.NET Rocks!

.NET Core 2 is shipped - what comes next? While at Ignite in Orlando, Carl and Richard chatted with Scott Hunter about life after shipping .NET Core 2. The conversation ranges over what the .NET Standard really means, and the fact that there are no immediate plans to declare new standards - there's no need! Scott also talks about XAML Standard and hints at some interesting futures for WinForms and...

There are so many messaging options in Azure, how do you choose? While at ProgNet in London, Carl and Richard sat down with Clemens Vasters to talk through the strengths and weaknesses of each messaging service. Clemens has been part of every messaging product in Azure, starting with Service Bus more than ten years ago. He discusses how customer needs and increasing demands in messaging resulted i...

What's up with Artificial Intelligence - and why should we care? While at DevIntersection in Stockholm, Carl and Richard hosted a panel discussion with Seth Juarez, Jessica Engstrom and Tess Ferrandez to explore the current AI craze. Each of the panelists discuss the technologies they've been working with for years that now fall into the banner of AI - whether that be machine learning, speech and...

Why should open source developers consider the Microsoft stack? While at ProgNet in London, Carl and Richard sat down with Dylan Beattie to talk about his experiences working with developers that have written lots of code, but not in the Microsoft world. The conversation starts out focused more on the ongoing evolution of the Microsoft Stack with the recent release of Core 2 and the evolving abili...

Core 2 is out, and with it, Entity Framework Core 2! While at ProgNet in London, Carl and Richard chatted with Julie Lerman about the latest version of Entity Framework Core. Julie talks about what's in, what's out and what's different - and it's a lot. The discussion digs into why you would use EF Core, including cases where you would use it with the regular Framework, not just with .NET Core. Th...

How would you make presentations better? While at ProgNet in London, Carl and Richard talked to Mark Rendle about his efforts to build a tool to make presentations more social - he calls it Shtik! The idea is to provide a cross-platform presentation tool using HTML so that it works on any platform (hence .NET Core) but also provides ways for the attendees to take notes and send feedback in real ti...

How do you diagnose problems in your applications? While at ProgNet in London, Carl and Richard sat down with Jon Skeet to talk through how he does diagnostics and understanding bugs. The conversation starts out with a discussion around a comment that Richard read about writing great Stack Overflow questions by breaking down the problem into the smallest possible reproducible version. Jon talks ab...

Event-driven architecture in Azure! Carl and Richard talk to Dan Rosanova about Azure Event Grid, built to power event-driven and serverless apps in Azure. Dan talks about how Event Grid picks up where WebHooks leave off, providing simpler connectivity between a variety of event streams and routing to different event consumers. The conversation also digs into the broader concepts of event-driven a...

.NET Core 2 is out - are you ready to migrate? Carl and Richard talk to Jeremy Likness about his experiences migrating his own projects over to Core 2 from .NET Framework. The latest version of Core has the vast majority of the base class libraries from the original framework implemented. Jeremy talks about his open source project called Sterling that hails back from the Silverlight days as a NoSQ...

Struggling to get started with Universal Windows Platform applications? Carl and Richard talk to Clint Rutkas about the Windows Template Studio (WTS). WTS was first released into the Studio marketplace at Build in 2017 and has been updating every six weeks or so - with lots of community contributions. Clint talks about striking the right balance between generating code automatically that demonstra...

New to ASP.NET Core 2 is Razor Pages - how is it different from Razor? Carl and Richard talk to Jess Chadwick about how Razor Pages takes Razor to the next level, getting away from traditional MVC (which is a funny thing to say) and into a more flexible model with a simpler code-behind approach. Jess talks about how this approach often ends up more closely coupled, but in a lot of cases, that's ju...

Do you have animation in your work? Carl and Richard chat with Rachel Nabors about her work putting animation into web applications. The conversation starts out with a bit of a history lesson around early animation on computers, especially around touch - Rachel argues that what made the iPhone great was the keyboard animation metaphor so good you forgot you were typing on glass. Animation when don...

