The pandemic is sending a lot of work to the cloud - are you ready to move? Carl and Richard talk to Mike Richter about his work helping companies move .NET applications into the cloud. Mike starts out with the hard truth, that moving your virtual machines into the cloud can get expensive. Better to take advantage of the Azure platform, starting with AppService. There's a lot you can do with existing software, and even more if you're willing to recompile. Check it out! Support this podcast at — ...
Oct 14, 2020•58 min
Can a development environment be online? Carl and Richard talk to Anthony van der Hoorn about GitHub Codespaces - the consolidation of a number of online development solutions from Microsoft including Visual Studio Online. Anthony talks about unifying the online dev environment for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code - recognizing that the two tools are very different! And there is the option to explore code directly in the browser as well. You have more choices than ever for writing code! Supp...
Oct 07, 2020•55 min
What happens when an open-source experiment becomes software people care about? Carl and Richard talk to Jamie Rees about his experiences creating Ombi - an open-source project that helps people managing Plex servers to handle requests from friends and family for more content. Jamie talks about creating Ombi as an experiment with NancyFX that soon evolved into something lots of folks needed and wanted. The conversation dives into the challenges of managing a popular open-source project, both fro...
Sep 30, 2020•51 min
Build better distributed apps with Dapr! Carl and Richard talk to Haishi Bai about his work on Dapr, the open-source framework for building microservices with an event-driven, portable runtime. Haishi talks about the challenges of building modern distributed apps, with elements running in the cloud, on PCs, mobile, and IoT devices. There's also a variety of languages, platforms, and patterns as well. Dapr sits in the middle, abstracting away specific services so that you can keep your app runnin...
Sep 22, 2020•50 min
Machine Learning has been around for years, what does it look like today? Carl and Richard chat with Zoiner Tejada about how he approaches machine learning today, starting with a focus on data. The bulk of the work for using machine learning is focused on sources, quality and bias in data. Zoiner talks about using data lakes to organize data simply, and be able to filter it for processing quickly. Often, it makes sense to duplicate data for processing efficiency! The conversation then dives into...
Sep 16, 2020•1 hr
What do you do when COVID-19 cancels your internship? Write an app! Carl and Richard talk to Theodora Tataru about her experience creating an application using Xamarin to help with tracker her college grades. Theodora talks about learning the tools, the libraries, and the various techniques to making a Xamarin app - including asking for help! College Diary is just starting to arrive in the app stores - and Theodora is starting her career as a developer! Support this podcast at — https://redcircl...
Sep 09, 2020•49 min
What are the Microsoft 365 APIs and what can you do with them? Carl and Richard chat with Glenn Block about his new role at Microsoft, working with Graph. Glenn talks about how Graph actually serves are a part of a larger "intelligent substrate" that covers all of Microsoft 365 and more. In the end, the substrate is a set of APIs that are used by Microsoft product teams and third-party developers alike. More to come! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations...
Sep 02, 2020•55 min
F# turns five - not five years old (it's more than ten years old!) - but version five! Carl and Richard talk to Phillip Carter from the F# team about what's coming in F# 5. Phillip talks about the past few years of F# being focused on getting fully onboard with .NET Core - and now is the time to go further. The conversation dives into adding capabilities to interactive mode of F# including working easily in Jupyter Notebooks. More ability to manipulate data means more power for all of us, check ...
Aug 20, 2020•58 min
Sure you can build .NET apps on Azure - but what about Amazon AWS? Carl and Richard talk to Robb Schiefer about his work building .NET Apps on AWS. Robb digs into the various reasons you might use AWS, while admitting that the two clouds are pretty comparable. But like Azure, AWS has good integration into Visual Studio, supports lots of versions of .NET and offers other cloud-based services that you need. AWS is an excellent option for .NET apps! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/n...
Aug 19, 2020•54 min
It's Show 1700! For a bit of fun, Carl and Richard invited the six most frequent guests on .NET Rocks over the past eighteen years - Michele Bustamante, Rocky Lhotka, Billy Hollis, Kathleen Dollard, Tim Huckaby, and Phil Haack. The conversation digs into memorable moments on the show for each of the guests, plus lots of commentary about making shows, the state of the industry, and favorite funny (if maybe a bit off-color) story. From the first show in August of 2002 to now... thanks for being wi...
