.NET Rocks!

What happened at Build? Lots! Carl and Richard talk to Rocky Lhotka about his impressions around the various announcements at Build. The conversation ranges over how this Build was somewhat different from others - perhaps more aspirational? Topics covered included the amazing AI/vision system demos that were exciting and frightening at the same time, as well as the XAML and .NET Standards, Hololen...

Azure Service Fabric is here - should your application take advantage of it? Carl and Richard talk to James Sturtevant about his experiences moving applications into Azure Service Fabric. Yes, it is possible to "lift and shift" your application into Service Fabric via Guest Executables, but that doesn't mean you'll get much of the benefit that Service Fabric can provide. James talks about picking...

How do you get better uptime than the cloud? Two clouds! Carl and Richard talk to Vishwas Lele about his experiences building ultra-reliable applications, both on-premises and in the cloud. The discussion digs into the decisions around reliability - it's easy to want it, but will you pay for it? It's important to calculate the cost of downtime, as that helps set the budget for what it takes to sta...

Banish Your Inner Critic! Carl and Richard talk to Denise Jacobs about her new book on creativity. And yes, we're all creative, we just have to get that inner critic under control. Denise talks about her own battles with feeling good enough to actually do work well and share it with others. It comes down to a sense of self-compassion - often we are harder on ourselves than we are on others. Give y...

Troy is back, put on your tinfoil hat and get under the bed! Carl and Richard talk to Troy Hunt about the latest security exploits going around. Ransomware is hitting new highs, where a user's files get encrypted via malware, and the only way to get them back is to pay a ransom in Bitcoin. Or are there other ways to recover? And don't be so sure paying the ransom will fix anything, there are some...

Ready to get off the hourly treadmill? Carl and Richard talk to Jonathan Stark about ditching the hourly crusade. Jon talks about the fact that software development really isn't an hourly business - you don't provide value every hour with software, the value only comes when it's finished. The conversation focuses on value - what value does this software bring to the organization? If you don't know...

What can Azure functions do for you? Carl and Richard talk to Yochay Kiriaty about his work creating Azure Functions as part of the App Service Platform for Azure. Azure Functions get you focused on just building code, there is no virtual machine, no operating system and a minimal hosting environment. But that doesn't mean that they're simple. Yochay talks about the need to architect effectively f...

How fast can you go through the air? Time for a Geek Out! Richard chats with Carl about the challenges of flying in the hypersonic regime - above Mach 5! Lots of experiments were done in the early days of the space race, and died down after Apollo 11. But toward the end of the cold war there was a resurgence that has continued to this day - developing engines and materials to keep flying faster. M...

Is Angular ready for the enterprise? Carl and Richard talk to John Papa about the latest version of Angular and it's applicability in every day enterprise development. John discusses how the fast-moving updates of open source projects are a challenge for enterprise developers and the solutions available - you don't have to always use the latest bits! The role of the cloud (specifically Azure) is a...

How do you deploy software? Carl and Richard talk to Robb Schiefer about his experiences using Chef to do application deployment. Chef comes from the open source Linux world, and is free to use with a pay option when you get to certain enterprise features. The Windows support is pretty good, and it works closely with PowerShell and Desired State Configuration to automate deployment of Windows and...

Azure with no servers? Carl and Richard talk to Jeff Hollan about Azure's Serverless offerings. The idea is to stop worrying about virtual machines and operating systems and focus on the stuff you really need. Jeff talks about Logic Apps, which provide workflow and connectors between your code and a ton of other services, some coming from Azure and many coming from other service providers. Credent...

How are software careers changing? Carl and Richard talk to Erik Dietrich about his new book, Developer Hegemony. Erik digs into the struggles that many developers have with the typical large enterprise, where software developers are treated more like cogs in the system, with limited amounts of information and flexibility. Leaving the company and contracting back increases your wages and flexibili...

Angular or Aurelia? Carl and Richard talk to Brian Noyes about his experience building Single Page Application (SPA) style web sites using Angular and Aurelia. No, not both at the same time, but separately. Angular is all the rage these days, but Brian talks about the confusion around Angular caused by the breaking changes from 1.x to 2.x, the skipping of 3 and now settling on Angular 4. The discu...

