How do you build a mobile app in 2018? Or should you? Richard moderates a panel from DevReach in Bulgaria with Sam Basu, Jen Looper and Jo Franchetti about their experiences with different tools building mobile apps. The conversation ranges over Xamarin, Cordova, NativeScript and good ol' fashion mobile web. Is the Progressive Web App good enough now to skip going to the app store? Or do you want your PWA to appear in the app store? How awful are app stores? Great thoughts around testing, access...
Dec 13, 2018•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast What can edge computing do for you? While at the Update Conference in Prague, Carl and Richard chatted with Jared Rhodes about his work building Internet of Things solutions with a variety of hardware and software. Jared talks about building reliable IoT solutions that are simple of customers to interact with - or work without any interaction at all. There are a lot of different choices in the IoT space right now, and no one right way - it is worth experimenting! Support this podcast at — https:...
Dec 11, 2018•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast Windows represents the single largest Git source control library in the world at 300GB - but what does it take to work on it? Carl and Richard talk to Ed Thomson and Jill Campbell about how Azure DevOps (formerly known as VSTS) functions under the load of 33,000 people working on the Windows project with 11 million work items. There are many things in Azure DevOps that can cope with that scale, but some aspects don't make sense to add directly, like moving millions of work items. For that, the t...
Dec 06, 2018•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast What's your dependency injection solution? Carl and Richard talk to Steven van Deursen about his work building SimpleInjector and why there seem to be so many different dependency solution options out there. Steven talks about how he came to build SimpleInjector and what makes different DI solutions valuable - including when the .NET Core team tried to build an abstraction over dependency injection that resulted in an anti-pattern! Dependency injection helps you code in a maintainable way, but t...
Dec 04, 2018•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Is there a morality to software development? Carl and Richard talk to Microsoft Principal Researcher Bill Buxton about his thoughts on what software can do and what our responsibility as software creators is. Bill talks about Melvin Kranzberg's Laws of Technology, starting with the idea that technology is neither good nor evil, nor is it neutral. Ultimately software is a tool, and people decide how that tool is going to be used. We shape tools, but tools ultimately shape us as well. It's always ...
Nov 29, 2018•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast You need more actors in your life! Carl and Richard talk to Aaron Stannard about the latest around Akka.NET, an open source actor model framework that has been evolving and growing for a number of years. Aaron talks about how his company Petabridge is providing professional services around Akka.NET including some custom tooling like a CLI tool called CMD. The conversation also dives into utilizing actors outside of just the server - actors make sense in mobile devices and IoT to name two! It's a...
Nov 27, 2018•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast Carl and Richard talk about the latest science in superconductivity Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations
Nov 22, 2018•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast Windows Server 2019 has shipped and Windows containers have improved! Carl and Richard talk to Elton Stoneman about the changes that have come with Server 2019 and the 1809 Update. Elton describes it as the second significant implementation of containers on Windows, although it has been steadily tested in the field over the past few years. For the most part, containers on Windows now have parity with the Linux containers - and the possibilities for migrating existing .NET applications to contain...
Nov 20, 2018•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast Looking for some build automation options? Carl and Richard talk to Matthias Koch about his open source project called Nuke - as in Nu-Make. Matthias discusses building a domain-specific language in C# that focuses on building software using fluent syntax, but looking beyond those options for more ways to work with third-party software and not getting too tangled in the details. This leads to an entire add-on model for Nuke that lets you encapsulate functionality and complexity. Check it out! Su...
Nov 15, 2018•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast How are user experiences evolving? Carl and Richard talk to Heather Wilde about her work with UX in a number of capacities, including helping to create the user experience of EverNote. The conversation dives into a number of poor UX designs, including frustrations around Windows 10 - but what's coming next? Heather talks about anticipatory design from the perspective of most people living with decision fatigue and being unwilling to make more decisions. So simplify your UI! Popular applications ...
Nov 13, 2018•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast How do you build out your cloud infrastructure? Carl and Richard talk to Luke Hoban about Pulumi, a start-up making open source software that helps you take Infrastructure-as-Code to the next level - not just simple scripts, but real programming languages. Luke talks about getting away from the cut-and-paste effects of Infrastructure-as-Code into building classes with enough sophistication that you're not creating technical debt each time you build a new cloud resource. With support for multiple...