Aug 11, 2020•1 hr 1 min
What is the right way to secure your applications? Carl and Richard talk to Christos Matskas and John Patrick Dandison about the various security offerings made by Microsoft for application developers. Christos and JD talk about Azure Active Directory B2C and the upcoming Microsoft Identity Web libraries on GitHub. The conversation explores reasoning for rolling your own security - which is almost never the right solution. Let the existing tools make your life easier when it comes to recovering ...
Aug 06, 2020•56 min
Got Silverlight apps? Carl and Richard talk to Giovanni Albani about the OpenSilver project - building an open-source version of Silverlight that runs without a plugin, using WebAssembly. Giovanni talks about companies he has communicate with that have Silverlight apps with hundreds of thousands of lines of code - not a simple thing to rewrite. The goal of OpenSilver is to let you migrate those applications. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations...
Jul 29, 2020•1 hr
Grenades with love! Carl and Richard talk to Sebastien Lambla about the state of the .NET open source ecosystem today, the role that Microsoft plays in it, and what the .NET Foundation could do in the future! Seb talks about the challenges of making open source projects in the .NET ecosystem when Microsoft gets involved - and how tough it is to stay involved when a megacorporation goes a different way. Is it damaging the ecosystem? The conversation turns to the value of diversity and the potenti...
Jul 22, 2020•58 min
What's coming in C# 9? Carl and Richard talk to the Mads Torgersen, the leader of the C# team, about the rapidly approaching C# 9. Mads explains that with .NET 5 coming in the fall, he felt there should be a new version of C# as well - so in less than a year since C# 8, they're going to have another version! That being said, the feature set of C# 9 is not as aggressive as it was in C# 8, with a focus on making immutable coding easier. And the whole development process is being done in public, on...
Jul 16, 2020•58 min
Ready to simplify and organize your MVC app? Carl and Richard talk to Steve Smith about his open-source project called ASP.NET Core API Endpoints. Steve digs into the problems around the controller part of MVC - as a project gets bigger, it gets harder to manage all of the elements associated with a controller. His Endpoints library cleans up this issue, to transform the MVC pattern into the Request-EndPoint-Response pattern, with simpler code and an easy project to manage. Check it out! Support...
Jul 08, 2020•51 min
How do you do static testing in your applications? Carl and Richard talk to Patrick Smacchia of nDepend - one of the original testing products for .NET, stretching back to the very beginning! Patrick talks about how nDepend has grown over the years to provide a variety of tools for helping you to visualize the quality of your code, and to detect code smells - that is, aspects of code that may indicate a problem. The conversation dives into building out rules in projects to do static evaluation a...
Jul 02, 2020•57 min
Are there alternative versions of VB.NET? Soon! Carl and Richard talk to Marc Hoffman of RemObjects Software about Elements, their cross-platform compiler for Oxygene (Object Pascal), C#, Java, Swift, Go and soon, VB.NET. Marc discusses the relationship between platforms and languages and the idea that, at least for this array of languages, they can all work together. The conversation dives into why you might want to take an existing Java app, compile it in Elements, and then build C# components...
Jun 25, 2020•53 min
Ready to go to Maui? Carl and Richard talk to Scott Hunter about the .NET Multi-Platform App UI or MAUI for short. Scott talks about how the next versions of .NET are focused on unifying the elements that go into .NET to make One .NET. And that includes the UI stacks - including Xamarin! The evolution of Xamarin into .NET means that all UI stacks will be treated equally. And that leads to the .NET Multi-Platform App UI, letting you make a single project that covers Windows, OS/X, iOS and Android...
Jun 17, 2020•57 min
Is VB.NET dead? Kathleen Dollard says No! Carl and Richard talk to Kathleen about a recent blog post from Microsoft about VB.NET not coming to .NET 5. Kathleen talks through the decision-making process that led to the blog post - not the death of VB.NET, but keeping VB.NET stable while C# is going through such significant changes. No, VB.NET is not going into maintenance, the same team is continuing to work on it - it's just going in a different direction from C#! Support this podcast at — https...
Jun 10, 2020•55 min
How do you test your Blazor app? Carl and Richard talk to Egil Hansen about bUnit, an open-source testing framework designed to work with Blazor - both the server-side Razor components and the WebAssembly client. Egil talks about building bUnit to allow for robust testing, that is, tolerant to the normal changes that come to an application without breaking all the tests. The conversation also turns to growing the bUnit project with more contributors, a wider set of features, and perhaps being pa...
