Hey Richard, Hey Carl, what do you know?
Well, I know that our friend Michelle Rubusta Monte is with us to tell us about something that's going on adjacent to DEV Intersection.
What is it? It's cybersecurity Intersection. Let's let Michelle tell that story.
Hey Michelle, Hey Carl, Hey Richard, how are you.
Tell us about cybersecurity Intersection?
Well, so, Richard and I are partnering with the group that does DEV Intersection and next Gen AI, and we are putting on a new conference dedicated to one hundred percent security focused topics. And I mean, honestly, the lineup of speakers is incredible. We have Paula A. Jenis, who's here from Poland and does keynotes all over the world and is one of the top rated RSA speakers and
black hat speaker. We're so lucky to have her. But she's not only keynoting, she's got a workshop teaches you about protecting your environments against hackers and shows you about how to you know, do attacks so that you can prevent them. It's pretty cool and sessions like that as well.
But we also have speakers from Microsoft. We have we have speakers that specialize in you know secure coding practices, Azure security, Zuero, trust architectures on Azure UH and people who do decision maker tracks, so things around governance policy and you know how to how to manage and your production operations keep them secure. So it's an amazing group of speakers, really excited about it.
And I think I can count myself among the group of speakers there.
Well, yes you can, that is right.
Yeah, I'm doing a securing Blazer Server applications talk and also I think we're doing a Security this Week live show there somewhere that is correct.
Yeah, we'll be recording Security this Week live. We're going to have a great panel with some folks. The interesting thing here is we don't really have a Microsoft and dot net and Azure focused toecurity conference yet, so that's the reason we're putting this on as well. You know there are other security conferences, but they have a spread of topics that maybe don't focus on the things you
do day to day. And you know this overlaps with again our community of folks that specialize in again dot net, Azure and yeah, they need to keep it secure too, So with tons of talks.
Cyber Intersection is part of a trio of conferences we're doing. They have Intersection alongside the next Gen AI Conference all in Orlando the week of October fifth through tenth. That's workshops and the main conference. And you can get a special registration code if you sign up through Cybersecurity Intersection dot com.
Yeah, so if you sign up at Cybersecurity Intersection dot com, then you put in this code, so Alliance cyber three hundred and you'll get three hundred off the entry price. So that's a special code that only works at cybersecurity dot com. And then you have access to all the conferences.
Like Richard said, Wow, that's cool. Thanks Michelle. I'm looking forward to it and I'll see you there. Hey, watch out for falling rocks. Nice, it's dot NetRocks. Watch out for falling dot NetRocks. I'm Carl Franklin.
And I'm Richard Campbell.
We're here for your listening pleasure again. On episode nineteen sixty seven, this is the year we were born. Yeah, and my wife then ye yeah, and a lot of cool things happen. Should we do better know framework first and then do what happened in nineteen sixty seven? Or should we Yeah, let's do that all right, don't mess with the pattern, roll the music.
What do you got?
I have something intriguing that I have not used, but you know, I like to look and see what's trending on GitHub and this one is a tool that lets you run Windows in a Docker container.
Oh far Oh.
It's docer doc k u r slash Windows on GitHub.
And let me pull the classic And why would you do that?
Why would you ever want to do that? Yeah? Why would you want to do that? I'll tell you what. The only reason I could see doing that is the same reason i'd want to VM, which is complete and encapsulation. But I would probably want to do it for security reasons, you know, like I want to move all my email reading stuff over there. But in order to do that, you really have to turn off network access, well local network access, you have to limit it.
You can do that sort of stuff with virtual desktop too, if you would, if it's just for that interaction. Yeah, you know. I funny do you bring this up. Timing's impeccable as usual, mister Franklin, because I was just having to chat about the origins of virtualization, realizing you know, back in the day I was using virtualization for testing installs. Right, we'd have a baseline. This is the current configuration of the machine at the company. We're gonna put the new
version on. Let's install it. Make sure it doesn't break anything. This is back in DLL hell days, right, And when it did you could use because you were in virtual machine. You just rolled back to the state before tweaked the install, figure out what you did, made mistake you and try it again. Like it was a great testing platform. And this is like a cool way to approach that problem. Not that we have those kinds of DLL hells anymore. Now we have new and extra special DLL health. Is
there such a thing as doctor Hell. I don't know, Maybe it's I don't know there was doctor help, but it's definitely new get help and yamel hell. I think everybody on those of this show knows about new get hell. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, so it's interesting. I would want to, like, I say, use it for security reasons. Vms are great, but you know they can be slow, and if they're not slow, they're expensive and.
They're big, big, big bulky, Like this is just a lean way to do this.
Yeah, And you use RDP to connect to it, and so it's pretty cool. But I'd just like to see if I could lock it down and you know, use it for Internet browsing and email and all those things.
So interesting.
If I do get phished, you know, I'm not going to get ransomwared. That's that's why I would want to use.
It, right, or you are, but it's just going to be on a machine that you don't have anything important on, so you don't care. Just pave it and go again.
Yeah yeah, or you.
Don't even have to pave it. You just rebuild the container and to help you go.
Right, yeah, yeah, so long as it doesn't touch your discs and your you know, well.
You give it a yeah, he got no rights to anything else.
Give it an area of the disk, and give it limited network.
No, it's living in that little space. You put it on its own virtual network, so it only can communicate the Internet, nothing else in your network. Like, yeah, we've done all this. This is good honeypot testing and black app testing, like this is where you do this stuff. It's cool idea.
So it's cool. I'm going to talk to Doane and Patrick about that on the next security this week. But yeah, that's what I got. So who's talking to us.
