How do you modernize a .NET application? While at NDC Porto, Carl and Richard talked to Mark Rendle about his work on Visual Recode, a tool for migrating WCF apps to gRPC, and dug into the broader story of what a modern .NET application looks like. Mark talks about why you would bother to modernize at all - because the standard framework isn't going anywhere. But if you want to take advantage of the latest features of .NET and the performance available to you with .NET 6 and the cloud, moderniza...
May 24, 2022•58 min
What can web components do for you? Carl and Richard talk to Jemima Abu about her work with web components. Jemima talks about the projects she is currently working on, and how UI web components make it easier to build good-looking front ends quickly. The discussion digs into how web components stay agnostic of different web frameworks - although often there are solutions within the framework for many component problems. If you're a fan of vanilla JavaScript, web components can be a big boost to...
May 17, 2022•52 min
How do you know your open source is secure? Carl and Richard talk to Jillian Ratliff about security practices on your own code, and the open-source code you depend on. Jillian talks about some of the high-profile security problems that have happened recently in the open-source world including log4j. The conversation turns to practices for making your applications secure with open-source including security testing as part of your CI/CD pipeline, periodic penetration testing, and more! Support thi...
May 09, 2022•49 min
How are extensions in Visual Studio changing? Carl and Richard talk to the extension master himself, Mads Kristensen. With over 150 extensions in the Marketplace, Mads has a lot of experience building tooling that can streamline your Studio experience. The conversation digs into why an extension makes sense rather than being built into Studio. Although in the case of the Markdown Editor, that does happen! Mads also as the VSIX Community space if you want to get into building your extensions, wit...
May 02, 2022•59 min
When should you pivot your startup? Carl and Richard talk to Phil Haack about his experiences with Abbot - the chatbot designed to work within Slack. Phil talks about starting with Abbot focused on ChatOps, where Abbot would help with automation around the deployment of applications. And while there were some customers, it wasn't enough. The pivot was to customer support that also depends on tools like Slack. The conversation digs into focusing on understanding where customers have challenges an...
Apr 21, 2022•58 min
How do you do Infrastructure-as-Code? Carl and Richard talk to Chris Klug about his experiences with different IaC approaches. Christ talks about using HashiCorp's Terraform - one of the original IaC solutions, with a huge number of providers to work with all sorts of platforms - but do they keep up with the latest? Microsoft has released Bicep as a domain-specific language over Azure Resource Manager, but of course, it's only for Azure. And then there's Pulumi, letting you create IaC in C# - as...
Apr 15, 2022•58 min
How do you make web apps into desktop apps? Carl and Richard talk to Otto Dobretsberger about Photino, a fork from Steve Sanderson's WebWindow project that will compile your web application into a cross-platform desktop application for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Otto talks about keeping Photino extremely lightweight, many times smaller than other desktop framework approaches. The typical approach is using the SPA of your choice - Angular, Vue, or React, and then compiling it into the desktop for...
Apr 12, 2022•47 min
How do you debug asynchronous code? Carl and Richard talk to Isadora Rodopoulos about her debugging asynchronous code series of videos and the tools available today to help with debugging. Different people approach debugging in different ways - there's no one way to solve any given problem. But Isadora digs into the critical challenges of asynchronous code, not being sure of the order of execution, managing when messages get lost and detecting the transient problems that come from async code! Su...
Apr 05, 2022•54 min
What's an Azure Static Web App, and why do you want one? Carl and Richard talk to Stacy Cashmore about Azure Static Web Apps, Microsoft's implementation of static web apps. Stacy talks about the bare essentials of making a web page - serving up some HTML. How much back-end processing do you really need? The static web app approach serves a page as a static file - and while that file may make calls to APIs, it doesn't require AppService itself. The result is fast, low-cost web apps! Support this ...
Mar 29, 2022•52 min
Are you moving apps to the cloud? Carl and Richard talk to Richard Reukema about his experience shifting workloads into the cloud. Richard talks about getting beyond virtual machines in the cloud and utilizing the platform services that allow your application to scale up and out. The conversation dives into designing software independent of the implementation, even the cloud provider! This separation between design and implementation, combined with modern practices of deployment and testing auto...
