.NET Rocks!

How are you doing TDD today? Recorded online at NDC Manchester, Carl and Richard chat with Ian Cooper about his views on TDD, going back to his old talk on Where TDD Went Wrong. Ian talks about how folk struggled to understand TDD, focusing solely on writing tests, rather than understanding how people use their software. This leads to a conversation on how development approaches have evolved with...

How do you test the security of your applications? Carl and Richard chat with Kim Carter about purpleteam, an open-source library for testing web applications as part of your CI/CD pipeline. Kim talks about OWASP in general and yes, SQL injection (and injection in general) is still the number one security risk - but there are plenty more. Don't be an easy victim, start making security testing part...

What is the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the environment? Carl and Richard talk to Amber McKenzie about her examination of resource consumption when creating machine learning models. As Amber explains, using ML models is not particularly resource-intensive, but creating them is - which leads to a discussion about using technologies like transfer learning to avoid making models unnecessaril...

How is Visual Studio working for you? Carl and Richard chat with Mads Kristensen about his new role on the Visual Studio feedback team - not that he's ever far from VS extensions! With a dash of home automation thrown in, Mads talks about how you can provide feedback to the Visual Studio team, and how that feedback is part of the continuous development plans for improving Visual Studio! Support th...

Where would you like your Mongo? Carl and Richard chat with James Kovacs and Rachelle Palmer about the latest at MongoDB, the open-source document database. While MongoDB's origins are in open web projects, today it is very popular with the enterprise development crowd and so the libraries for Java and C# are excellent. The conversation also turns to MongoDB Atlas, which is the cloud offering that...

What's next for .NET? Carl and Richard chat with Dan Roth about all the good things coming this November for .NET. The conversation starts out with some discussion around Blazor, which is no longer an experimental project, but now a key part of .NET. Dan talks about the role of MAUI bringing together UI elements for smartphones, tablets, PCs, and more. There's a lot to look forward to by the end o...

How can Elasticsearch help you? Carl and Richard talk to Steve Gordon, who recently moved to Elastic to work on the .NET clients. Steve talks about how Elasticsearch can act as a data store as well as work with existing databases and non-relational data to provide awesome search capabilities to your applications. And not just for search bars - there are many cases where having an ability to see ac...

Do you have apps that need to move to .NET 5? Carl and Richard talk to Mark Rendle about his work on Visual Recode, which started out as a migration tool for WCF to gRPC, but has evolved to deal with the migration to .NET 5 challenges. Mark talks about how older WCF apps can often move to gRPC pretty easily, but moving the app has other problems, like out-of-date libraries, build practices, tests,...

Teams is extensible - wanna write some code? Carl and Richard talk to Hilton Giesenow about his work building Teams extensions - and there are a lot of options! The conversation starts out focusing on what Teams can do for you, which is to be the portal into collaboration at work. Hilton talks about the huge array of extensibility options for Teams to put more of the work in the tabs of Teams - fr...

Can a chatbot make your team development process better? Carl and Richard talk to Phil Haack about his work building Ab.bot, a chatbot designed to work in Slack and Discord to help with building software - call it ChatOps - doing your development workflow with everyone able to see, sending commands through the bot. Phil talks about building add-ins to Ab.bot using C#, Python, and Javascript. ChatO...

What's a Blazor Static Web App, and why should you care? Carl and Richard talk to Jeff Fritz about how the new Azure Static Web App service can be combined with Blazor to do dynamic things on the client, without any client rendering on the server. The conversation ranges over a variety of web development technologies, including Web Forms, Angular, and more. Static doesn't mean boring! Support this...

What's new in Entity Framework Core 5? Carl and Richard chat with Julie Lerman about the latest in EF Core, stories from the trenches of data development and more! Julie talks about there not being an EF Core 4 (to avoid confusion), but that there will be an EF Core 6 which should align pretty nicely with EF 6, which is now in maintenance. Yes, there's more to do to make the ORM better, and parity...

How many ways can you run containers on Azure? Carl and Richard talk to Tom Kerkhove about his experiences working with Azure container solutions. The conversation starts out talking about Azure Functions, which under-the-hood are handled in containers - but you don't control those containers at all. You can run Web Apps in Containers or use the Azure Containers Instance. Azure Service Mesh also s...

