How do you build out your cloud infrastructure? Carl and Richard talk to Luke Hoban about Pulumi, a start-up making open source software that helps you take Infrastructure-as-Code to the next level - not just simple scripts, but real programming languages. Luke talks about getting away from the cut-and-paste effects of Infrastructure-as-Code into building classes with enough sophistication that you're not creating technical debt each time you build a new cloud resource. With support for multiple...
Nov 08, 2018•47 min
Web performance is still important - what are you doing to keep your sites fast? Carl and Richard talk to Benjamin Howarth about his current approach to web site performance - with a focus on dealing with older smartphones and lower bandwidth. The conversation runs through a huge gamut of tools that help you understand what your customer experiences when accessing your website, and where to focus to make improvements. Not everyone has 4G connections and top-of-the-line phones - be kind to your u...
Nov 06, 2018•57 min
Functions are ephemeral and stateless - right? What if they weren't? Carl and Richard talk to Maxime Rouiller about durable functions in Azure. Maxime dives into the patterns that durable functions provide, starting with the chaining pattern, where you can declare a series (or chain) of function calls that only start when the previous function completes. And then onto the fan-out pattern that allows for an orchestrator to launch any number of simultaneous functions and then collect their results...
Nov 01, 2018•48 min
Is .NET ready for the Internet of Things? Carl and Richard talk to Bryan Costanich about the current state of IoT and how his startup Wilderness Labs is building next-generation hardware that runs .NET! Bryan talks about how microcontrollers have gotten much more powerful today, but the programming stacks are still back in the 80s. The expectations of customers today is cloud integration, auto-updating and mobile apps - which is expensive and time-consuming to write in C++! Enter Meadow, program...
Oct 30, 2018•53 min
Ready for a different database? Carl and Richard talk to Craig Kerstiens about his work with PostgreSQL. The conversation starts out with a little bit of the history of PostgreSQL being one of the original open source projects - and how it has evolved over the years. Today there is great support for Postgres in .NET, and in Azure as well! Craig is the editor of the Postgres Weekly newsletter, so if you're keen to get engaged with the Postgres community, sign up today! Support this podcast at — h...
Oct 25, 2018•48 min
Call it an impromptu Geek Out! While at NDC Sydney, Carl and Richard talked to Agustinus Nalwan about his work with artificial intelligence technology in his company. This leads to a larger conversation about the risks around AI and the idea that we may be approaching the Singularity - which according to Gus is where technology continues to teach itself. Richard chimes in on the debate around the Singularity from Ray Kurtzweil, exploring how humans could integrate with technology and what that w...
Oct 23, 2018•55 min
Ready for some functional thinking? While at NDC in Sydney, Carl and Richard chatted with Daniel Chambers about his experiences in functional programming, starting with F# and moving to Haskell. Daniel talks about how F# serves as the gateway drug for functional programming, living within Visual Studio and still interoperating nicely with the object-oriented world. But sometimes you want pure functional, and Haskell can help you - communicating with it via web service models, you write purely fu...
Oct 18, 2018•56 min
What does it take to make an application resilient to exploits? Caring about more than just the code you wrote! While at NDC in Sydney, Carl and Richard talked to Nina Juliadotter about securing all the code in your application - including the open source libraries that your application takes dependencies on. Nina talks about building tests into your CI/CD pipeline to evaluate all the libraries in your project to figure out what is in your application and what the current versions are. Do you ke...
Oct 16, 2018•47 min
What can PowerBI do for you? While at NDC in Sydney, Carl and Richard talked to Peter Myers about Microsoft's modern data analytics tool. The conversation starts out exploring the history of data analytics at Microsoft and how it has landed at PowerBI. Peter talks about how PowerBI is both a Software-as-a-Service tool and Platform-as-a-Service component. You can embed PowerBI in your applications to do dashboards and dynamic reporting. It consumes virtually any data source and has great programm...
Oct 11, 2018•54 min
Start programming quantum today! While at NDC in Sydney, Carl and Richard talked with John Azariah about Q# and the Quantum Development Kit that he has helped create. The conversation starts out with a refresher on quantum computing in general, including exploring a number of the myths and fallacies - John brings up the really important problems that quantum can tackle, including (no kidding!) world hunger and climate change. John dives into what Q# is all about, being able to abstract away from...