Mar 21, 2022•55 min
How do you build cross-platform UI? Carl and Richard talk to Dan Walmsley about Avalonia, a lightweight, cross-platform UI using XAML and C#. Dan talks about supporting an array of Linux GUIs, Windows, macOS, WebAssembly, Raspberry PI, iOS, and Android! Avalonia comes from the Linux and Mono world and now runs with .NET 6 - you should check it out! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations
Mar 17, 2022•45 min
Flutter comes to Windows! Carl and Richard talk to Chris Sells about the latest incarnation of Flutter which now has desktop support for Windows. Flutter has been around for a few years helping to build mobile apps in iOS and Android with a unified codebase. But now it also supports deployment as a web app, and as a Windows app, and soon, MacOS and Linux. Chris talks about how Flutter provides for hardware abstraction that has allowed the ecosystem to support even more platforms, and build libra...
Mar 07, 2022•53 min
Visual Studio turns 25! Carl and Richard talk to Julia Liuson, who has been working on Visual Studio since the beginning about her experiences building and leading the product. Julia talks about how Visual Studio got started, its evolution into .NET, with some great stories along the way. There's also Studio for the Mac and Visual Studio Code to talk about as well - all with different origin stories! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations...
Feb 28, 2022•49 min
Another in the series of twenty years of .NET, this one with Scott Guthrie! Carl and Richard talk to Scott about the early days of ASP.NET, the recruiting of the ninja army of Scott Hanselman, Rob Conery, Phil Haack (and others), and much more! Scott has been part of .NET from the beginning and talks about bringing the ASP.NET web team with him when he joined the Azure group. The conversation digs into how to keep a 20-year-old product relevant, which does mean an occasional reinvention! Support...
Feb 21, 2022•1 hr
.NET is twenty years old - how has it changed? Carl and Richard talk with Mark Miller about how he moved from Delphi to .NET, and how .NET has continued to be relevant through the years. The conversation also digs into those pivotal moments of .NET and how it shaped the product into the open-source, cross-platform product of today! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations
Feb 15, 2022•1 hr 13 min
C# is twenty years old! Carl and Richard chat with Anders Hejlsberg about how C# has evolved, and how it's continuing into the future. Anders digs into the origins of C# as the C-like Object-Oriented Langage aka COOL that he proposed when Microsoft could no longer build its own version of Java. The conversation gets into how all programming languages 'build on the shoulders of giants' and use features of languages past, with their own twists and innovations. Fun conversation with the father of C...
Feb 08, 2022•1 hr 1 min
Twenty years of .NET! Carl and Richard talk to Miguel de Icaza about his experiences working with .NET, going all the way back to 2001 with the announcement of the Mono Project. Miguel talks about those early days of Mono, creating MonoTouch to make C# run on iOS, Xamarin, and more! The conversation also dives into the evolution of open source, and the impact that tech companies have on open source projects, and what the future might hold for open source maintainers. Support this podcast at — ht...
Feb 01, 2022•1 hr 4 min
How do you build microservices? Carl and Richard talk to the authors of Pro Microservices in .NET 6 - Sean Whitesell, Rob Richardson, and Matthew Groves. The conversation digs into how microservices have evolved, the role of containers, and how the different tools that go together to make a successful microservices architecture. Then there's a whole discussion on reliability, security, scalability, and testing - there are a lot of things that go into making professional microservices! Support th...
Jan 25, 2022•55 min
What's your UX strategy? Carl and Richard talk to Brian Lagunas about his work on Prism, the UX framework that works WPF, Xamarin, and now the Uno Platform to build good-looking, consistent UX experiences. Brian talks about the challenges around simplifying the UX experience enough to make it easy to do the right thing, while still having enough functionality to not limit what your applications can do. The conversation also dives into web UX challenges and some of the tools that Brian has been w...
Jan 17, 2022•54 min
What's the right development stack for a startup? Carl and Richard talk to Oleg Fridman about his latest startup called Verb Data and the challenges of building a startup with the .NET stack. Oleg talks about how the investors, and sometimes the developers, have concerns around .NET - but not the customers. .NET is well known for being enterprise-class and scalable - but it's not as well known for being cross-platform, open-source, and cloud friendly. The conversation dives into where .NET makes...