Richard grabbed a comment off a show from fifteen sixty going back a few years. It's from July of twenty eighteen with one Mads Christensen. Maybe you've heard him and can't wear his glasses very well when we're talking about writing visual studio extensions, I'm talking about his headshot because he's got this headshot with his glasses all askew, which is hilarious inside joke. And admittedly this is a few years ago, so this is a comment from Scott Hirstell
who said, holy smokes. After listening to this episode, I took a dive into the visual studio marketplace to see what kinds of extensions were available, and after hearing about the image optimizer on the show, Thank you Mads, I figured i'd give web Essentials a shot. One of the most satisfying things about this tool was the ability to save my files and have the browser automatically reload so
I can check out my changes. There are so many goodies and web Essentials, thank you for your excellent work. Oh and Fartacus is pretty good too. Everybody at the officer you get a kick out of that one was this from the era of the fart app was that what Fardacus was.
Yeah, the part is the original fart app for visual studio.
So like you press a control key and it goes or something or.
Well, of course there's a hot key, but you can also you set it up so that when the build fails.
Ah, it's that or sad trombone, right.
There are some forks of it that does like you know, Homer Simpson kind of.
Oh yeah and stuff. I remember setting up a rig where when the build failed, it turned on a red flashing light and everybody on the team had nerf guns and you all shot the guy who wrote the bell. It's nice, yeah, Scott, thank you so much. Here comment and a copy of music Goby is on its way
to you. And if you'd like a copy of music Cobe, I write a comment on the website at dot NetRocks dot com or on Facebook, so you publish every show there and if you comment there and I read it on the show, we'll send you a copy.
Music go by and we're talking about music to Code by, which you can get at music to Code by dot net. We have twenty two tracks all in MP three flack or wave format, helping people write code since twenty sixteen. I can't remember when I started it, but anyway, that's it. So let's talk about nineteen sixty seven. Brother.
All right, dude, where do you want to go?
Well, first of all, we were born that year.
My wife is born that year. That's ye happened.
But one thing that's really important to me is this is when Sergeant Peppers was released.
Yeah, right, that's true.
One of the most iconic rock albums of all time.
It was also a transformative album for the Beatles too, like it was a very different style.
Well, they were sort of in a rut. I remember Paul McCartney talking about this. They were in a rut in Beatlemania, you know, and they wanted to break out of the mop top kind of image and they were just beside themselves. They're like, well, this is who we are. And Paul came up with the idea and he said, what if we just put on these personas and we wrote music from the perspective of these guys rather than the Beatles, Right, So looks end and it was really
good and it broke them through. That broke them through their issues. So other things that happen. Of course, it was the summer of Love Right the Human Being in San Francisco on January fourteenth marked the beginning of the Summer of Love, attracting over two twenty thousand people celebrating piece of music. Vietnam War, Lynn and Johnson requested more funding for the Vietnam War during his State of the
Union of Dress on January tenth. Civil Rights Thirdgod Marshall was confirmed as the first Black Supreme Court justice on August thirty, big significant milestone. I'll let you talk about science and space, but sure, yeah. I think Jack Ruby was shot on January third. I think you're a year too far ahead. Oh really yeah, Oh Jack Ruby's death. Jack Ruby, who killed Lee Harvey Oswald, died on January third. Yeah, so he died that year. It wasn't he didn't get shot.
I had that backwards. What happened in space and tech?
There's all the time. There's a lot of stuff coming in tech at this point, like the you know, we're only a year or two away from arpinnet becoming real, so we're just we're just getting going there. But the language logo is first published in nineteen sixty seven. While if You're say gets say more, Pact and Cynthia Solomon. They were working for a company called BBN, who was also a central part of Arpanet. Sorry, the dog, after being silent for hours, has decided to bark.
Now, Oh that's all right. We have to be real once in a while, don't we. Yeah, little dog bark never heard anybody. It was logo and a particular type of language like function, functional or procedural or.
It was a it was a It was an interpreted language. And this is where turtle graphics came from, like sort of vector draw on the screen. Right, Yeah, it's turtle basic. Yeah, well, turtle basics another thing. But this was a turtle logo. You used turtle graphics as much graphics. We suppose to be the term they called it logo from the Greek logos for word or thought.
Interesting. So anything in space yeah.
Well yeah. This is the year of the most launches in history until twenty twenty one until SpaceX blows the record out one hundred and seventy two launches during the Soviet Union and the United States.
Wow.
It's also the year of the Apollo one fire. In January, chrisdom and White and Chaffee lose their lives in a plugs out test on the stand and stops the Apollo program.
Wow.
For some time as they figure out the mistakes that they were making. There was wiring problems. They were using a pure auction environment, which created more risk. But it's also the year that they fly for surveyors, which were the robotic landers for the Moon, three of which will landsafe on the Moon. The fourth will make a what
they call vigorous land. Also, so use one flies if the first Soyuz flies with a single cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, who will also lose his life after a day in space on the way down, the parachute on his re entry module failed. Any bomb did not survive, and the Soviets successfully get the Venera four mission after several tries to Venus and it lasts about ninety minutes before it melts.
Yeah, what were they thinking, Hey, let's go to Venus.
Well, now they were trying to You know, they taught us a lot. The Soviets are the only nation to ever land anything successfully on Venus. Oh, they did land, but you know, it lasted a while. It's very tough. Conditions are very very hot, high pressure there.
Wow.
And finally by the end of the year they ratify the Outer Space Treaty, which is especially contrapuntal today now because this is the treaty that says you can't own the Moon and no weapons in space and don't go setting off nukes on the moon, which is one of the American things. Americans considered doing was to test a nuclear upon on the Moon. So that doesn't happen, and the out of space were you're supposed to stop all that. Now there's a conversation about does this treaty still make
sense because it's from nineteen sixty seven. It's a long time ago, and now that we're actually talking about utilizing resources on the moon, how do we make this work?
Very cool? Yeah, good stuff. I think this year's geekout is going to be really good. Are the geek outs?
Yeah, there's going to be a few geekouts, including when after this, when this show is published, I'll have already taken a tour of Copenhagen Atomics thorium reactors, so oh wow, Either I'll be dead or I'll have a phenomenal interview with their team talking about building thorium right, or both. As it turns out, you'll publish it posthumously, right, I'll actually there's no They're in Denmark and Denmark does not
allow nuclear reactors, so what a great place to build one. Yeah, and so what I don't have a whole lot of risk there. They're actually making it portable enough that they're going to take it to Switzerland to operate it as a test run. Then they're allowed to bring it back as long as it's not operating and do some tests evaluations of it. So that's what's going to be good with that. But yeah, no exciting times. Don't worry the fall.