Time for an Identity Server update! Carl and Richard talk to Dominick Baier and Brock Allen about Identity Server. The conversation starts out focused on the evolution of security over the internet in the first place, including an update to OAuth - version 2.1. Then the conversation turns to IdentityServer itself, and how to sustain and grow development on it. Dom and Brock talk about building ope...

How secure is your software? Carl and Richard talk to Maya Kaczorowski of GitHub about The State of the Octoverse Security Report - one of three annual reports coming from GitHub about how software is being built. Maya talks about how software vulnerabilities are found and fixed, including the amazing statistic that vulnerabilities on average exist in code for four years before being detected! Als...

Happy New Year! To ring in the New Year, Carl and Richard talk Geek Out for a couple of hours! Topics include the Pandemic, Renewable Energy, the latest in Space and Electric Cars. Yeah, that's right, all the hits in one show! Richard talks about how our understanding of COVID-19 has evolved, and the impact of genetic technology and new vaccine concepts are advancing our response. On the power sid...

.NET 5 is shipped! What happens now? As part of the .BLD() Tech Talks XXL event in the Netherlands, Carl and Richard streamed interviewing Scott Hunter about .NET 5. The conversation turns to how the scope of .NET 5 focused in on how to help projects move from the standard framework onto .NET 5. Scott also dives into the ever-improving performance of .NET, the latest version of Blazor, and the ado...

What does it take to make a flight simulator in C#? On a smartphone? Carl and Richard talk to Laura Laban about her experiences building Infinite Flight - starting with the Windows Phone in 2011! The conversation follows the history of using C# in smartphones, from WinPhone 7 through to MonoTouch, MonoGame, and Xamarin! Laura discusses the challenges of tooling getting deprecated, platforms going...

What can you use Blazor for? Carl and Richard talk to Georgia Nelson about GifBot, a Twitch bot Georgia has built using a variety of tools and languages (including Java) and today is C# and Blazor. Georgia talks about evolving the bot from version to version, looking for ways to make it easier for Twitch streamers to use. From WinForms to WPF to Blazor, the UI has taken a few turns, but Blazor wor...

With a new version of .NET out, it's time for a new version of Nuke! Carl and Richard talk to Matthias Koch about Nuke V5 - synchronizing the version number of Nuke with the version of .NET. Matthias talks about the philosophy of Nuke, focusing on creating builds using C# with package references and class inheritance. This leads to a conversation around build maintainability - making sure every de...

Ever pivoted halfway through a software project? It happens in filmmaking too! Carl and Richard talk to Shawn Wildermuth about his experience making Hello World the Film. Shawn talks about starting out wanting to make a love story about being a programmer - and how anyone could be one. Until he discovered that it wasn't true: That getting into software development does require a certain amount of...

Can you make open source projects in the Microsoft ecosystem and live to tell the tale? Carl and Richard talk to Aaron Stannard about his view of the Microsoft open-source ecosystem, including the challenges of building and maintaining Akka. NET. Aaron talks about Microsoft being good producers of open source but not good consumers of open source - they still have that not-invented-here viewpoint...

Good user interface design makes your company money! Carl and Richard talk to Billy Hollis about his latest work around understanding the return on investment that exists with user interface design. Billy talks about a spreadsheet he's been using in presentations to actually look at the cost associated with bad UI designs, that require more keystrokes, more searching, more time and more frustratio...

Cake is shipping! Carl and Richard talk to Mattias Karlsson about Cake, aka C# Make. First on the show in 2016, Cake has been through a lot - all the twists and turns of .NET Core, becoming a cross-platform product - it's not easy to be a good build system! But things are stable now and version 1 is released. Mattias talks about how Cake fits into your build pipeline, working with many other compo...

Everyone wants AI - but where's the business value? Carl and Richard talk to Joel Hulen and Kyle Bunting about building machine learning models and what they can do for business. The conversation starts out with the typical AI-destroys-the-world debate, recognizing that these tools are just that, tools. Using them responsibly is important, but so is focusing on business value. What can this techno...