Ready for a great explanation of Agentic AI? For the last show at Build, Carl and Richard sit down with Seth Juarez to dig into what agentic AI really is - and how you can take advantage of it! Seth discusses the potential of MCP and NLWeb to enable agents to work with each other, as well as the challenges of managing these tools effectively. The conversation turns to what's happening under the hood of agentic AI software, including the limitations of its abilities. There is a need for governanc...
Jul 03, 2025•58 min
It's the Imagine Cup Finalists! While at Build, Carl and Richard sat down with Daniel Kim, Matt Steele, and Gheida Omar to talk about their projects in the Imagine Cup. Gheida discussed Signvrse, a mobile app that enables real-time translation of speech, text, and sign language. Matt tells the story of Hairmatch, a mobile app for women with textured hair. And Daniel describes Argus, the winner of the Imagine Cup, as a two-part wearable device for people with low vision that provides object detec...
Jun 26, 2025•41 min
How do you eliminate the friction of development? Carl and Richard talk to Nicole Forsgren about her upcoming book on eliminating the friction from software development. Building on her earlier book, Accelerate, Nicole discusses the role of AI technologies in software development, along with more traditional DevOps elements, such as automating testing, deployment, telemetry, and more. There's never been a better time to pay attention to your tools and methods when it comes to software developmen...
Jun 19, 2025•58 min
What happens when AI comes to your web testing tool? While at Build, Carl and Richard talked to Debbie O'Brien about the latest features in Playwright, including Playwright MCP, the model control plane for Playwright capabilities. Debbie talks about using Playwright MCP to buy a table. Ask your LLM what tests should be written for your web page, and then ask it to write them.
Jun 12, 2025•49 min
How will coding agents change your code? While at Build, Carl and Richard chatted with Scott Hunter about the announcements around coding agents at the keynote. Scott talks about the agent mode available in Visual Studio Code - and now in Visual Studio! Agent mode allows the LLM to evaluate the code across an entire solution, not just the file you're currently looking at. You can create a workflow where GitHub issues are assigned to the agent, which then generates code and provides a pull reques...
Jun 05, 2025•55 min
What if you could use ElasticSearch serverless? While at Build, Carl and Richard chatted with Ken Exner about the new announcements around Elastic providing serverless storage and search! Ken talks about paying for only the data you move and store with serverless, rather than needing to operate any infrastructure for Elastic. The conversation digs into the potential of Elastic in Azure AI Foundry to provide ultra-fast access to current company data for your LLM implementations. Elastic did vecto...
May 28, 2025•42 min
Do you understand how networking works in C#? Carl and Richard chat with Chris Woody Woodruff about his new book on networking with C#. Chris runs down the fundamentals of networking and then discusses the different approaches readily available in the C# world, including web sockets, gRPC, SignalR, and many more! The conversation also turns to the upcoming QUIC standards built into HTTP/3 that should simplify networking. Sure, you could go with the defaults, but why not explore all the options!
May 22, 2025•1 hr 3 min
How do you secure browser-based frontends with ASP.NET Core backends? Carl and Richard discuss the Backend for Frontend (BFF) Security Framework with Erwin van der Valk. Erwin talks about Sam Newman's BFF Pattern and how it helps deal with the diversity of clients, including web, desktop, and mobile, to work with a common backend. OAuth 2.0 is capable of dealing with this complexity, but there are many moving parts, and that's where the security framework can help!
May 15, 2025•50 min
How do you balance architecture and code? Carl and Richard talk to Steve Smith about various architectural strategies and the swing back-and-forth against over-designing architecture and getting code written. Steve talks about how architecture changes depending on the size and number of teams, how the latest tools can help with architectural choices, and the challenge of effective refactoring when things need to change. Lots of great conversation!
May 08, 2025•54 min
Open Source Maintainers are burning out or going commercial - how do we solve this? Carl and Richard chat with Rob Mensching about his work to create the open source maintenance fee through GitHub. Rob talks about the common problem of single maintainers getting buried under issues and demands of consumers for a project. Recognizing that most people cannot contribute to the project, a maintenance fee helps support the maintainer in a low friction way for everyone involved. Check out the links to...
