.NET Core in Action! Carl and Richard talk to Dustin Metzgar about his new Manning book, .NET Core in Action. Dustin talks about the challenge of writing faster than the .NET team can ship code - how do you get a book done? The conversation also digs into effective strategies for working with .NET Core, the kind of tooling you care about, approaches to debugging, internationalization and more! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations...
Jul 03, 2018•52 min
How can Azure help your applications be secure? Carl and Richard talk to Daniel Piessens about his experiences using various features of Azure to secure applications. The conversation starts out with application secrets stored in Azure Key Vault - not just for SSL certificates, any information that your application needs should be in there. To access it, you'll want Azure Active Directory, and that leads to a discussion on multi-factor authentication and increasing sophistication of identity - a...
Jun 28, 2018•57 min
Put machine learning into your .NET app! Carl and Richard talk to John Alexander about ML.NET - a set of libraries that Microsoft has been using internally for years, now available for you as a NuGet package that you can add to your application pretty painlessly. The conversation dives into what sorts of machine learning tasks make sense for ML.NET and your application, and there are a ton. From sentiment analysis to pricing prediction, machine learning has a ton of possibilities. ML.NET provide...
Jun 26, 2018•50 min
How do you handle faults in your application? Carl and Richard talk to Dylan Reisenberger about Polly, the open source library (now part of the .NET Foundation) that helps organize fault recovery into a set of policies. Dylan talks about creating good fault solutions, not especially hard code, but it can get messy at times - creating policies makes your code more readable as well as easy to maintain when your approach to faults needs to change. And now Polly is a recommended tool for working wit...
Jun 21, 2018•1 hr 2 min
The .NET Framework continues to evolve! Carl and Richard talk to Kathleen Dollard about her work at Microsoft - helping to provide tooling and new features for maintaining existing applications and creating new ones. Kathleen is also responsible for Visual Basic .NET, and talks about how it's being maintained based on the needs of VB.NET developers - stability is a focus! The upcoming Core 3 offers some interesting opportunities for existing applications to get new features, and Kathleen talks a...
Jun 19, 2018•1 hr 1 min
Everything fails eventually - how do you recover? Carl and Richard talk to Barry O'Reilly about building anti-fragile systems. Anti-fragility is the philosophy of accepting that things can break and you need to be able to detect and recover from that failure, whatever form it might take. Barry talks about the four aspects of anti-fragility: redundancy, diversity, modularity and loose-coupling. They're all common terms, but understanding how to do them well within your system is a challenge. How ...
Jun 14, 2018•53 min
Microsoft acquires GitHub! What does this mean? Carl and Richard talk to Phil Haack about what's going to change and what isn't - starting with, at least for the foreseeable future, Phil is not a Microsoft employee! GitHub is going to be a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft, operated independently. But having Microsoft resources available does open some interesting doors - Phil talks about the vast amount of resources that Microsoft has to move quickly on cool features and projects around the ...
Jun 12, 2018•49 min
Where has Uno been all your life? Carl and Richard talk to Francois Tanguay and Jerome Laban about Uno - the open source cross-platform UX library based on the Microsoft Universal Windows Platform (UWP) - the other flavor of XAML! Francois and Jerome talk about using various versions of Uno the past four years to build cross-platform applications for Windows, Android and iOS - more than 200 of them! Now they have implemented a web assembly version as an experiment and are open sourcing the frame...
Jun 07, 2018•50 min
C# is not done - there's more to come! Carl and Richard talk to Mark Michaelis about his work on Essential C# 7 which digs into the new bits in the 7.x version of C# - which is cool, but so is the conversation around what happened at the Build event and how that is reflected in C#. Mark talks about the new language features in C#, even going into some things that should appear in version 8 to deal with modern programming problems. And then there's Core 3 - what will it mean to have WPF and WinFo...
Jun 05, 2018•1 hr 2 min
Azure is good - but tooling makes it great! While at Build in Seattle, Carl and Richard talked to Paul Yuknewicz and Andrew Hall about the latest tools available in Visual Studio for developers wanting to get the most out of Azure. The conversation starts out with a response to a listener about debugging services in Azure - the challenge of following an execution path through your software and the various service offerings of Azure that your application might depend on to understand where proble...