Where is your DevOps at? Carl and Richard talk to Jez Humble and Nicole Forsgren about DORA, that is the DevOps Readiness Assessment. DORA helps you understand where your organization is at in the spectrum of DevOps, from low to medium to high. The conversation digs into what it takes to improve operational capability, focusing on understanding exactly how your organization delivers software so yo...

You can make a game in Xamarin Forms? Yes! Carl and Richard talk to Jonathan Peppers about his latest work on NBA Life, a role-playing game for iOS and Android built with Xamarin Forms. Jonathan talks about the process they went through to decide on this particular architecture for the game, having done prototyping with Unity and Xamarin Native. The conversation also digs into the back end using A...

Most of us have taken antibiotics at some point in our lives, but how do they work? Time for a Geek Out! Richard talks through some fundamental cell biology to be able to set the stage for what antibiotics are, where they come from and how they work. Why do antibiotics work on some illnesses and not others? Why are some bacteria becoming antibiotic-resistant and what can be done about it? What's t...

C# 7 and Visual Studio 2017 are shipped - now what? Carl and Richard talk to Kathleen Dollard about her experiences working with folks that are trying to dig into the latest version of Microsoft development tools. Kathleen talks about the various approaches she's taken to teaching both C# and effective use of Visual Studio, there are so many little things to know, it's hard to take it all in. The...

The whirlwind of DevOps is back! Carl and Richard talk to Donovan Brown about his on-going mission to get everyone into a DevOps practice - in fact, he talks about getting to a place where continuous delivery and monitoring are just the way you make software. Donovan talks about a session he has been giving where he creates four different delivery pipelines in an hour, with different programming l...

What does it take to build great multi-tenant apps on the cloud? Carl and Richard talk to Joe Audette about his set of open source tools called cloudscribe to make multi-tenant apps easier to implement. The conversation starts out with managing IdentityServer, the great open source library for handling single-sign-on across multiple applications. Cloudscribe helps you manage the sites, users, role...

MVVMCross has grown up! Carl and Richard chat with Martjin van Dijk about his work on MVVMCross. Past guest Stuart Lodge started MVVMCross way back in 2012 when it was focused on building MVVM apps in Silverlight, but today the focus is on Xamarin. Martjin talks about how MVVMCross works with Xamarin forms to make it easier to build, test and debug mobile apps, bringing inversion of control and de...

What can analytics around development do for you? Carl and Richard talk to Steven Borg about his work with Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), especially around understanding developer productivity. The conversation starts out with a comment around Team Foundation Server and VSTS, the former being the on-premise version of the latter. But why run your own infrastructure when you don't have to? The...

Scripting with C++? Of course! Carl and Richard talk to Jason Turner about ChaiScript, his open source project that simplifies adding C++ as a scripting language to any application, but especially other C++ applications. The conversation turns to how C++ has evolved and some amazing tools available today to help you understand what C++ is doing, right down to the CPU level! Check out the links in...

Visual Studio on a Mac! Carl and Richard talk to Mikayla Hutchinson who's been with Xamarin since the very beginning, about her work on the preview of Visual Studio for Mac. The product comes from MonoDevelop, which is Xamarin's IDE that runs in Windows, Mac and Linux. Mikayla talks about how Visual Studio for Mac focuses on both the client side of mobile devices and Mac OS as well as the cloud -...

How do you manage legacy code? Carl and Richard talk to David Bernstein about his book Beyond Legacy Code. The conversation starts out talking about what legacy code is - and David brings up the idea that code is legacy if you don't have confidence in it. Now how do you get confidence? This is where the rewrite behavior comes from: You're naturally more confident in your own code. But is it a good...

How do you bring a DevOps practice to an existing application? While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talk to Damian Brady about his experiences working with teams trying to get better at building, deploying, instrumenting and maintaining existing applications. Often the processes put in place when an application is first developed stay the same - new techniques are applied to new apps. But it does...