Nov 08, 2018•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast Web performance is still important - what are you doing to keep your sites fast? Carl and Richard talk to Benjamin Howarth about his current approach to web site performance - with a focus on dealing with older smartphones and lower bandwidth. The conversation runs through a huge gamut of tools that help you understand what your customer experiences when accessing your website, and where to focus to make improvements. Not everyone has 4G connections and top-of-the-line phones - be kind to your u...
Nov 06, 2018•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast Functions are ephemeral and stateless - right? What if they weren't? Carl and Richard talk to Maxime Rouiller about durable functions in Azure. Maxime dives into the patterns that durable functions provide, starting with the chaining pattern, where you can declare a series (or chain) of function calls that only start when the previous function completes. And then onto the fan-out pattern that allows for an orchestrator to launch any number of simultaneous functions and then collect their results...
Nov 01, 2018•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast Is .NET ready for the Internet of Things? Carl and Richard talk to Bryan Costanich about the current state of IoT and how his startup Wilderness Labs is building next-generation hardware that runs .NET! Bryan talks about how microcontrollers have gotten much more powerful today, but the programming stacks are still back in the 80s. The expectations of customers today is cloud integration, auto-updating and mobile apps - which is expensive and time-consuming to write in C++! Enter Meadow, program...
Oct 30, 2018•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ready for a different database? Carl and Richard talk to Craig Kerstiens about his work with PostgreSQL. The conversation starts out with a little bit of the history of PostgreSQL being one of the original open source projects - and how it has evolved over the years. Today there is great support for Postgres in .NET, and in Azure as well! Craig is the editor of the Postgres Weekly newsletter, so if you're keen to get engaged with the Postgres community, sign up today! Support this podcast at — h...
Oct 25, 2018•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast Call it an impromptu Geek Out! While at NDC Sydney, Carl and Richard talked to Agustinus Nalwan about his work with artificial intelligence technology in his company. This leads to a larger conversation about the risks around AI and the idea that we may be approaching the Singularity - which according to Gus is where technology continues to teach itself. Richard chimes in on the debate around the Singularity from Ray Kurtzweil, exploring how humans could integrate with technology and what that w...
Oct 23, 2018•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ready for some functional thinking? While at NDC in Sydney, Carl and Richard chatted with Daniel Chambers about his experiences in functional programming, starting with F# and moving to Haskell. Daniel talks about how F# serves as the gateway drug for functional programming, living within Visual Studio and still interoperating nicely with the object-oriented world. But sometimes you want pure functional, and Haskell can help you - communicating with it via web service models, you write purely fu...
Oct 18, 2018•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast What does it take to make an application resilient to exploits? Caring about more than just the code you wrote! While at NDC in Sydney, Carl and Richard talked to Nina Juliadotter about securing all the code in your application - including the open source libraries that your application takes dependencies on. Nina talks about building tests into your CI/CD pipeline to evaluate all the libraries in your project to figure out what is in your application and what the current versions are. Do you ke...
Oct 16, 2018•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast What can PowerBI do for you? While at NDC in Sydney, Carl and Richard talked to Peter Myers about Microsoft's modern data analytics tool. The conversation starts out exploring the history of data analytics at Microsoft and how it has landed at PowerBI. Peter talks about how PowerBI is both a Software-as-a-Service tool and Platform-as-a-Service component. You can embed PowerBI in your applications to do dashboards and dynamic reporting. It consumes virtually any data source and has great programm...
Oct 11, 2018•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast Start programming quantum today! While at NDC in Sydney, Carl and Richard talked with John Azariah about Q# and the Quantum Development Kit that he has helped create. The conversation starts out with a refresher on quantum computing in general, including exploring a number of the myths and fallacies - John brings up the really important problems that quantum can tackle, including (no kidding!) world hunger and climate change. John dives into what Q# is all about, being able to abstract away from...