May 31, 2018•58 min
More news from Build - the release of Visual Studio for the Mac 7.5! Carl and Richard talk to Mikayla Hutchinson about the latest features coming for the former Xamarin product. The biggest news is support for Razor, JavaScript and TypeScript intellisense, which sounds simple, but involves a ton of changes and makes VS for Mac more than just that mobile development tool. There's plenty of improvements in the mobile dev space too, and the first steps to integrating with VSTS! Support this podcast...
May 29, 2018•43 min
Could there be life on other planets? Time for a Geek Out! Richard chats with Carl about Fermi's Paradox, Drake's Equation and all the latest science we've gathered around how common life is on other planetary bodies. This does lead to a discussion about what makes a planet a planet in the first place - that definition is changing and being heavily debated. And as for intelligent life... well, that's a whole other problem! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations...
May 24, 2018•1 hr
Desktop installation needs to get better! While at Build in Seattle, Carl and Richard talked to Andrew Clinick about MSIX, the next generation installation technology from the Windows team. MSIX is open source and available at GitHub, and works to make your desktop application installation experience a bit less painful. Andrew discusses the various approaches that Microsoft has taken over the years around installation and some of the unintended consequences that have come along - all that learni...
May 22, 2018•55 min
Tabs for Windows apps? While at Build in Seattle, Carl and Richard talked to legend Raymond Chen and Jason Watson about the upcoming Sets capabilities in Windows 10. The conversation dives into the virtual desktop, Windows 10 timeline and other tech to get you back to a productive state quickly, from one device to another. Jason and Raymond talk about how developers can add functionality to their applications to take advantage of Sets to further increase productivity. Windows continues to evolve...
May 17, 2018•51 min
.NET Core is fast, but does how you write code in .NET Core help with performance? Carl and Richard talk to Ben Watson about the 2nd Edition of his HIgh Performance .NET Code book. The original edition came out in 2014 when .NET Core was just beginning (ASync/Await were brand new too!) and so an update is welcome. Ben explains that there is no one right way to write high performing code, every implementation is on a case-by-case basis. You need to benchmark and instrument to understand where bot...
May 15, 2018•53 min
MFractor grows up! Carl and Richard talk to Matthew Robbins about the progress he's made over the past 18 months (since his last show) on MFractor - now an extension for Visual Studio for the Mac to make building mobile applications with Xamarin easier. Matt talks about improving the mobile development cycle - the time it takes from writing code on your PC to it running on your smartphone, and recognizing that it's not just about compile and transfer times. It's also image sizing and copying, ca...
May 10, 2018•53 min
Fresh from Build (actually recorded before Build) - a new version of .NET Core! Carl and Richard talk to Scott Hunter about the announcement of .NET Core 3. Scott leads off with a conversation around .NET Core 2.1, now a release candidate at Build. And then the big news, the next version of Core bringing love to the desktop side, at least for Windows. Versions of WinForms and WPF run against Core. It's a separate package because it's not cross-platform, but it certainly brings new Windows deskto...
May 08, 2018•57 min
Do constraints liberate? Carl and Richard talk to Mark Seemann about the very constraints that developers often argue against - pointing out how those constraints can actually make us more productive. Mark talks about memory management, such as garbage collection in .NET, while a constraint (you can't do what you want with memory) actually liberates you from thinking about memory. The same with static typing - decide on a type once, and stop worrying about it. The question is, are you surroundin...
May 03, 2018•58 min
Where do you store your objects? Carl and Richard talk to Kamran Ayub about the latest version of RavenDB. Kamran talks about his experiences implementing Raven in different projects all the way back to version 2 - and how much he appreciates that this latest version offers a ton more features and the kind of stability you need in a data storage tool. The comparisons to MongoDB are inevitable, and it's impressive how similar they are - but clearly RavenDB has a .NET spin! Of course, it's open so...
May 01, 2018•54 min
How do you build your web UI? Carl and Richard talk to Frank Krueger about his work on Ooui (pronounced whee), an open source project for implementing a Xamarin-forms like UI experience to the browser. The result is pretty amazing, including a web-based XAML editor that all runs in the browser... super fast! Frank talks about his experiences building code that runs with WebAssembly and the challenges of thinking through new UI experiences. The challenge is the variations in implementation - is X...