Jun 03, 2020•58 min
What's your cross-platform development solution? Carl and Richard talk to Kenzie Whalen about the Uno Platform, where you write C# and XAML for Windows and are able to deploy via Xamarin to iOS and Android... and to browsers via WebAssembly also! The conversation digs into how UWP is evolving, and the approaches you can take to keep your codebase as common as possible between all the platforms. But there are always variations from platform-to-platform. Kenzie also talks about how some of the new...
May 28, 2020•51 min
How are shared APIs evolving in the new decade? From the online version of NDC Porto, Carl and Richard chatted with panelists Shawn Wildermuth, Irina Scurtu, and Heather Downing about the right things to do around APIs. Are you just exposing your database to the internet through APIs? Or do you have specific use cases? What about REST vs GraphQL? How about versioning APIS - can you ever turn the old versions off? Lots of great thoughts about the modern API! Support this podcast at — https://redc...
May 20, 2020•51 min
Time for some chocolatey goodness! After seven years, Rob Reynolds is back chatting with Carl and Richard about the Windows application package manager that you want to use! Since the last show in 2013, Chocolatey has grown up, become a commercial product with a great open source free version. And there's a GUI - you can help your non-technical friends and family automate application installation and updates! But more typically, you use Chocolatey to build out your development environments in an...
May 13, 2020•52 min
Ready for a challenge? Carl and Richard talk to Heather Wilde about her work with the Air Force on innovation projects called AFWerx. Heather talks about the different kinds of projects that the Air Force is interested in, and how anyone (who is an ally of the US) can submit projects. And if your project is successful, you can build some business around it, working with the Air Force! Check out the links in the show notes for more information. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-...
May 07, 2020•49 min
Are there Silver Bullets in Development? Carl and Richard chat with Mark Seemann about the 1986 Fred Brooks essay No Silver Bullet. Mark argues that there are silver bullets - but do we notice them? The conversation dives into technology like the Internet (maybe you've heard of it?) changing the way we do software development: Providing rapid access to resources, answering your questions, and simplifying deployment. Mark also talks about automated testing to shorten cycle times, how modern distr...
Apr 29, 2020•59 min
Jon Skeet is the first show recorded since the COVID-19 pandemic was declared - so its pretty far ranging! Carl and Richard discuss Carl's recovery from the virus, and then chat with Jon about what life is like for him in this new world. The conversation also digs into the Better Know a Framework around VB.NET going into maintenance, challenges with nodatime and versioning and more! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations...
Apr 23, 2020•1 hr 2 min
What's up with CSLA? Carl and Richard talk to Rocky Lhotka about his ubiquitous framework for managing business rules and user interfaces. Rocky talks about the latest version with support for Blazor, along with many other popular UI solutions including Web Forms, WPF even Silverlight. Rocky talks about the challenges of taking care of an open-source project for so many years, including some issues around NuGet. The conversation also dives into the power of Blazor and how CSLA makes it even easi...
Apr 15, 2020•54 min
Did you know there is a separate Azure for government? Carl and Richard talk to Vishwas Lele about his work with Azure Government, specifically the version for the US Government. Vishwas explains that there are a number of data centers around the world set up as sovereign data centers for the local government. They comply with various government-related security standards and have a restricted set of features. They cost more too! But if you want to do business with certain governments, working w...
Apr 09, 2020•49 min
Still using jQuery? Chris Love asks why! Carl and Richard chat with Chris Love about modern web development; and the fact that what jQuery does today is largely built into JavaScript. Chris talks about the state of JavaScript back in 2006 when jQuery first came along and how the move to HTML 5 and more mature versions of JavaScript have moved the bar far enough that you can let it go. So why is adoption still growing? Often jQuery and other libraries are included by reflex, not thought. Time to ...
Mar 31, 2020•1 hr 2 min
What are GitHub Actions, and why should you care? Carl and Richard talk to Enrico Campidoglio about how GitHub evolves under Microsoft and the addition of GitHub Actions to expand CI/CD capabilities directly in GitHub. Enrico talks about how typically build services of continuous integration with GitHub have to be set up elsewhere - but GitHub Actions solves that, and adds some new capabilities. The discussion turns to building Docker containers as part of GitHub Actions and the power that repre...
Mar 26, 2020•1 hr 2 min