How do you understand the quality of your code? Carl and Richard talk to Richard Gross about his open-source tool called CodeCharta. Richard talks about various ways you can use CodeCharta to understand your codebase - whether it is complexity, number of changes, or number of coders involved - there are many visualization opportunities. This leads to a discussion about what problematic code actually is. Sometimes, too many people work in the same place, and sometimes, there is only one. Some com...
Dec 05, 2024•55 min
How are Azure Static Websites evolving? Carl and Richard talk to Stacy Cashmore about her work with Azure Static Websites, including an update to her book, which is coming soon! Stacy talks about adapting to the latest version of .NET, taking advantage of some of the new features in Blazor, and new Azure Static Website capabilities, including the new Data API Builder. The conversation also explores some of the gotchas, like challenges with SEO and dealing with authentication and authorization st...
Nov 27, 2024•1 hr
Let's talk about .NET 9 with one of the platform's leaders! Carl and Richard talk to Glenn Condron about his experiences building .NET 9. Glenn talks about the usual improvements in every version of .NET, including performance, security, and stability. But the new stuff is where the excitement is, starting with Aspire. The conversation digs deeper into the origin story of Aspire and what the team sees as the future of building cloud-native applications with .NET. Then, a dive into all things AI ...
Nov 21, 2024•1 hr 6 min
Ready for more Rockstar? Carl and Richard chat with Dylan Beattie about the programming language known as Rockstar. Dylan talks about a joke that got wildly out of hand - back when recruiters were all about rockstar developers, why shouldn't there be a programming language? And then it happened - a language where the code looks (and sounds) like glam rock lyrics! And now there's a new version coming - more rocking to be done!
Nov 14, 2024•1 hr 3 min
How do you balance the coupling in your application? Carl and Richard talk to Vlad Khononov about his book on Balancing Coupling in Software Design. Vlad talks about three aspects of coupling - information, distance, and volatility. When these aspects are out of balance, such as a pair of services that are distant from each other but highly dependent and need lots of information, development becomes difficult. Where information is high, keeping the distance low makes life easier. This led to a g...
Nov 07, 2024•50 min
What's coming for Blazor in .NET 9? Carl and Richard talk to Dan Roth about the upcoming version of Blazor. Dan discusses excellent performance improvements, better MAUI interactions, new SignalR features, and more! The conversation also dives into how Blazor gets made and the journey that submitting issues into GitHub goes through to become features in the Blazor framework. It takes a while, but you can be part of making Blazor great!
Oct 31, 2024•1 hr
What does it mean to build cloud-native applications? Carl and Richard talk to Chris Klug about his experiences building applications designed to operate effectively in the cloud. Chris pushes back on the fixation around Kubernetes - you can build cloud-native apps without it! The conversation digs into the various options available to take advantage of the cloud's ability to scale while also tolerating its occasional short-duration outages and shifting availability. Chris also talks about .NET ...
Oct 23, 2024•57 min
What has Chris Sells been up to? Carl and Richard chat with Chris Sells, the guest on episode 10 back in 2002, about how his career continues to evolve. Chris talks about working at Google on Flutter, the mobile dev stack - before departing for Meta to work on the tooling for augmented reality. The conversation digs into how AR appears to be the logical evolution of mobile but has been completely overwhelmed by artificial intelligence. Chris has left Meta to work on AI technologies and sees huge...
Oct 16, 2024•59 min
How do you make your own copilot? Carl and Richard talk to Prashant Bhoyar about his work with Copilot Studio and Azure AI Studio. Prashant describes how Copilot Studio lives in the Power Platform space while Azure AI Studio is more related to Visual Studio, in that it is a tool for developers of AI technology. Anything built in Azure AI Studio can be surfaced in Copilot Studio - another kind of fusion development! Lots of conversation about what works well and what is difficult with these tools...
Oct 10, 2024•1 hr
Ready for a chat with the creator of Node? Carl and Richard talk to Ryan Dahl about his work creating NodeJS in 2009 and how he moved on after a few years, leading to the creation of Deno, an opinionated approach to building web applications. Ryan talks about the challenges of simplifying web development by combining all the important things into a single set of tools—saving you the effort of assembling those things yourself. The conversation also digs into how web development has evolved and on...