May 01, 2025•1 hr 6 min
How can a large language model help your organization answer government RFPs? Carl and Richard talk to Vishwas Lele about his startup pWin, as in proposal win. Vishwas talks about being a year into the startup and his deeper understanding of how AI technologies can augment skilled operators to produce better quality products in less time, including responding to RFPs. The conversation digs into tuning the LLM to focus on the data relevant to each section of the RFP so that the operator can inter...
Apr 24, 2025•55 min
Can you integrate performant audio-video into your .NET application? Carl and Richard talk to Elias Puurunen about his work at Tractus Events, where he uses the NDI protocols to bring real-time audio and video streams into his C# application. Elias talks about the power of P/Invoke to access the underlying libraries for controlling video streams, including utilizing NVidia GPUs for extremely fast encoding and decoding. You could write this code in C++, but why?
Apr 16, 2025•1 hr 6 min
Ready to build an agentic AI in .NET? Carl and Richard talk to Spencer Schneidenbach about his work using large language models to enhance customer interactions in healthcare. Spencer discusses using the LLMs to summarize customer conversations to identify topic areas, sentiment, and other concerns. He digs into how Microsoft's Semantic Kernel makes connecting an OpenAI model to your APIs easy, fetching information and creating a context for testing reliability and consistency with these models....
Apr 10, 2025•56 min
How do you measure the quality of a large language model? Carl and Richard talk to Dr. Jodie Burchell about her work measuring large language models for accuracy, reliability, and consistency. Jodie talks about the variety of benchmarks that exist for LLMs and the problems they have. A broader conversation about quality digs into the idea that LLMs should be targeted to the particular topic area they are being used for - often, smaller is better! Building a good test suite for your LLM is challe...
Apr 03, 2025•1 hr 1 min
What are JavaScript promises, and why do you want to make them? Carl and Richard talk to Martine Dowden about all the various async options available in Javascript today, including Callbacks, Promises, Async/Await, and even ReactiveJS! Martine digs into some of the more remarkable features available, including grouping sync calls together so code is only called when they all complete, or the race option where only one needs to complete, and everything else is thrown away. Lots of power is availa...
Mar 27, 2025•53 min
What's the latest with .NET Aspire? Carl and Richard talk to Rob Richardson about his experiences with .NET Aspire to help build great .NET cloud apps. Rob talks about all the goodness that comes out of the box with Aspire, including OpenTelemetry, containerization, good security practices, and the excellent dashboard. The discussion turns to the challenges of evolving .NET to be better in the cloud, retrofitting existing applications with Aspire, and all the container choices you have in front ...
Mar 20, 2025•57 min
Seventeen years of Automapper! Carl and Richard talk to Jimmy Bogard about his latest version of Automapper - and the challenge of maintaining a long-lived and much-loved open-source library! Jimmy talks about the origins of Automapper as a tool he needed for working with clients and automating the mapping of objects. Initially, he moved to GitHub on Codeplex in 2009, and as open source became more popular in the .NET community, Automapper has hundreds of millions of downloads. And now, the next...
Mar 13, 2025•55 min
React version 19 has been released! Carl and Richard talk to Aurora Scharff about the long-awaited version of React that incorporates React Server Components and many other features. Aurora talks about the rethink involved in switching to a server-first implementation of a React website, which is best suited for greenfield implementations. For existing React apps, you'll want to look at React Router, which has V7, incorporates Remix features, and provides a bridge between React 18 and 19. Lots o...
Mar 06, 2025•51 min
How can vertical architecture help you? Carl and Richard talk to Jeremy Miller about using vertical architecture to help build applications quickly and reliably. Jeremy talks about resisting the over-thinking of architecture leaving room for developers to build the app and get to results rapidly - by taking a vertical slice of the problem space, end-to-end, and getting something running as soon as possible. The conversation digs into many concerns about taking shortcuts, collaborating with other...
Feb 27, 2025•54 min
Ready to speed up your cross-platform development? Carl and Richard chat with Francois Tanguay and Sasha Krsmanovic about Uno Hot Design. First shown at .NET Conf in 2024, Hot Design brings the Hot Reload experience to UX onto your various client devices. Francois talks about the evolution of the Uno Platform into a place where you can use a variety of client libraries to build your app and deploy your client of choice. But when it comes to iterating the implementation, Hot Design speeds your de...