Oct 09, 2018•1 hr 1 min
How do you read other people's code? While at NDC Sydney, Carl and Richard talked to Patricia Aas about the fine art of studying code you haven't written - and even more challenging, understanding it! Code doesn't read like a novel, there really is no beginning or end, it's always an exploration. The conversation also turns to being respectful of existing code, recognizing that it is as good as it could be at the time and that there are always ways to make it better. And when you're writing code...
Oct 04, 2018•55 min
You need a bot for that! While at NDC in Sydney, Carl and Richard talked to Adam Stephensen about his experiences building bots. The bot craze has died down a bit these days, but that means that more serious work is being done. Adam talks about what it takes to build a good bot, looking beyond the FaqBot and into more context-sensitive and service-oriented bots. In the end, a bot is just another front-end over your well-organized services layer that can handle web and mobile front-end services a...
Oct 02, 2018•46 min
Can you build a neural net from scratch? While at NDC in Sydney, Carl and Richard talked to Joe Albahari about using LINQPad to create neural nets from scratch. LINQPad is an interactive development environment for .NET - originally focused on helping you build LINQ expressions. But as Joe explains, it can be used for all sorts of interactive coding experiences - including learning to build neural networks. Joe talks through the fundamentals of neural nets and what it's like to build neural nets...
Sep 27, 2018•48 min
SignalR is updated! Carl and Richard talk to Microsoft Cloud Developer Advocate Anthony Chu about the latest updates to SignalR - including a version of SignalR for .NET Core! Anthony talks about how SignalR has evolved since the first versions in 2011, today there is still the Standard Framework edition as well as the new .NET Core edition. And then there's also the Azure backend! You can run the back end in Azure with a free tier, and there's a paid tier as the scale gets larger. Anthony also ...
Sep 25, 2018•49 min
How do you test a single page application? Carl and Richard talk to Dan Wahlin about cypress.io, Dan's favorite new open source library for testing anything in the browser, including SPAs like Angular, React and Vue. The conversation dives into the various challenges around testing for web apps, trying to get beyond unit testing and into more functional testing that will let you know if you broke the UI. Dan talks about taking over existing projects that have chunks of code that everyone fears -...
Sep 20, 2018•1 hr 2 min
Time to rub a little DevOps on it! Carl and Richard talk to Donovan Brown about the state of DevOps at Microsoft - including some important changes! The conversation starts out talking about the latest tooling making it easier than ever to get a great automated pipeline of continuous delivery. But that's not enough, there's a cultural shift that has to happen also. Donovan talks about how IT folks can resist the changes that come with rapid deployment, and Richard argues back about how IT roles ...
Sep 18, 2018•1 hr 4 min
The Internet of Things keeps evolving! Carl and Richard talk to Suz Hinton about her on-going work in the IoT space, including joining Microsoft! It's been five years since Suz created the MeowShoes, and the combination of Moore's Law and the Cloud has made IoT more powerful and less expensive at the same time. Suz talks about coding in JavaScript via NodeJS to deploy code to all sorts of devices, along the way mentioning that operating systems just don't matter much, these days you can program ...
Sep 13, 2018•54 min
What's an Intelligent Edge? Carl and Richard talk to Microsoft EVP and CTO Kevin Scott about his work in software with Google, LinkedIn and Microsoft - and what he focuses on today. Kevin talks about the resurgence of interest in .NET and C#, and the expansion of .NET across all sorts of development areas including Internet of Things. This leads to a conversation around Intelligent Edge, recognizing that there is enough compute power in even the smallest of devices that they can do analysis of d...
Sep 11, 2018•51 min
How do you protect the source code you ship in your applications? Carl and Richard talk to Gabriel Torok, who has led PreEmptive Software for years and has provided code obsfuscation for .NET since the very beginning - for free! Today it's not enough to conceal your code, as Gabe says, it's about tamper-proofing. Not just to keep your code from being stolen, but to stop hackers from stealing data and exploiting your applications. With GDPR and other regulations, your responsibilities to protect ...
Sep 06, 2018•52 min
The Redux Dance Craze is on! Carl and Richard talk to Ward Bell about how Redux has becoming a key player in state management for UX stacks in modern Single Page Application development. Although Redux was originally a library to support the React component model, today there are implementations of Redux for almost any Javascript UI solution - including Angular! Ward talks about how Redux and reactive architecture makes a cleaner, tidier and more maintainable UI solution. And lots of great side ...