Oct 02, 2024•56 min
What's the latest with Playwright? Carl and Richard talk to Debbie O'Brien about her ongoing work with Playwright, Microsoft's open-source testing framework for web applications. While it is focused on web applications, you can write your tests in various languages, including .NET! Debbie talks about the new Playwright Testing service, which operates in Azure, so you don't have to stand up with your testing infrastructure - pay for what you use. The conversation ranges over the various features ...
Sep 26, 2024•56 min
How simple can you make software development? Carl and Richard talk to Mark Rendle about his focus on simplicity in building software - as simple as possible. Mark talks about the tendency of developers, sometimes through no fault of their own, to use what is new and cool in development, regardless of how practical or necessary it actually is. The conversation digs into the ongoing battle around cloud-native development using technologies like Kubernetes. You can be cloud native with more straig...
Sep 19, 2024•1 hr 1 min
How does good design pay off in software? Carl and Richard talk to Billy Hollis about his work designing software, both from a user interaction perspective and application architecture. Billy talks about saving time and money by working hard on design to get a clearer picture of what stakeholders want—because code rework is always more expensive! The conversation also digs into the institutional knowledge walking out of many companies through employees retiring—and how much work that is going to...
Sep 12, 2024•1 hr 6 min
Can you do mob programming remotely? Carl and Richard talk to Ulrika Malmgren about mob, or team programming - where three to five developers work together on the same problem, rotating keyboard control and collaborating to write the best possible code. Modern tools like Teams and Zoom make it easy to do the same programming style with everyone remotely! Ulrika talks about how team programming becomes the standard approach to development - as opposed to solo programming, where everyone works sep...
Sep 05, 2024•51 min
What can machine learning do for geospatial data? Carl and Richard talk to Malte Loller-Anderson and Mathilde Ørstavik about their work at Norkart, using aerial imagery to build detailed maps around Norway. Mathilde dives into the critical role of machine learning - identifying buildings in images. Usually done by hand with each new image, Norkart has a machine learning model that automates the process trained on previous vector maps of buildings. But there are many things that look like buildin...
Aug 29, 2024•54 min
What do Domain-Driven Design and event sourcing have to do with each other? Everything! Carl and Richard chat with Anita Kvamme about her experiences applying DDD, and specifically event storming, to developing applications using event sourcing. Anita talks about building applications that have many sources of events—from users and elsewhere—and needing to manage that complexity without slowing down development. Event sourcing also means keeping a source of the truth - all events leading up to a...
Aug 22, 2024•55 min
How can a low-code solution help you deliver a .NET app? Carl and Richard talk with Serge Sarafudinov about his Xomega project. Serge describes how Xomega uses models and templates to generate .NET code for applications for Blazor clients, WPF, and even ASP.NET Forms and TypeScript! The conversation also digs into rehabilitating existing .NET applications where new features can be added with Xomega, and then gradually convert the existing application into the model approach - and then you can ch...
Aug 15, 2024•59 min
How do you manage APIs to GenAI, and how can GenAI help with API management? Carl and Richard chat with Andrei Kamenev about the latest features coming to Azure API Management. On the one hand, there are Copilot tools to help craft and understand APIM policies, which can get very complex. Then, there is the provisioning of access to GenAI-related APIs like the Azure OpenAI service, which utilize tokens - and those tokens mean money, so they need to be controlled. The GenAI Gateway provides the a...
Aug 07, 2024•51 min
How can .NET Aspire help you get into containers? Carl and Richard talk with Jiachen Jiang about her experiences working with .NET Aspire. Jiachen talks about the power of .NET Aspire to help lead developers to utilize cloud native architecture efficiently. A key part of the equation is containers, and Jiachen talks about how relatively rare containerized .NET apps are - because in many cases, it doesn't add anything but complexity. But as .NET applications need to scale in the cloud, containers...
Aug 01, 2024•55 min
What if you want to build your own copilot? Carl and Richard talk to Vishwas Lele about his new startup, which is focused on using Azure OpenAI tools to help automate the government RFP writing process. Vishwas discusses the complexities of proposal writing, how specific and complex rules exist for each part of the proposal, and the challenge of getting the software to do an excellent job on the draft. The conversation digs into the domain expertise needed for the technologies and the proposal w...