This winter's geek outs will be big, yeah, and there may be a few extra ones.
Yeah, all right, and with that, let's bring on Mads. Mads Christiansen is a program manager on the Visual Studio team at Microsoft, with the privilege to work with the extension community and ecosystem. He's an avid extension writer himself, with over one hundred published extensions to Visual Studio Marketplace. Before joining Microsoft, he spent a decade as a web developer, working at both startups and enterprise companies. His wife and two young sons all enjoy and support his adventures in
the world of home automation. Welcome back mads.
Hey, guys, glad to be here.
You mad extension writer. You.
I think we're over two hundred now, wow, crazy, got to update your bios. You are the marketplace, sir.
That's right.
Yeah, I don't know. There's a lot of extensions out there.
So far be it from me to use dot net rocks as a place where I can get a personal answer about some feature that I want in visual studio. But I'm going to do it anyway.
Yeah, go ahead.
So I've noticed, you know, I'm a Blazer developer mostly, and when I'm building a web application, I noticed that every time I hit play, the position and size of the browser that comes up is automatically set something to where the last browser window that had focus is. And it drives me absolutely nuts. And because you know, I've got windows all over the place, and if I click on the one to mute the TV that I'm watching, and then I go back and press play, now it's
over the TV window, right. So I wanted to know if there's an extension that you've created to automatically set the position and location of a browser every time you run it.
Well, no, I have not written anything for it, but this is I don't know how this is, like it happens to me too when it has nothing to do with Mitchell Studio. Right, but if you have multiple you know, edge browsers open, you have one for your work account and one for your private or whatever, right, and you then click a link and outlook, Yeah, it will open it in the last browser you had active.
Yeah, so it's a browser thing. But surely there must be a way to tell the browser. Yeah, open it here, like in JavaScript or something.
Yeah, and really you don't want to even doc that, you know, the tap It should just be its own thing, right, Yeah? Yeah, did you? I don't. I don't know if we I've never seen this request before, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. If it does exist, you should vote for it or create it.
I entered it as a suggestion in the Visual Studio. There's a link too. Yeah I did that. I haven't heard back yet. I just didn't know. I went looking and I didn't see anything. But I figured, you know, if anybody knows Mad's nos, Yeah, so.
Make sure you put a link in so that everyone, any listener can go and vote.
For There you go, Yeah, leverage leverage the podcast friend if you get it voted up to the top, you know, then they're they're going to talk about it. Oh yeah, that's cool, that is their priority list.
Yeah, well, we don't know. Sometimes you see something like this and you think, oh, yeah, this is not going to be that hard to do, right, Yeah, and then it turns out it's really really hard to do. Right. So even though you are able to vote something up to the top, that doesn't guarantee that we can do it if it's like really expensive.
Right, or or we don't know how well, and you always have the niche problem, right, like a certain group of people really want this, but it represents a tiny amount of the customer base, Like there's always got to be a waiting on those kinds of Well, it depends.
I think it's one of those features that people don't know they need it until they get frustrated enough and say what the heck right exactly?
And we usually say that, you know, one vote or one bug represent a thousand people.
Yeah, so yeah, it won't.
It doesn't have that many people like or it's a small niche. Let's say it's only five percent of you know, Visual Studios user base or whatever, but that's still like hundreds of thousands of people, right right, So it's important that you know even the small things are big just because we're dealing with like millions of monthly active users, right right right.
I heard that you guys are I don't know who you guys is, but Microsoft engineers are required to look at that list twice a week and actually look at all the new suggestions.
Yeah we so we don't really have a requirement for that, but we are required to fix any high important bugs like P one' or P two priority one or zero bugs okay, and they have we have an whole SLA, like a service license agreement there with like that we have to fix them for the next service release that we that we publish like on a weekly basis. So yeah, we take that stuff really seriously. So you probably can't do that without looking at your list of bugs twice
a week. But there's no requirement for looking at the list. The requirement is to fix them. Yeah, but that's for bugs, that's not for feature requests.
Oh right, yeah, yeah, this is this is just the suggestion list, I guess future requests list.
Yeah, yeah, well we have actually do we do implement one point two feature requests per workday.
Wow.
If you look at the average of the last twelve months, wow, and that that trend is going up.
Wow. Are you guys going faster or are they get requests getting easier? Like, how do you get that quest? No?
I think it's a little bit of a mind shift. I don't know if you've noticed it over the last two or three years. But things that before wasn't prioritized because it was maybe had low impact, Like some bugs come in or some feature requests come in and they kind of have low impact. They don't you know, some of these suggestions were not like something that would open new scenarios. They might just be like little delighters or hey, it would be nice if but they weren't like blocking
you for doing what you needed to do. And we had a hard time prioritizing that type of feature request in the past, whereas now it's a little different because you know, when you're using visual studio eight ten hours a day, you're using half your waken live in visual studio, right, it's kind of crazy. So all these little things, because you're using it so much, they become big and they're big things. And so by kind of making that change, of mindset a little bit to look at things differently.
We've been able to double down on a bunch of the small issues and a bunch of the small like paper cuts, industry standard things, muscle memory issues that didn't before carry over from other apps into Visual Studio for shortcuts, for instance, like just taking them one out of time, Like let's just double down on that type of stuff,
and you know it. I think the shift is if you know, this sounds super cliche, but the shift I think has gone a little bit from focusing, you know, primarily on productivity and instead of focusing more on happiness, like developer happiness. You can't be happy developer if you're not productive. So it includes the productivity thing, but it's more. It's also about like are you looking forward to working studio every morning?
Right?
Is there a smile on your face? Do you feel empowered? Inspired, creative? This vis studio kind of get out of the way when it needs to and help you when that's a requirement, like all that type of stuff.