Ready to try on F#? While at NDC Oslo, Carl and Richard chatted with Scott Wlaschin about what C# developers need to know to get started with F#. Scott talks a bit about his own history with development which ties in with the evolution of functional programming which in a way lost out to object-oriented programming back in the 1980s. Not that the two approaches are mutually exclusive, and Scott di...

How do you get to know your customers? While at NDC Oslo, Carl and Richard talked to Diane Zajac-Woodie about empathy mapping, a process for trying to internalize the dimensions of your various customers. Diane talks about considering various dimensions of people, looking at what the see, hear, think, say and do. Empathy mapping is a way to get your team more engaged around what customer needs are...

Serverless is here - why would you do anything else? While at NDC Oslo, Carl and Richard hosted a panel of Rob Conery, Lynn Langit and Mathias Brandewinder to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the serverless approach to building applications. First up - the terrible name. Of course there are servers involved in serverless computing, you just don't have to think about them. The conversation s...

How does security work in ASP.NET Core? Barry Dorrans knows, he's writing it! While at NDC Oslo, Carl and Richard sat down with Barry to talk about all his work in the security space at Microsoft. As Barry says, .NET Core represented a unique opportunity to reboot how security works on the web for the Microsoft stack, and he tried to do right by us all. Nothing is ever simple as you want it to be,...

How do you make your applications accessible to everyone? Carl and Richard talk to Elle Waters about her working building applications for the visually and hearing impaired, on all sorts of platforms. The web dominates the discussions since so much can be built there. Elle talks about the array of tools that users have to help them understand a web page through audio, even touch solutions using br...

How can ETW help you? While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard talked to Dina Goldshtein about her work instrumenting applications. This leads to a conversation about Event Tracing for Windows, which Dina uses primarily to take measurements of different applications running on Windows machines - but you can have your app add to the ETW stream as well. Monitoring, profiling and debugging are all diff...

There's a lot of stuff in Azure - how to sort through it all? While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard talk to Barry Luijbregts about the huge array of features that exist in the Azure Platform-as-a-Service offerings. Barry runs down the list, helping to categorize what elements are very similar, what are totally different, and how things work together. The platform is where it's at in terms of valu...

Is there more to logging? Yes! While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard talked to Nicholas Blumhardt about his long running logging project called Serilog. Calling back to the earlier .NET Rocks episode on Serilog (2014!), Nicholas talks about how logging is one of those 'bicycle shed' problems - it looks simple on the surface, but the deeper you go, the more you find complexity that needs to be man...

MS Build is cooler than you think! While at NDC Oslo, Carl and Richard sat down with Daniel Plaisted to talk about the latest version of MS Build. But first, a quick conversation about the situation around the reversion back from project files using JSON rather than the traditional XML-driven MS Build files. The good news is that more of what made the JSON project files great is showing up in the...

Are you ready to go into the cosmos? With apologies to the late Carl Sagan, let's talk about Cosmos DB! While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard talked to Josh Lane about Cosmos DB which was first announced at the Build conference. Cosmos DB is a globally distributed multi-modal database. As of the recording it supported several flavors of document storage (including MongoDB) as well as key-value, g...

It's summer in the northern hemisphere, are you ready to get hacking? Carl and Richard chat with the new executive director of the .NET Foundation, Jon Galloway. The conversation starts out talking about the Foundation itself, why it exists and what it does for the .NET open source community as a whole. The Foundation is where .NET Core, C# and more all live, as well as many awesome third party pr...

How do you make your APIs accessible to everyone? While at NDC is Oslo, Carl and Richard talk to Steven Faulkner about GraphQL, a Facebook open source project for exposing your APIs in a type-safe JSON-like approach. Steven talks about the advantages of having an abstraction over your APIs, allowing you to manage new versions of your API painlessly as well as packaging up multiple calls - saving s...

Core 2 is coming - are you ready? While at NDC Oslo, Carl and Richard talked to the amazing duo of Damian Edwards and David Fowler about the rapidly approaching release of Core 2. Expectations are huge, but Damian and David are confident that Core 2 will deliver. The conversation dives into the meta side of software development - what didn't make it into Core 2, what had to be pushed to the next v...