerator that focuses on conscientious capitalism, providing an intense ten-week program that helps the companies get moving with finance, marketing, and growth strategies. Stephen talks about the genesis of the challenge with Pope Francis' encyclical 'On Care of Our Common Home.' Making a profit doesn't have to be at the expense of the planet or othe...
Dec 28, 2017•55 min
Mobile development continues to evolve in the Xamarin world! Carl and Richard talk to James Montemagno about the latest features coming out of the Xamarin team to make developing cross-platform native applications faster and easier. James digs into the new Xamarin Live tools that show your Xamarin app on your device with edit-and-continue capabilities. As you modify your Xamarin Forms code, the changes are immediately reflected in the device. This shortens the code-deploy-debug cycle so you can ...
Dec 26, 2017•58 min
Last show before Christmas - time for some rants! Carl and Richard talk to Billy Hollis about his frustrations around UX design. And Billy starts out talking about the complete lack of UX design he finds in many applications. The conversation digs into the differences between visual design and interactive design, where the interactive part is harder, but ultimately more valuable. Billy also discusses the costs around poor design and ultimately, poor quality software. Cloud and internet have made...
Dec 21, 2017•56 min
The new version of DotVMM is imminent! Carl and Richard talk to Tomáš Herceg about his on-going effort to build a great framework for creating web applications and migration paths away from web forms and other web pages bound to the .NET Framework over to .NET Core. Tomáš discusses the new features coming in the latest version and his solutions to various problems around building web pages where the JavaScript is taken care of. And everything is open source - you have the code, modify it as you ...
Dec 19, 2017•44 min
Developing in Salesforce? What's that about? Carl and Richard talk to Jay Janarthanan about the kinds of software being built today against the Force infrastructure that runs the Salesforce CRM SaaS product - and so much more! Jay talks about why you would want to do extensions to Salesforce, and how in the past few years enterprises have been building entire applications with the Force tools and infrastructure. The language of Force is Apex, and Jay is building an open source project called Ape...
Dec 14, 2017•55 min
What does it take to implement a DevOps practice at Microsoft? While at Connect in New York, Carl and Richard talked to Lori Lamkin about the efforts of the VSTS team to deliver more value to customers faster. Lori talks about changing the tempo of deployment for TFS from 24 months to three weeks and the re-organization of the teams so that developers are responsible for features from conception to operations. The role of operations also evolves to one that focuses on monitoring, rather than dep...
Dec 12, 2017•51 min
Show 1500! What better to celebrate another aught-aught milestone of .NET Rocks than a look back. Richard has been working on writing a book on the History of .NET (maybe Christmas 2018?) but to celebrate a milestone show, he dives into the topic with Carl. .NET has had a lot of twists and turns through the years and .NET Rocks has been there the whole time - throughout the conversation, there are opportunities to point to specific shows that represent part of that history. Here's to another 150...
Dec 07, 2017•1 hr 20 min