Sep 04, 2018•55 min
Migrating .NET applications to .NET Core? The Windows Compatibility Pack can help! Carl and Richard talk to Immo Landwerth about the Windows Compatibility Pack, which is a NuGet package of NuGet packages to fill in over 20,000 APIs that aren't part of .NET Core. The goal, as Immo explains, is to make it easier for developers to deal with migration, by having more parts of the framework included. But you likely don't need them all, so breaking them down into separate packages makes them easy to r...
Aug 30, 2018•48 min
What the heck is Twitch, and why would you want to code on it? Carl and Richard talk to Jeff Fritz about his experiences building a TwitchTV livestream for coding with .NET. What started as an experiment has grown to thousands of viewers and streams that happen several times a week. Jeff talks about the power of reaching new audiences and how the digressions during streams turn into the most important bits. Is live stream coding a good way to learn? How does it compare to other techniques? And j...
Aug 28, 2018•53 min
How should developers get started with Azure? Carl and Richard talk to Adam Cogan about his nine knights of Azure - in order, a set of services in Azure that developers should start with. Right off the bat, Adam suggests staying clear of the fancy cloud techs like containers and serverless. Start simple with Azure Web Apps, then start working on continuous integration and deployment. There are a ton of moving parts in Azure, and Adam has a great plan for getting your application and your skills ...
Aug 23, 2018•1 hr 4 min
Xamarin keeps evolving - are you using the latest? Carl and Richard talk to James Montemagno about his on-going work making life easier for Xamarin developers. The conversation starts out referencing a comment from a listener about the code-compile-deploy time and what it takes to get going faster. James discusses the work Xamarin has done working with the different emulators out there to make things go faster and work in more configurations. And then it's on to Xamarin Essentials - combining al...
Aug 21, 2018•58 min
Can Artificial Intelligence help protect the Earth? Jennifer Marsman says yes! Carl and Richard talk to Jennifer about her new role working with Microsoft Research on implementing machine learning systems to support agriculture, environmental protection, biodiversity and more. Some of the projects originate within Microsoft, but there are a number of external projects supported by the team with Azure credits and funding. AI for good! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/dona...
Aug 16, 2018•57 min
How are applications being built for Hololens? While on the Modern Web Tour in Munich, Richard chatted with Jimmy Engstrom about his work building software for Hololens. The conversation starts out with the frustration over the lack of new hardware on the Hololens front - but with hope for something new soon! Jimmy runs down a variety of different programming methods for Hololens, the most popular of which is Unity - and not just for writing games! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com...
Aug 14, 2018•48 min
Back at the beginning of WPF, before Silverlight, there was MVVM Light. While on the Modern Web Tour in Zurich, Richard sat down with Laurent Bugnion to talk about his work creating the open source toolkit that helped developers build cross-platform applications using the Model View View-Model pattern. Laurent's story crosses much of the story of XAML itself, from WPF to Silverlight to Windows Phone and Xamarin Forms! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations...
Aug 09, 2018•1 hr
Ready to add UX to your skills? While in Berlin at the Telerik Modern Web Tour, Richard interviews Jessica Engstrom on how developers can add UX skills to their repertoire. Sure, it would be nice to have a dedicated UX person, but that's not always an option. So what do you need to know to get started? Jessica talks about the Tenets and Traps card deck that lists a variety of key tenets and the traps that you can fall into when it comes to making great UX experiences. Lots of great thinking! Sup...
Aug 07, 2018•54 min
So many ways to build mobile apps - what works best for you? Carl and Richard talk to Matt Netkow about the past, present and future of PhoneGap and how the Progressive Web App is playing in the mobile dev world. Matt talks about the many JavaScript-based solutions for mobile cross-platform development including PhoneGap, Cordova, NativeScript and Ionic. But with Progressive Web Apps being supported by browsers on mobile devices, could you just be writing native Javascript for your web app? Lots...
Aug 02, 2018•56 min
It's 2018, do you know where your C++ is? Carl and Richard talk to Kate Gregory about the resurgence she sees in C++ - but why? Kate talks about a number of factors, including the fact that C++ itself has evolved, the latest standard is from 2017 and there are plans for a 2020 edition! Anywhere that performance and resources are at a premium, C++ is there - you see it in embedded systems, all kinds of drivers and production code that cares how fast things go. There are lots of new developers on ...
Jul 31, 2018•59 min