Jul 25, 2024•50 min
What are the basics of building a decent user interface on a web page? Carl and Richard talk to Hilary Stohs-Krause about her experience helping folks build websites - you don't have to be a designer to make something useable! Hilary talks about steering clear of more complex UX libraries unless you know the site owner prefers them. Keeping things simple and consistent is best! The conversation also digs into accessibility and how accessibility needs are a great guide to a decent basic design - ...
Jul 18, 2024•56 min
What's happening with WPF? Carl and Richard talk to Joseph Finney about the news from Build about WPF - it's back, baby! But did it ever go away? Joe talks about how WPF was made open source in 2018 and how minimal development was done there - enough so that the community started building frameworks to support it, including WPFUI and ModernWPF. But at Build, Microsoft announced a new focus on WPF, including creating support for a Windows 11 theme - with a line of code, you can make your WPF app ...
Jul 11, 2024•1 hr
Multi-modal is here and ready to use! Carl and Richard talk to Veronika Kolesnikova about what she has seen in the latest OpenAI model. Multi-modal refers to GPT-4o's ability to work with text, audio, images, and more and respond in kind! Veronika talks about tackling interesting visual problems with GPT-4o - like summarizing graphs or creating new data visualizations. The conversation digs into some announcements around Build, including the new security features in AI Studio and Windows Recall ...
Jul 04, 2024•50 min
CosmosDB makes ChatGPT fast! While at Build in Seattle, Carl and Richard chatted with Mark Brown about CosmosDB's role in AI. Mark talks about how ChatGPT switched over to CosmosDB early on - when the number of users started to climb, database performance became essential, and CosmosDB was there. Today, many AI-centric CosmosDB features exist, like vector storage, indexing, and search! The conversation also digs into the impact of the large language model on development - things are different no...
Jun 27, 2024•55 min
What's up with MAUI and Blazor? Carl and Richard chat with Beth Massi about the latest MAUI, including the new webview available on GitHub that lets you embed an existing web page into your MAUI app. Beth talks about making apps the way you want to - with a mobile, web, or desktop focus - or making them all! Mixing Blazor and MAUI means you can steer clear of XAML if you prefer. There's no right way to build your clients, and MAUI gives you many choices!
Jun 20, 2024•45 min
GitHub is about so much more than source control! While at Build, Carl and Richard chatted with Damian Brady about all the great things coming out of GitHub over the past few years, including Copilot and now Copilot Workspaces. The conversation digs into how large language models are changing how you write code and some idea of what things could be like in the future. Damian also digs into the more enterprise-centric features like Software Bill of Materials and effective sponsorship of projects....
Jun 13, 2024•48 min
Chatting with the leaders of C#! While at Build in Seattle, Carl and Richard sat down with Mads Torgersen and Dustin Campbell to discuss how C# continues evolving into version 13! With new versions coming every year, Mads talks about how complex features can be developed over several versions of the language - while also being able to get feedback from regular developers. So, what comes next for C#? Have a listen!
Jun 06, 2024•57 min
It's episode 1900! While at Build, Carl and Richard recorded a milestone episode with Scott Hanselman. Scott talks about his goals in the later stages of his career, the ideas and origins of all the podcasts, and what is important to him today. In the second half, Carl pulls out a quiz show for Scott with quotes from shows going back 20 years! Lots of great stories of different conferences, podcasts, and other events - and the things learned along the way. Thanks for listening!
May 30, 2024•53 min
The Nomadic Developer returns - and is working on AI technology! After fifteen years, Aaron Erickson returns to .NET Rocks to talk to Carl and Richard about his nomadic adventures. Aaron talks about the twists and turns of moving from consultant at Thoughtworks to leadership in a tech company, leading a startup, and now being part of the team at nVidia exploring the potential of machine learning and large language models. While the journey is inspiring, Aaron's passion for his latest work sparks...
May 23, 2024•59 min
What do you want the last chapter of your software development career to look like? Carl and Richard talk to Shawn Wildermuth about life as a 55-year-old software developer. Shawn talks about being an independent software development consultant for the past twenty years and considering what the next ten should look like. The conversation digs into what's fun and valuable and what you want to achieve before retirement. One thing is for sure - there is no one right way to have a career - but makin...
May 15, 2024•54 min