Apr 26, 2018•58 min
Blazor is getting some buzz, but is it really useful? Carl and Richard talk to Rocky Lhotka about his thoughts around how Blazor uses WebAssembly (WASM) to let C# run on the browser - and what that means for client-side development, both web-based and regular desktop client. Rocky talks about how WASM is an equal-opportunity feature for all sorts of languages, and covering the four big browsers: Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari. Could the future of enterprise apps be all in the browser? Between ...
Apr 24, 2018•56 min
What does it mean to have clean architecture? Carl and Richard talk to Steve Smith about his work on an e-book and template for clean architecture using ASP.NET Core. Steve describes the new tools that make life easier for following clean architectural principals as well as the separation of concerns, between business logic, infrastructure, and clients. The conversation also digs into Domain Driven Design, Test Driven Development and the ever popular Pain Driven Development. Great, common-sense ...
Apr 19, 2018•55 min
What's new with Xamarin? Carl and Richard talk to Laurent Bugnion, now a Microsoft Cloud Developer Advocate, about his latest experiences with the cross-platform mobile development tool. It's been two years since Xamarin joined Microsoft, and a lot has happened - and far more to come. Laurent talks about both .NET and XAML Standards, and the challenges of reconciling development approaches for an array of mobile devices, the PC and the web. The conversation also dives into the truth that there i...
Apr 17, 2018•55 min
Test Driven Development (TDD), good idea in theory, but in practice? Carl and Richard talk to John Callaway and Clayton Hunt about their success with TDD. At it's simplest level, TDD is about writing tests first, before coding. In practice, everything is more complicated than that. Writing testable code isn't as simple as it seems, and refactoring existing code to become testable can cause it to break - which is why you wanted tests in the first place. John and Clayton talk through their experie...
Apr 12, 2018•52 min
How do you do desktop deployment? Carl and Richard talk to Paul Betts about the open source project called Squirrel, which is all about making desktop deployment less painful. As Paul says, like ClickOnce, only doesn't suck! This leads to a discussion about the various installation tools out there and what they focus on. Paul talks about what makes Squirrel different - providing the tooling to make it easier for a developer to provide unobtrusive updating of applications - as in, not when they s...
Apr 10, 2018•47 min
How productive are you with Visual Studio? Carl and Richard chat with Kasey Uhlenhuth about her work making Visual Studio even more productive for developers. The conversation focuses on the huge array of features that Visual Studio has, to support all sorts of different styles of programming. Kasey talks about balancing the needs of developers - some want lots of support and hints from Visual Studio, and some want it to just get out of the way while they program. There are a ton of options, you...
Apr 05, 2018•44 min
Programming for the Cloud! Carl and Richard talk to Vishwas Lele about the Microsoft Business Application Platform, which organizes the huge suite of tools available in Azure along with PowerApps and PowerBI to create a great place to build applications that run on Windows, iOS and Android. Vishwas talks about moving up into a higher layer of coding using Logic Apps and Azure Flow to pull together the various sources of data that already exist in your organization, including Office, SharePoint, ...
Apr 03, 2018•50 min
Falcon Heavy flies! Now what? Time for a Geek Out! Richard talks to Carl about the amazing Falcon Heavy launch - what worked, what didn't and why did it take so darn long to fly? The discussion dives into how the plans for the Heavy evolved, affected by the evolution of the Falcon 9. The impact of the launch is interesting - is it a new phase of spaceflight for humanity? The Heavy just barely sneaks into the super heavy lift class, and it's flight has caused a bit of a kerfuffle - both Russia an...
Mar 29, 2018•1 hr 14 min
How do you do concurrency? Carl and Richard talk to Riccardo Terrell about his new book on concurrency in .NET. More than just ASync and AWait, there are still a ton of concurrency options available in .NET, you just need to know when and where to apply them. The conversation ranges over a bunch of different technologies, including a lot of discussion on functional programming as a whole, since it lends itself to concurrency far better. But you don't have to use F# to write functional code! Ricc...
Mar 27, 2018•49 min
Can Big Data actually hurt society? Carl and Richard talk to Cathy O'Neil about her book, Weapons of Math Destruction. Cathy has been deeply involved with machine learning and big data for decades and has a broad view of both the potential and dangers of the technology. The conversation dives into understanding how this technology amplifies bias and how that bias ultimately shapes behavior. The trick is to acknowledge that the bias exists - once you see it, it is possible to overcome its effects...
Mar 22, 2018•1 hr