Jan 12, 2022•1 hr
Geek Out Number Three - Energy! Richard chats with Carl about the state of power generation in the world today - the growth of wind (offshore wind is growing!) and solar, why geothermal isn't taking off, and then a long conversation about small modular nuclear power. Is SMR really going to be a thing? 2021 also had a lot of news around fusion - much of it just noise, but there have been some important developments that might actually mean fusion is getting closer! The energy Geek Out wraps up wi...
Jan 10, 2022•1 hr 29 min
Ready to migrate from ASP.NET Web Forms? Carl and Richard talk to Veli Pehlivanov about his work helping organizations modernize their ASP.NET Web Forms applications. Veli talks about finding an appropriate migration strategy for the application, often keeping the existing app in operation while modernization efforts happen piece by piece. The challenging part in that scenario is aspects like security - can you share authentication from the older app with the newer? Sometimes it's necessary to b...
Jan 04, 2022•1 hr 1 min
Part Two of the Geek Outs - all about the Pandemic. The conversation starts out talking about the Omicron variant and how the pandemic has changed since the 2020 Geek Out. The biggest thing that has happened is having 3.8 billion people vaccinated - not quite half the population, and not enough for herd immunity yet. But progress is being made, and there's more to come. Richard also dives into the power of the innovation that mRNA vaccines represent - a new tool for humanity to fight all sorts o...
Jan 03, 2022•1 hr 2 min
It's the end of the year and time for a Geek Out - actually, three! With so much geeky goodness to explore, this is the first of three Geek Outs to come out in rapid succession, starting with SPACE! Richard talks about how amazing 2021 was for spaceflight - with a record-setting number of space flights from China and the US. China had a huge year in space, including landing a rover on the Moon and launching a space station. Then there are all the amazing science missions including DART, Persever...
Dec 28, 2021•1 hr 25 min
.NET 6 was huge for Blazor - what's next? Carl and Richard talk to Daniel Roth about how Blazor continues to evolve as a C#-centric way to build web applications. Daniel talks about a bunch of the key features from .NET 6, including smaller runtime, Hot Reload, and rending components from JavaScript. The conversation also digs into the evolution of Blazor Fluent UI and MAUI - which also leads to the futures conversation, taking advantage of multithreading, and other great features you can see in...
Dec 22, 2021•1 hr
What is DAPR, and why do you want it? Carl and Richard talk to Paul Yuknewicz about how DAPR helps you build better microservices by dealing with all the plumbing. We all need messaging, security, logging, and other services to make microservices work - and there are a ton of SDKs and libraries out there to help. DAPR helps glue all those pieces together with a nice layer of abstraction to make it easier for your tool selections to work! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/...
Dec 14, 2021•57 min
OpenSilver reaches V1! Carl and Richard talk to Giovanni Albani about OpenSilver - an open-source, plug-in-free implementation of Silverlight. Giovanni talks about how the client-side of OpenSilver is different from Silverlight, using Web Assembly to eliminate the need for the plug-in. But the developer SDK side is as close to identical as possible. The conversation explores going beyond compatibility with Silverlight 5 from 2011 to more modern capabilities, including the latest versions of .NET...
Dec 07, 2021•49 min
How do you start thinking outside the box? Carl and Richard chat with Mark Miller about his approach to creative problem-solving - not just solving the problem, but making it appear like there's no problem at all! Mark talks about driving toward optimal solutions, with some examples from his work in CodeRush. You don't always have the perfect tools to do everything you want, which is where improvisation comes in. The conversation also digs into getting beyond failure, being willing to walk away ...
Nov 30, 2021•52 min
How do you test .NET applications written for different browsers, different servers, and different platforms? Carl and Richard talk to Kendra Havens about the recent release of .NET 6, Visual Studio 2022, and all the great tools to make testing and debugging cross-platform .NET applications easier. Kendra digs into tools like Test Explorer, the Remote Debugger, and Hot Reload - all tooling to make your testing life easier, no matter where your code is running! Support this podcast at — https://r...
Nov 23, 2021•49 min
Is desktop development still relevant? Billy Hollis says yes! Carl and Richard talk to Billy about his work building desktop apps, primarily with XAML. Billy talks about how desktop development has evolved even though a lot of folks have steered clear of it for years, doing all development with web clients. What is better with a traditional desktop client? The conversation also swings to how users interact with software, how developers learn, and how we could all stand to take a step back, decre...
Nov 15, 2021•1 hr