Oct 09, 2018•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast How do you read other people's code? While at NDC Sydney, Carl and Richard talked to Patricia Aas about the fine art of studying code you haven't written - and even more challenging, understanding it! Code doesn't read like a novel, there really is no beginning or end, it's always an exploration. The conversation also turns to being respectful of existing code, recognizing that it is as good as it could be at the time and that there are always ways to make it better. And when you're writing code...
Oct 04, 2018•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast You need a bot for that! While at NDC in Sydney, Carl and Richard talked to Adam Stephensen about his experiences building bots. The bot craze has died down a bit these days, but that means that more serious work is being done. Adam talks about what it takes to build a good bot, looking beyond the FaqBot and into more context-sensitive and service-oriented bots. In the end, a bot is just another front-end over your well-organized services layer that can handle web and mobile front-end services a...
Oct 02, 2018•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast Can you build a neural net from scratch? While at NDC in Sydney, Carl and Richard talked to Joe Albahari about using LINQPad to create neural nets from scratch. LINQPad is an interactive development environment for .NET - originally focused on helping you build LINQ expressions. But as Joe explains, it can be used for all sorts of interactive coding experiences - including learning to build neural networks. Joe talks through the fundamentals of neural nets and what it's like to build neural nets...
Sep 27, 2018•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast SignalR is updated! Carl and Richard talk to Microsoft Cloud Developer Advocate Anthony Chu about the latest updates to SignalR - including a version of SignalR for .NET Core! Anthony talks about how SignalR has evolved since the first versions in 2011, today there is still the Standard Framework edition as well as the new .NET Core edition. And then there's also the Azure backend! You can run the back end in Azure with a free tier, and there's a paid tier as the scale gets larger. Anthony also ...
Sep 25, 2018•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast How do you test a single page application? Carl and Richard talk to Dan Wahlin about cypress.io, Dan's favorite new open source library for testing anything in the browser, including SPAs like Angular, React and Vue. The conversation dives into the various challenges around testing for web apps, trying to get beyond unit testing and into more functional testing that will let you know if you broke the UI. Dan talks about taking over existing projects that have chunks of code that everyone fears -...
Sep 20, 2018•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast Time to rub a little DevOps on it! Carl and Richard talk to Donovan Brown about the state of DevOps at Microsoft - including some important changes! The conversation starts out talking about the latest tooling making it easier than ever to get a great automated pipeline of continuous delivery. But that's not enough, there's a cultural shift that has to happen also. Donovan talks about how IT folks can resist the changes that come with rapid deployment, and Richard argues back about how IT roles ...
Sep 18, 2018•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Internet of Things keeps evolving! Carl and Richard talk to Suz Hinton about her on-going work in the IoT space, including joining Microsoft! It's been five years since Suz created the MeowShoes, and the combination of Moore's Law and the Cloud has made IoT more powerful and less expensive at the same time. Suz talks about coding in JavaScript via NodeJS to deploy code to all sorts of devices, along the way mentioning that operating systems just don't matter much, these days you can program ...
Sep 13, 2018•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast What's an Intelligent Edge? Carl and Richard talk to Microsoft EVP and CTO Kevin Scott about his work in software with Google, LinkedIn and Microsoft - and what he focuses on today. Kevin talks about the resurgence of interest in .NET and C#, and the expansion of .NET across all sorts of development areas including Internet of Things. This leads to a conversation around Intelligent Edge, recognizing that there is enough compute power in even the smallest of devices that they can do analysis of d...
Sep 11, 2018•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast How do you protect the source code you ship in your applications? Carl and Richard talk to Gabriel Torok, who has led PreEmptive Software for years and has provided code obsfuscation for .NET since the very beginning - for free! Today it's not enough to conceal your code, as Gabe says, it's about tamper-proofing. Not just to keep your code from being stolen, but to stop hackers from stealing data and exploiting your applications. With GDPR and other regulations, your responsibilities to protect ...
Sep 06, 2018•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Redux Dance Craze is on! Carl and Richard talk to Ward Bell about how Redux has becoming a key player in state management for UX stacks in modern Single Page Application development. Although Redux was originally a library to support the React component model, today there are implementations of Redux for almost any Javascript UI solution - including Angular! Ward talks about how Redux and reactive architecture makes a cleaner, tidier and more maintainable UI solution. And lots of great side ...
Sep 04, 2018•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast