.NET Rocks!

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 w...

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 e...

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 dec...

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 yo...

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...

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 allo...

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-upd...

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 i...

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...

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 func...

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...

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...

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!) wor...

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...

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 f...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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, recognizi...

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...

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 reac...

Migrating .NET applications to .NET Core? The Windows Compatibility Pack can help! Carl and Richard talk to Immo Landwerth about the Windows Compatibility Pack, which is a NuGet package of NuGet packages to fill in over 20,000 APIs that aren't part of .NET Core. The goal, as Immo explains, is to make it easier for developers to deal with migration, by having more parts of the framework included. B...

What the heck is Twitch, and why would you want to code on it? Carl and Richard talk to Jeff Fritz about his experiences building a TwitchTV livestream for coding with .NET. What started as an experiment has grown to thousands of viewers and streams that happen several times a week. Jeff talks about the power of reaching new audiences and how the digressions during streams turn into the most impor...