Feb 20, 2025•57 min
How do customers take control of their data from merchants? Carl and Richard chat with Richard Reukema about his book The Empowered Customer. Richard discusses building a data cooperative between customers and merchants using ethical data handling techniques and technology to create mutual benefit. The conversation dives into how to get merchants to migrate from their loyalty programs into this more constructive and broader model.
Feb 13, 2025•56 min
Can tooling make implementing AI features in your applications easier? Steve Sanderson says yes! Carl and Richard talk to Steve about the Microsoft.Extensions.AI preview toolset for OpenAI and oLlama. Steve discusses ideas around useful places for AI technologies to appear in your application, not just chat. The conversation digs into more ambient ideas, like providing suggested cut-and-paste items when entering forms and even dynamic changes to UI based on how a user interacts with the applicat...
Feb 06, 2025•53 min
Ready for a migration story? Carl and Richard talk to Nathan Westfall about his experiences moving an application for school buses from Xamarin Forms to Blazor. Nathan describes the interplay between a tablet on the bus for the driver, cloud services in AWS, and parent smartphones. The discussion dives into the advantages of Blazor on the client from a server resources perspective when dealing with hundreds of thousands of parents, plus being compliant with all of the rules and expectations of a...
Jan 30, 2025•52 min
What's a Microsoft DevBox, and why do you want one? Carl and Richard talk to Isaac Levin about the power of DevBox to help you get up and running fast with a development project. Issac describes a virtual workstation designed for software development with much more processing, memory, and storage options. With the management tools, you can quickly build templates to create new instances,and only pay for what you use. You can have instances for different projects, even different versions!
Jan 23, 2025•52 min
A visit from one of Scott Guthrie's Ninja Army! Carl and Richard chat with Rob Conery about his latest work with Microsoft technologies, including a VS Code extension for Copilot to understand Postgres databases! Rob talks about spending time in other programming platforms besides .NET to expand his horizons, which led him to create a tool called Viper.NET, similar to the tool from the Go platform, to help manage configuration. The conversation also visits and revisits the impact of GitHub Copil...
Jan 16, 2025•55 min
How is your architectural intelligence? Carl and Richard talk to Thomas Betts about his thoughts on implementing AI-related technologies into applications. Thomas talks about stripping the magic out of AI and focusing on the realities - in the end, it's just another API you can call. The conversation digs into what useful implementations of large language models look like, as UX alternatives, summarizers, and tools for reviewing existing work.
Jan 09, 2025•1 hr
It's a new year and time for an Energy Geek Out! Richard catches up on all the developments in energy generation over the past year, including solar, wind, wave, hydrogen, geothermal, nuclear, and more... the conversation also digs into the impacts of the cost of financing going up, the efficiency of different energy generation, and some of the new technologies on the horizon. There's been a lot of progress recently, including a new interest in nuclear power - how will this all play out?
Jan 02, 2025•2 hr 7 min
The Space Geek Out for 2024! Richard talks to Carl about SpaceX breaking more records - the most flights in one year, including four test flights of Starship and the Heavy Booster - including the extraordinary catch of the booster in IFT-5! 2024 also saw the first flight of ULA's Vulcan and the second. And then there's the saga of Starliner - and the fact that Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore will spend ten months on the ISS instead of the planned eight days. More missions to the Moon mean more...
Dec 26, 2024•1 hr 45 min
What's coming for GitHub? Carl and Richard talk to April Yoho about the recent announcements from GitHub Universe and how they will roll out in 2025. The biggest topic, of course, is all the large language models coming to GitHub - there are a bunch of copilots! April talks about original GitHub Copilot, Copilot Workspace, and Copilot Chat - so many options! Now, you can choose your language model to move beyond OpenAI. And there are other changes at GitHub, including EU residency, new features ...
Dec 19, 2024•57 min
How can event modeling help you build better applications? Carl and Richard talk to Adam Dymitruk about Event Sourcing and Event Modeling, including the new book Understanding Eventsourcing. Adam talks about thinking through business workflows as an approach to event sourcing, where new data is constantly added, never modified. These data streams can then be modeled into different workflows following consistent patterns that make your application straightforward to build and maintain. It does ta...
Dec 12, 2024•1 hr 4 min
