.NET Rocks!

Ready for the new Angular? Carl and Richard talk to John Papa about Angular 2 being in beta. And really in beta - John mentions that for the past few betas, updating his samples have only taken a few minutes, not hours. The conversation also dives into the controversy around the significant differences between Angular 1 and 2, although John sees it as simplification. A lot of ceremony that existed...

How is C# 7 coming along? Carl and Richard talk to Kathleen Dollard about her involvement in the very public process that is the open source development of the next C#. Kathleen talks about how there are issues in the GitHub repository for Roslyn that are actually design notes - summaries of the current thinking on the new features coming. Where things get really exciting is the comments on those...

How do you build cross-platform desktop applications? Carl and Richard talk to Curtis Wensley about eto.forms, an open source project he started back in 2006 to deal with cross-platform challenges. Originally focused on mobile, Curtis recognized that Xamarin was moving seriously into that space and pivoted to the desktop side, just in time for Silverlight to go into limbo. Under the hood, eto depe...

Ready to transpile your Javascript? Carl and Richard chat with Craig McKeachie about BabelJS, an open source tool for transpiling Javascript. Why would you want to do that? So you can write in the latest version of Javascript and still have it run everywhere! Craig talks about how the rate of evolution in Javascript is increasing, and the jump that is ECMAScript 6, also known as ECMAScript 2015, m...

Where do development patterns fit into your world? Carl and Richard talk to Gael Fraiteur about the evolution of PostSharp into a library for implementing patterns. The combination of aspect-oriented programming and patterns is powerful - providing a means to implement a pattern while keeping it separate from your business code. Gael explores one particular pattern - multi-threading. Postsharp imp...

What's missing from most document data storage technology? Carl and Richard talk to Jeremy Miller about Marten, an open source document data store library that runs on top of PostGreSQL. Why would you run a document store on top of a relational database? For the features! Jeremy talks about how PostGreSQL brings the backup systems, development tooling and all that DevOps goodness to Marten. Under...

Can you continuously deliver software on Azure? Carl and Richard talk to Jeffrey Palermo about his approach (and toolkit) to do continuous delivery - and Azure makes it far more feasible! The conversation starts out with some definitions, recognizing that the development community has been working its way toward faster delivery of value to customers for a long time - it's part of the Agile Manifes...

How do you manage your software releases? Carl and Richard talk to Kevin Mack and Brandon Rohrer about the various tools that come together to help automate software releases. The focus on this approach is a product formerly known as InRelease by InCycle, which was acquired by Microsoft back in 2013. Now it's known as Release Management Services for VSTS and deeply integrated with the Studio tools...

Have you used the biggest, most complex Single Page Application (SPA) in the world? It's the Azure Portal! Carl and Richard talk to Jakub Jedryszek, one of the folks building the framework that runs the Azure Portal. Jakub talks about the portal framework being built on TypeScript and Knockout so that all the different Microsoft teams building Azure products don't get delayed in delivery because t...

What does Virtual Reality and XAML have to do with each other? Carl and Richard talk to Laurent Bugnion about his work around building virtual reality software. The challenge, as Laurent puts it, is the whole 3D issue. Building 3D software is tricky, and the tooling is hugely important. The conversation turns to tools like Unity3D, which is very popular in the 3D space. But can XAML do the job? Wh...

So where are containers and microservices going? While at NDC London, Carl and Richard hosted a panel discussion with Michele Bustamante, Mark Rendle and Ben Hall to talk about microservices and the role that containers play in making microservices manageable and practical. Docker is the most well-known of the container services, but its not alone, and the panel debates the relative merits of the...

Do agile development practices make economic sense? Carl and Richard chat with Matthew Renze about his views on the economics, psychology and science behind agile development. The conversation turns to the benefits of agile done well - moving rapidly to build effective solutions for a business. This touches a lot of points that developers care about, like their software actually being used and bei...

How do you get started with machine learning? On the last stop of the Scot Net Rocks tour, Carl and Richard talked to Gary Short about his work independently and now with Microsoft building machine learning solutions for a large variety of companies. Gary talks about the evolution of machine learning, and how the cloud has become a critical part of the equation. With the cloud, you can harness as...

How can you bring change to your organization in an agile way? While on the ScotNetRocks tour, Carl and Richard talked to Chris McDermott about his experiences bringing agile to companies, and how that affected change. The conversation explores the idea that companies are actually highly resistant to change - change represents risk, and risk should be avoided. How do you really embrace change? Chr...

Geeking out on agriculture? Of course! While food is rarely the number one issue in the western world, food quality and security always bring out a certain level of anxiety in people. So how did we get here? Are we going to run out of food? Is the population explosion going to doom mankind? Or will it be climate change? Can technology actually work through all these problems? Carl and Richard disc...

Can React make your web pages more reusable? While on the Scot Net Rocks tour, Carl and Richard stopped in Edinburgh to chat with Chris Canal about his work with React. The conversation turns to a stack of tools you may never had heard of for building reliable, maintainable and testable JavaScript code - no really, check out the links! Chris talks about how React creates objects, mixing JavaScript...

Can Agile scale to thousands of people? While at NDC London, Carl and Richard sat down with Dan North (and a bottle of scotch) and had a deep conversation about the limits of agile and how we can get beyond that limit. Agile naturally lends itself to feature teams - 5-10 people who have a variety of skills that can get a feature out the door. But to build more substantial software, you need more p...

How can you learn what your users like about your application and what you can do to make it better? Enter user research! While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talked to Lily Dart about her approaches to doing user research - guerrilla style! Lily talks about being out on street corners asking passersby to look at an application on a smartphone and give their impressions, all for a Starbucks card....

How do you instrument your applications in production? While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talked to Joe Guadagno about his efforts using Azure Application Insights to understand how his web applications run under load. Gathering telemetry from your production applications used to be a very case-by-case scenario, but when working the Azure Web Sites, things get a bit simpler, using Azure App Ins...

What patterns make sense with containers? At NDC London, Carl and Richard talk to Ben Hall about some more mature pattern approaches to container implementations, specifically with Docker. Ben talks through a number of key patterns that make containers work the way you expect in production. There are key elements such as immutability, avoiding circumventing the configuration-as-code mindset of con...

What does your company do when it brings in new hires? While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talked to Jessie Shternshus of the Improv Effect about how she helps organizations create fun, innovative onboarding processes that actually reflect the culture of the company. Jessie talks about various exercises she uses to help folks get comfortable with a team and communicate effectively. The conversat...

How can you make machine learning simpler? While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talked to Seth Juarez about his open source project NuML. Seth has been working on NuML since 2011, providing tooling to let developers think more about the goals of their machine learning than the specific mathematical concepts involved. But he reinforces that you do need to learn some core concepts of machine learni...

How are you managing identity? While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard talk to Dominick Baier and Brock Allen about their work Identity Server. Now part of the .NET Foundation (making it easier for enterprises to being open source into their organization), Identity Server can provide the authentication services across all your applications. That naturally leads to a discussion on the authorizatio...

What do you know about R? While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talked to Barbara Fusinska about her work using R as part of real system. Barbara talks about the role of statistics and machine learning as well as the various tools that make it easier to incorporate into your application. The conversation turns to MatLab and Revolution Analytics language R. R is focused on machine learning, it's no...

Service Discovery? Is UDDI back? While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talk to Ian Cooper about service discovery in the microservices world. Ian talks about the effect of microservices in making systems more complex - it's easy to end up with hundreds of services. And you don't want to be hard-coding service locations into your application, what happens when things change? While you could roll yo...