I've got issues.
We all have issues, probably.
Probably nothing to do with what you work on, but isn't me or has GitHub co pilot just completely taken over like now I start typing a variable and it gives me this long thing and there are gray letters in there that are like and as I'm typing, like, it's I don't even know when I'm typed, I have no idea what's going on. It's gotten so crazy. Yeah, and I know you can control that, but.
So you can control it now. So what we're adding is a way for that not to happen automatically, but only at a keyboard short cut. So instead of having it automatically show up, it can be only when you request ith.
Okay, I like, so.
You you you can control more of that because some people they really like kind of that feeling of just tapping their way through and and other people they really want not to have that. And so now you can figure it. You can. You can now customize it.
How about a foot switch?
Yeah you can do on off. Yeah you can do that.
I love I love foot switches. I'm a musician, right, so I have guitar pedals and stuff, but you know, if I had a little pedal board under my you know, to to Oh, I want that feature. I want that feature, these momentary on off toggles, that'd be so cool. Somebody should do.
That, that'd be the equivalent of a distortion distortion pedal.
There you go, yeah, exactly. You know I'd add some distortion to my to my API controllers.
Yes, yeah, you know a lot of a lot of effort goes into it. And the new version of visual Studio here is like it's a big foundational upgrade when it comes to to AI. So with with visual Studio, we are in a unique position where we know a lot about all the different aspects off your workflow. We know about your GET issues, it's your tracker. We know about profiling and debugging and unit testing, and maybe we know about your CICD, and we know about your let's say,
ASTRA deployment environments and whatnot. And so the more we know and the more Copiled is able to understand, the more useful it can become. And so this is really kind of one of those foundational updates that kind of infrastructure wise sets us up for the future and for adding features on top that's like way more that goes way deeper and just more helpful.
And are you guys, guidance seems to be like an issue, But then again, I don't go looking for it. I'm so spoiled by chatch ept searching the web for me that I'm really disappointed when I go to Google and I type something and I don't get like good results, you know. So like a video that explains how to control co pilot, I'm sure is out there. I'm just conditioned to not go look for it.
Yeah, it's out there, and a lot more will come. But yeah, there's a bunch of great videos out there already and articles and tutorials and whatnot.
Oh I know, yeah that's good stuff.
But I think but it's an interesting thing, right because the question is always like why do you need why do you need a description of how to do something right? It should be autodiscoverable just by the way you design the software.
Well yeah, more importantly, if you know how to do it, just do it right.
Yeah that's another thing.
Can we skip over? They don't explain this to me, just do it? Phase Like, yeah, I'm tired, I got stuff to do, Like, let's move on. Yeah.
I mean I suppose you could use the copilot agent, you know, or chat in visual studio to help you figure those things out. I find that to be a very valuable tool.
Yeah, And you know, but sometimes the best prompt is no prompt. So that's that's when you have a let's say you have a button that us or it comes up automatically, and so we have we have that in Ryan Vischoustudo. You're going to see more of that, whereas not the burden on prompting and knowing how to use it is no no longer on you. Yeah, it's like if you if you want to write a commit message,
there's a button there. There's a generate commit message, right, and so you don't have to prompt, you just click a button. That makes it easy, right. Or we just released a new way of optimizing your code, so you can you can just make a selection of your c sharp or whatever or VB and then you can say, hey, rite click and say optimize this code, and you don't have to prompt because what are you optimizing for? Like is it PERF? Is it readability? Is it quality? What
is it? You know, exception handling like or something like what is it? And so that burden of prompting and kind of if we can take that away and make it so that there's no prompt at all, then you're probably in many in many cases, you're going to be faster, and you're going to but faster and more accurate, but you're also going to be it's also going to be discoverable that you can do this.
Yeah, that's the challenge is how do you tell me you could optimize that code within it out interrupting me or annoying me in the process.
That is the challenge. Yeah, exactly, and it becomes clippy right otherwise.
Yeah, that's right, that's always the dance for us. Right, It's like I all the studio does is better than anybody. But all those little icons and floaties and squiggles, but all these little clues that hey I know something about your code you may not know.
And if you install code Rush, now you're at another level of icon crazy, right, Yeah, talking about.
Well, you know what they say, clippy walk so Copela can run.
There you go, and took a lot of flak in the process.
I still remember this on this quiz show wait wait, don't tell me on NPR. You know, Adam Felber is a comedian and he's on there, and when Microsoft announced that they were getting rid of Clippy, right, that Clippy was was dead Adam Felbery because hey, I see you're digging a grave? Is that a business grave or a personal grave? Can I help you dig that?
Can I help you?
It's funny, Richard. Maybe you remember there was a conference where there was we had someone in the Clippy costume walk around.
Oh yeah, I remember that, and it was immensely popular.
Everybody walked up in high five.
Hugely powered. Everybody loves Clippy. But it's like, yeah, because it's a meme.
Yeah totally. It's like comic sense.
Yeah, yes, except that it feels good when you punch. It wasn't meant to be serious. I don't know why you're using it, Like, what are you thinking?
I use it in a PowerPoint presentation sometimes and it throws people off.
Well, and if we wanted to do even more O pick Rob references. We talk about Windows Bob because at least one of the Clippy characters was that dog from Bob, designed by the same person, Glenda Gates. I think you know when you can use those characters, Yeah it was yeah, Melinda, Yeah, I don't know that she did clipp.
You it was a wizard as well. It was one of the characters that you could use those characters from from back then, there was a remember for Internet Explore.
That was the Yeah, there was a called the Microsoft Agent.
Yeah, the Agent, Yes, and you could with JavaScript or VBScript probably be you could, like.
I actually used that in an early online training tool that I wrote, which characters the Wizard. But you could use whatever you wanted to. But the idea is you could program him to fly around on the screen and point to things and explain stuff. So yeah, that didn't last time. It was fun while it lasted, but it didn't last.
Yeah, but you know, these all feel like attempts now to what these ll ms can do for us.
Yeah, it's really impressive. So we have I think there's like a couple of categories of where this is, where this is useful. So one is where we can learn and we become better developers. So let me take you a example. Is the new Profiler Agent, which is the one feature we're building on top of this foundational infrastructure change in Visual Studio twenty twenty six, and it's the Profiler Agent is able to run the profiler in Visual Studio, which we've had for a long time, but very few
people use it. It's kind of hard to it's an advanced concept. It's not easy to kind of understand. But this new agent can do it for you. And it can write benchmarks like using benchmark dot net. Wow, it will add benchmark or run if there's existing ones, and it can then find the hot paths. Then it can give you a laundrylease stuff. Here's what I want to do to optimize performance. It can then simulate that with the and then run the new and run the benchmarks
again to see what the performance benefit will be. And then you can just tell okay, go ahead, or if there's something that you don't understand because that's the problem. Even if you run the profiler and it says, hey, this line is very expensive or this method call is very expensive, how do you know how to optimize it? Right?
All right? Yeah, it's like okay, the software has criticized me.
Now what yeah, now what yeah, exactly, it found my problems. Now what are the solutions? Right? It didn't help me there, but now you get that help and so you know, it could be you know, maybe I have a dictionary that I use a linquery on and it says, hey, if you use a hasset, we're going to be eighty percent faster in this particular case, and you'll be like, oh, that's neat next time I run into a similar scenario, I'm going to remember this hasset thing. And so you
learn along the way. And so I really like that idea where the copole comes in sits beside you kind of and and you kind of get to that destination.
Together makes you a better developer, You become better.
Yeah, you know this reminds me of the old optimizing website stags. We're using the profiling tools to see that locus of concentration, Like, hey, this is a big expensive process, but it only gets run once an hour, so we're not going to optimize that. But this little thing, this settle thing, is being running four hundred times a second, and if we can shave one hundred milliseconds out of it, it's worth it.
Now.
Is there such a thing as an agent that understands SEQL and SQL profiling, because I would love to turn that loose on you know, hey, why is this query taking so long? And what?
Yeah?
I think you know what index do?
Is? What indexes do I need to add to make it work better?
That kind of thing that might be in for as as a mess. Yeah, if you looked at the Latest Days is a mess I have.
Yeah, and I know it's based on the whole visual studio, you know, fundamental environment, So did also have those.
I haven't played with it for a mess twenty one twenty two preview. You might see something more updated there in that regard. I'm not sure. I haven't followed along that course.
Yeah, there's a twenty five coming that's likely out in November, not that I know anything, but I'm speculating because that's when they would normally ship it.
It should be in preview by the time the airs.
Somewhere in the quote unquote ignite time frame. And I imagine there's going to be all kinds of.
Imagine there's going to be more a tooling seems like, you know that's where development is heading is in you know, the innovation is happening in AI.
Well, there's all the new helpers, right like we saw this extensively with Microsoft Fabric. Not to go too far off track here, but because Fabric touches so many different tools. When you're doing data analytics and you've got POWERBI and the data warehousing clients and these different storage mechanisms in the lake and so forth, each one you don't use enough to be really proficient with so the fact that it was a copilot at each layer, it's like, what'd
you want to do? Let me help you there, Like it's really powerful.
It seems like a good time to take a break. Yeah, So we'll be right back after these very important messages. Stay tuned. Did you know you can easily migrate asp net web apps to Windows containers on AWS? Use the app to Container tool to containerize your iis websites and deploy to AWS managed container services with or without Kubernetes. Find out more about app to Container and aw dot Amazon, dot Com, Slash, dot Net, slash Modernize, and we're back.
It's dot net Rocks. I'm Carl Franklin's my friend Richard Campbell. Hey, and that's our friend Mads Christensen, the Mad indentist of Visual Studio Extensions.
And Mad's you said, Studio twenty twenty six. So is this official? What are we expecting in the version of Studio next year?
No, it's out in preview.
It is okay, so it's not next year, it's like imminently right now. One would speculate because there's certain events coming up towards the end of the year.
Hey, but you know, I'm not in the business of speculation, no, so, but you know we when did we ship visuals do to twenty twenty.
Two in fall of twenty one? As I recall, maybe, yeah, so I'm just doing math. How much did the whole AI wave derail? You guys, Like, I don't envy your situation because you push that out in the fall of
twenty twenty one. Chat GBT is the next year, and you know, get Hub Copilot's already out, So that's a thing like this, It's been a it's been a while, Like you're not talking four years between versions of the studio, but they've been some nutty years, a little pandemic, a little revolutionary computing, like wooh.
It's been it's like a train that hits you, right, It's yeah, it was it was like that. Yeah. We we changed the whole ORC structure, change, all of that changed in the past couple of years to accommodate this. So there's no question where that this is like such a groundbreaking change for everybody, and I think we're probably on the forefront of it because we are we are kind of the lower layers of that that enables others to kind of use.
A name, and you're expected to dog food the new bits so you're seeing it before we see it.
So all that was like really heavy. But I think like this year when we look at like get ub copilot adoption, like this year is where it's really exploded. Yeah, so I think the l ms now are so good with the you know, clots on at for another like they're just GPT five, like they're finally at a place Jim and I are two point five is you know? Was also another one that was like, Okay, this is.
Good, real good.
So I got a story for you. I was trying to solve a CSS problem and I knew it was a CSS problem, but I wasn't quite sure how to solve it because you know, I'm a C sharp programmer, not a CSS guy. And I asked Chatchept. I spent an hour with chatchyp Yeah, I like that he's holding up the mugs. CSS is awesome outside of the box. I set the challenge to chat Ept. I spent an hour with chatchept, and it could not figure out, for the life of itself, how to fix this problem. So
then I went to get hub Copilot. I just created a new private repo in gethub with a scaled down example. Get ub co Pilot scratched its head for like forty minutes and then came back with the wrong answer. Then I went to Gemini and I, because Gemini is like built into Chrome, right, you can ask Gemini how do I fix this? And it completely baffled itself. It did
not have the answer. Then I went back in the visual studio and I went to agent mode and I picked Claude Son at three point five and I said do this, And it was literally less than three minutes and it had figured it out. Claude's Son. It is the bomb for CSS anyway.
It's really good.
Yeah, and you're sort of speaking to that sort of new reality that just harnished the agents you got. You want a client that has access to all of them, and you can try your different problems on different right on different models.
So that's that's really nice. You can now you can bring your own keys what we call it, right, You can bring your own API key and plug in you know, any other clod model or whatever. So but it's it, you know, it really depends a lot of a things. One is the context you give it like what does it understand about your project? And the other thing is the prompt, like how are you prompting it? And so that's the challenge because you know at what point I'll
be becoming prompting engineers. I always think that sounds a little bit too big for what it is, Like it's a different way of asking a question. You know, does that make you a prompt engineer? But but you know there's some truth to that.
I guess, you know, yeah, because I'm all, you know, I do a favorite of writing, so it must be a sentence engineer.
Also, yeah, exactly paragraph engineer.
Don't get crazy now trying to get there.
So but what I what I do like is you know, I mentioned the thing where it kind of makes you better, you become a better developer. But the other aspect is that it will it will allow you to do things that you couldn't do before. So when I mentioned this stuff about the profiler right before, like I'm not a very low level developer, like I don't I don't go into unsafety sharp for instance, right, Like I've never used a volatile keyword. I don't know what it does, and I'm kind of afraid to know.
But the name tells you everything you want to know.
That's right, stay away, Yeah, danger here across.
So that door was closed to me, right, And but with this this new profile agent, for instance, it can come in and it can teach me stuff. I can see how to do this, it can it can kick in the door that was otherwise closed to Yeah, and so it makes the impossible possible. And I really like that because it's like that. And then it doesn't go there, It doesn't open the door and walk in on its own. It takes me with it, right, we walk in together, and that I think that's the magic part. I think
a lot of people miss that. They think, oh, you know, Copila, that's going to take over my job or whatever, but it is. It is really a cold pilot. I think that's important.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to the day and I don't think it we're here yet. But it doesn't do really well with graphics and you know, animation and all that stuff yet that's not really in the in the models that I know anyway. But I'm looking forward to the day where I can think about something that I never thought of before doing because I know it's completely outside my wheelhouse. And then and then engaging some AI to help me figure that stuff out. But otherwise I would
I would never have attempted it. But and I'm not talking about for professional reasons, like I would never say yes if a customer asked me to do something like that, but you know, for for messing around and you know, writing some fun games or something, I would totally be into it.
Did you see the Scott Hanselman and Mark Prosenovitch they did this shader using copony. They had no idea how to write a shrader, and they did it. And they could use it as a background kind of animation movie thing that just ran in the background up the windows terminal. Yeah, and they've never written the shad before. And so again that was a door that was to go. They could have learned they had spent their time doing that.
But good stuff.
Here we are well.
And that's always the thing, Like you have skills, you know you could do this, but your list of needs, the things, you know, priority list is so long.
That's exactly it. You know, I got kids and family and stuff. I gotta leave work, and then I gotta leave work. I can't just you know, keep going. And that's the most most people are in a situation like that, your time is limited, and so having that kind of AI sitting there and being helpful to I think it's really good. Another one that's really helpful is it can
increase your velocity. So I have a three hundred and something repos on GIDDA right, a lot of extensions and NU could package libraries and whatnot, and I get a bunch of feature requests and bug reporting, and I can't really as a single person, I can't do all of these things. But I can have the coding D and I can assign a task, say hey, can you take a look at this bug? Can you fix that? Or take a look at this feature request? And the more you use it, the more you kind of understand what
it can do. And then you know, oh, this is a great candidate for the copilot.
Sure to do for me. If you want one hundred percent unit test coverage, you know, you could beat your interns as much as you want to try and get there, but boy, the soft or knocks it out.
Yeah that's right.
Yeah, yeah, So I feel like you can your A. Your velocity can go up if you if you know how to use it in the right way. But that now you have, but then you learn that too write. So there's some new stuff to learn. And I think that's important that we do it and whatever time we've got, but don't dismiss it up front.
One hundred percent coverage. I would set that on to go on a Friday night and then go away for the weekend. For some of these projects that I have, there's so big. Well.
One of the patterns I've gotten into now when I'm asking the tools to write code is that they sort of do a tdd thing. I want you to write the test as well. And one of the effects I found with that was that often if you made too big of a request, it wouldn't finish it. Yes, and so including the tests and keep iterating this until all the tests passed. Actually create a pattern to finish the code request. Right.
I don't like, you know, dot dot dot, you know, finish the implementation here. No, you finish it. That's what I'm asking you.
That's what you do, you piece of software.
You what I do?
Is that what you do?
Yeah?
Nice? But I feel like more and more we're the project managers, right Like you're managing you only write certain bits of code that you're like, well, the tool's going to have at the time with this, but most of the other code you're you're just doling it out and
checking it in. I feel like software developers are uniquely qualified in the scenario because the tools like GitHub and things like, we're used to taking contributions from unknown sources in some respects, and what's more unknown than an LLM, right, Like, just makes sense that okay, and it comes evaluated, you know, run it through the process integrated.
And let's get meta here, Like you ask the copilot to write you something and it does a pull request and you check out that pull request. Now you should have an agent test that pull request. Sure, why not have another third part? Right? And so thinking about this in terms of, oh, it's not just this one agent that I'm interacting with, but multiple agents that do different things better than the other kind. That's this is the future, I think.
Yeah, we're already seeing with the mcps, for instance, where they know now you have the playwright and it can go ahead and unbelievable too, launch your new pro request and the browser and test that it works. And I mean it's pretty phenomenal.
The thing that got me with the playwright MCP was the ownership of the test problem on my part. Now is a set of prompts about what I need to valuate it on this website, And so as playwright changes on you and the site changes on you, you don't have to rewrite the test. They're regenerated by the prompt. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, that's nice.
Yeah yeah, it's powerful, and it's just a funny way to think about software. And I don't know if necessarily like it's fun in the sense that I'm getting a lot done, but it's not fun in the sense of like that old school flowing with code thing that I used to do once in a while. It's not the same when you're shepherding all these tools, like you're you're kind of running an interrupt driven method of coding where various bits are coming back from different agents and you're
trying to pull them together. It's like, where are we in the overall problem space here?
You're definitely more of a conductor of an orchestra now when you take really take full advantage of all this stuff. But I don't I don't see that as Hey, the role of the software engineer is changing. It's just that
we do we work in a slightly different way. And so we also now orchestrate stuff, but hopefully we orchestrate the stuff that's kind of boring or the stuff that tedious, or stuff that doesn't add unique where we you know that that we want to add unique value that only we can do, right, stuff that's like you know, makes us feel great and love our work, and where we have unique insights and we can be creative and come up with these fantastic things and then have kind of
maybe the boring parts and stuff that would be great if someone else would take care of that, but we do the conducting of that.
That was back to the old adage, right, Like your job as the software engineer wasn't to write code, it was to produce solutions. Yep, right, I remember. I mean I'm old enough down to remember switching to Visual Basic. His guy brought real tired of battling MFC, like you were mostly fighting with Windows, not providing solutions, and VB took that off the shelf, and people like we're not really programming anymore. It's like pretty sure, I am pretty sure.
I'm going to be crying all the way to the bank here.
Yeah, I forget who said it? But it was was it Repert Scoble or like Joe's bowlski or something that. Hey, you know, as a software engineer, your goal is to solve problems. Yeah, the side effect is that you write code or something like that. The by product is code. But we're here to solve problems. And so I think that's true in this new world as well. And I think we're still going to write as much code. We might even write more because some of this other stuff
can be sort of automated away a little bit. And so I think we're looking at a very very bright future for software engineering. I think it's going to be more fun now than they has been in the past.
The productivity explosion is astonishing. Folks have seen who figure this stuff out. I mean, I for a while there, the good Hub Copilot days, I was seeing folks saying, hey, my coders are pushing in more code. It's twenty thirty forty percent more productive. There's more reworks, like they're backing out stuff more often. But generally if it gets pushed and it sticks, it's pretty good in its days, Like
code quality up overall. Yeah, Yeah, Now I watch guys that are knocking out two three weeks worth of work in a typical pattern in a day. Sure, Like it's just astonishing when they get it right.
Yeah, yeah, right, And so I think like, as, but that's a craft too. How do you work with the prompting and with the yelms.
Yeah, So also staying current on what the different lllms are and what their strengths and weaknesses are. I think that's a big challenge too, because you know that experiment that I did with the first chatchpt for an hour, and then you know that the GitHub copilot and all that stuff that took like a whole day just to figure out that claudees on at three point five was was the was the model that I wanted. And now when I go back that, I'm going to try to
use that for a similar problem. But something else might have come around that makes it even easier. Right, So keeping up with these things is going to be a full time endeavor.
I remember the arguments over is garbage collecting actually a good idea? We've been to these sort of changes in the way we think about code things before. Yeah, and it's just this is an issue one.
And I also feel like, yeah, you have to keep up today with like which models are great for your scenario. Let's say, I don't think that's different than keeping up with other industry kind of.
Yeah, it just most faster, most faster than language evolution or tool evolution.
That may only be true right now.
Yeah, it's a moment in time. I think it feels like we're on our way somewhere. Yeah, and we're trying to figure out where where does this go? Is this is the chat the right interface going forward? Is it a what is it? It might be, but it might not be. And so we're on our way there wherever there is.
I have a suggestion to people who are hearing this podcast, and that is listen to more dot ne Rocks episodes because we'll keep you up to date on these things. Because we're doing the hard work out here.
We're definitely asking some questions anyway and trying to get an overview. Yeah, that's true of you know, who's succeeding, who's struggling? Where are these things helping? Word? Don't they help?
But we're thinking about this. You know, you might have heard this concept of ambient AI. Yeah, so the concept real briefly is that it's kind of sitting there in the background only showing its phase when it's needed, and it seamlessly offer you, you know, the help contextually where you want it. And so it's so think of it as something that's always there, but it's not in your way, and it's not something that you need to learn. And so we like that idea because it kind of fits
naturally into things that already exist. So if we were to put it into Visual Studio, for instance, you know I mentioned the you know, the generated commit message, Well, we already have a commit message box. So adding a button that automatically does that would be it's a place where you expected, it's not in your way, you don't have to prompt anything, right. That's a that's kind of
ambient AI thinking. Another one is renamed variable. We made a big splash about this because you know it's the one of the hardest problems in computer science is naming things. And so if you want to rename a variable, there's like a little UI and Visual studio for that. If you could click control r R on an identifier, the rename thing come up. We show you automatically the top three things that we think based on how that variable
is being used in your code. What will be good names for that based on cipical naming strategies, and so that's ambient AI.
Although we are talking about Microsoft here and you guys have a record about names.
All right, well let's just put.
That right out there.
No size, that's the perfect name for what it does.
You know exactly what it does.
I'm the worst of naming things. They just the name is what they do.
Yeah, yeah, which is actually the perfect name. Like, because nobody's confused in.
The in the UK, they say, it's what's on the tin, right, what's printed on the can is what you get. Yeah, what's on the tin.
It's what is in the can. Like, that's as much as we could hope for. I appreciate that.
Uh.
Can we talk a little bit about the sort of project side that is also visual studio because I think, you know, people will tell me, you, well, why would I use visual studio code of visual studio? And it's like, to me, studio is as much a project management tool as it is a development environment.
It is. Now, that's funny, that's exactly how I look at it too, and that relationship you have between projects and solutions. But if you're new to visual studio, you know, a lot of people don't understand that concept, yeah, because it's just new to them, foreign to them, and it really allows us to do some interesting things when it comes to building and to building context, I mean compiling and building context for intellisents and so on when it's not based on a file system, but it's based on
an intentional project structure. So I guess you could replicate that in the filesystem too, but that's typically not what you see, and so that's you know, we've it's always been a little bit problematic too, because loading from a file system is fast, but loading from a project hierarchy that you have to read the entire hierarchy first before you can figure out the dependencies between them and how to then render them in the solution explore right in
the tree view. And so there's always it's always been more expensive from that perspective working with the projects and solutions. So this time around we've we've finally i'd say, been able to go really really deep on some performance stuff to make that, you know, faster than ever. So you'll notice the first thing you'll notice in the new version is how fast things show up, how fast project solutions load all that, it's just it's visible immediately.
I was under the impression that the reason why visual studio proper is slower than say visual studio code is because there's a lot of calm involved in stuff, and so that naturally kind of slows down the whole process and kind of bloats the memory. But I don't know if that's really true. What do you think about that?
No, that that had that has some truth to it, for sure. And but also like visual studios over twenty eight years old, and so there's there's some things that have just evolved over time, like some debt that has been building up, right, and we've finally been able to look at that, but some very key aspects of it. But one thing that was was a thing was blocking
the UI threat. So when you would click a button to do it something, sometimes whatever would happen when you click that button would do that on the UI threat. And what that means is that visual studio freezese. Nothing could update on the score, right, and so we would and so we get what we call it's called a hang, but you might call it a freeze, and Zoo would be unresponsive for like a half a second.
Once the programmers know all about that though. I mean, if you've done any kind of multi threaded or a programming, you know what that is.
That's top programmers.
Richard had this comment about outlook sixty five threads and not one of them for me, that's my thread.
But when you start but when you start doing that, and that's part of that profile the thing too, right or or debugger where like something like an AI can help you. Is it's really hard to d book like acinc call stacks and you know, multi threaded applications or whatnot.
But this time around, we've really really done more than ever in terms of moving things out of the UI threat and that we run dot net you know core processes under visual Studio that you know runs very qui and very fast, and it does a lot of that work in the background now. So you'll see visual Studio becoming a lot snappier. So opening startup, opening a solution, time you hit five, like compilation and time for you to hit When you hit a five too, you hit
your break point. Is that was so much faster than ever was and it does all that while the UI is still respond here.
If you guys at Microsoft, the people that are working on Visual Studio in general are using AI to help them find bottlenecks and find places that need to be fixed or updated.
Yeah, we're using it internally. You have to you have to think about the So the Profiler Agent is really new, So we haven't used it like extensively, like for a long period of time. It's very new, and I tell you it was. Some of the first things we did was we told all the teams, hey use it on your own code base inside Visual Studio, and so we see optimizations come in all the time. But what Nick did, he's on the profiler team, he did something really interesting.
He started with the top hundred Nugat packages and he would profile them to figure out where are the hotspots or whatever and can he fixed them? So he sent starts sending pull requests to the top Nugat packages because they're used in thousands and if not millions of apps, right, and that means if he can like do seventeen percent better performance for some of these packages, like that's a huge win for everybody.
Yeah wow.
So he's been very busy doing that and that's really great because that trains him in using the product and figuring out where there could be further improvements and so on. Plus all the internal dog footing stuff off that profiler ends up making everything better and we can fine tune all these things and it's it's really impressive.
Well, I guarantee Polly isn't one of those newcat packages that needed improvement.
It's really should I tell nick to go look at that.
No, it's really fast, it's really good.
Oh, it's fast enough, it doesn't need Yeah, it's.
Like all native the as your team got involved because they were leaning on it. Pretty Yeah.
I think actually Nicky found that when he ran some profiling, he figured out all the way down in dot Net framework itself that there was something that could be optimize. So I think he's gonna send up a code update. I'm not sure they take pull requests in the traditional sense, but like he's gonna see if we can get some.
That's so cool.
That framework, because that has to do with visual studio startup. Visual Studio actually is a native process that boots up the dot Net framework in its own. It's like it's really kind of.
And you're talking about you're talking about the Donet framework, the Windows version of dot Net framework.
Yeah, framework for it Yep.
That's so cool that you guys are doing that, and it's it's inspirational.
Really well, it's just a reminder that Microsoft employees use Visual Studio like the products you build the products with the products Uber Dog Souper.
That's my joke always like, hey, did you know that Visual Studio twenty twenty six was build using Visual Studio six.
That's great, it's true. So where can folks take out preview out firs spin.
Yeah, go to visual studio dot com, click the download button and select the preview of twenty twenty six. That's how you do it.
But if you already have the Visual Studio installer, you can just load run that and it'll tell you if there are preview versions, right.
You need to maybe if you have the preview already, you've got the latest on the preview that includes the installer. Otherwise, just go to visual studiot com click it there. If it doesn't show up for you, and you can install a side by side. It won't interfere with any other installs. You got a Visual Studio twenty twenty two or whatever, and it will it will look at twenty twenty two
if you have that installed. So when you're installed twenty twenty six, it looks at twenty twenty two, and it looks at your settings, your extensions, and the components the workloads like if you're if you've taken like let's say dot net, ASP, dot net and desktop, those are your two workloads. It will copy that information. It will take that information from twenty twenty two and pre select all that.
So your installation is super smooth. You get all the components you need, settings and extensions because the extensions are you're twenty twenty two. Extensions work in twenty twenty three.
You go, let's hear for extensions. Yeah, going into the future.
Very exciting stuff and that. Yeah, so it's super fast to get from you click the install butt until you're able to open till you're able to open your solution and start writing code. Is probably the fastest ever.
Fantastic nice All right, Well, geez, I think I ran out of questions. You got any more, Richard.
No good. I think it looks like it's gonna be an awesome version of the studio, and it's been a while coming, but I understand why.
Matt, thank you so much. It's been awesome as always.
Thanks for having me. It's my pleasure as always.
All right, and we'll talk to you next time on dot net brocks.
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