.NET Rocks!

Ready to build a chatbot? While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talk to Galiya Warrier about the different chatbot technologies available today. The focus is on the Microsoft Bot Framework, which under the hood uses LUIS - that's Language Understanding Intelligent Service. Galiya also talks about the QnA Maker, which sits on top of the Bot Framework to automate the creation of a chatbot that can u...

IdentityServer4 is all grown up! While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard sat down with Brock Allen and Dominick Baier to discuss their amazing open source product, IdentityServer. The conversation starts out where it left off last year, getting to the point of shipping IdentityServer with ASP.NET RC1. But literally a few hours later, RC2 was announced with serious breaking changes. The challenge...

Can you use Docker with your database? While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard talk to Stephanie Locke about her experiences deploying database in containers. And as Stephanie says, you can deploy the database engine there, but the data has to live somewhere a bit more stable - like the cloud! The conversation digs into the power of containers for rapid deployment and upgrading, as well as the va...

The Chuck Norris of C# is back! While at NDC London, Carl and Richard sit down with the indomitable (and always humble) Jon Skeet to talk about what he's been working on in the past year. First up is nodatime, an open source library for doing date, time and timezones correctly. Why is time so hard? Because politics and science! Jon talks about crazy time zone challenges, solutions for leap seconds...

The beatings will continue until morale improves! While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard talk to Louise Elliott about the idea of punishment driven development - that is, workplaces where blame is a driver. Louise talks about getting rid of blame and punishment, whether self-inflicted or team-inflicted, so that the individual unique contributions and capabilities of every member of the team are...

So what's the right way to use ASP.NET Core? There may not be one right way, but there are plenty of opinions, and Scott Allen has some! While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard chat with Scott about his preferences for building ASP.NET Core apps. Scott digs into project organization, keeping projects and folder structures aligned, keeping elements related to features together and more. Many of th...

Can you help a charity move to the cloud? Carl and Richard talk to Jeremy Pitman of Microsoft Philanthropies about the new offering to provide $5000 worth of Azure credit to any qualified non-profit organization. The offering includes tools like Office 365 and Dynamics CRM - things that are pretty straightforward to implement. Even using Azure to set up a WordPress blog is simple - but what if you...

2016 was an amazing year for space - what happens in 2017! Time for a Geek Out! Richard pulls together all his notes on the various players in the US space industry (and a few beyond the US). The big player, of course, is the United Launch Alliance (ULA). With pressure from SpaceX, ULA is starting to innovate - is this a good thing? And what about SpaceX? After the accident on Sept 1 2016, they're...

Where do your keep your secrets? Carl and Richard talk to Sumedh Barde about Azure Key Vault - the perfect place to keep all your secrets for your Azure applications. Sumedh talks through the issues around securing Azure applications properly and needing to store certificates and other secrets (including username/password logins) in a very secure place. Azure Active Directory plays a critical role...

How do you monitor your applications in Azure? Carl and Richard talk to Tom Kerkhove about his work with Azure Application Insights. AppInsights works with .NET, Java and nodeJS apps to allow detailed instrumentation of how your application is being used. Tom talks about doing deep tracing with AppInsights to be able to see a request come in on the front side of the application all the way back to...

How do you rewrite critical code safely? Carl and Richard talk to Phil Haack about his work on Scientist. NET. Phil talks about the challenges of rewriting code, which means taking something that works (more or less) and trying to make it better, at the risk of breaking it. Yes, test suites would help, but who has those on legacy projects? The Scientist library makes it easier for you to build a n...

How do you migrate to Azure? Carl and Richard talk to Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Christos Matskas about his work helping companies move workloads to Azure. The conversation starts out focused on what you can move to Azure - which is less a technical problem and more of a political one. Christos discusses Azure Site Recovery as a sort of gateway drug for getting organizations into Azure - muc...

Are there new C++ programmers, or just old people? Carl and Richard chat with Kate Gregory about her discovery of a whole new generation of C++ programmers, who just haven't had to go through the same pain that the old folks once did. Kate talks about going to cppcon, the premier C++ conference in the world, and seeing packs of young people getting into C++. The good news is that C++ has evolved a...

Have you seen the new docs for C# (and many other Microsoft products)? Carl and Richard talk to Bill Wagner about his work with Microsoft getting great C# docs together on http://docs.microsoft.com . But first, a conversation about side projects, including Carl's work bringing the Polly library to the .NET Foundation as well as Bill and Richard's work on Humanitarian Toolbox. Then on to the docs -...

How do you make your website progressive? Carl and Richard talk to Christian Heilmann about the latest approach in web development - the progressive web app (PWA). Christian talks about how PWAs really are progressive - you can add bits of these new capabilities to your existing web sites and see some benefit. It starts with the manifest that helps create an icon on a desktop or smartphone to get...

You need to markdown to make good markup! Carl and Richard talk to Rick Strahl about his work building Markdown Monster, which is a Windows-based editor for creating markdown code that ultimately becomes HTML. Or leave it as markdown, which is a popular format (going back to 2004) for blogs, readme docs in GitHub and more. Rick talks about his experiences putting together a desktop app (WPF!) but...

What happens when your college buddy decides later in life that he wants to switch to software development? Carl and Richard talk to Will Gant about his efforts bringing BJ Burns into his organization and apprenticing him as a software developer. What can you build with the earliest set of skills in modern development? How is an apprenticeship different from more traditional schooling? Will and BJ...

With the release of Visual Studio 2017 Release Candidate, the truth is out - no more web essentials! Carl and Richard talk to Mads Kristensen about his decision to stop making Web Essentials, but not to stop making all the Web Essentials goodness! Rather than make one big bundle of tools for web developers, Mads has broken down the package into individual add-ins that you can download separately a...

Friendship bracelets that teach girls to code! Carl and Richard talk to Sara Chipps about her experiences bringing Jewelbots to life. Sara talks about her idea to get girls more interested in coding by creating something programmable that girls will like - a friendship bracelet! Sara and her team put together a kickstarter in 2015 to raise $30,000 and ultimately raised $167,000 - the product was a...

What does it take to keep AngularJS moving forward? Carl and Richard talk to Jules Kremer about her work as the head of Angular Developer Relations at Google. Angular started out as an internal library at Google and is widely used all over the organization. But as it's popularity grew, the outside world became interested in it also. Jules talks about learning how the rest of the world uses Angular...

Ionic is growing up! Carl and Richard talk to Justin James about his work building mobile apps with Ionic Framework, now at version 2! Justin talks about the tight relationship between Angular and Ionic, including the significant changes from V1 to V2 - mostly due to Angular, but still. As such, Justin recommends sticking with Ionic 1 for existing apps but building new apps with Ionic 2. The conve...

There are more ways to go serverless! Carl and Richard talk to Glenn Block about his work with WebTask. WebTask uses nodeJS to build services that are unique units of work with their own scalability. Glenn also talks about using WebTask as a Webhook, allowing you to do call backs based on an activity - it's this tooling that can help you automated builds and deployments and more. Using the Webhook...

As requested by a listener, a Geek Out on worldwide energy production! Richard starts out with a discussion on how to measure the energy production of humanity, and explores how energy is used on the planet - it's not just about electricity! Then into the hard stuff, looking through all sorts of energy sources including oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind, solar and even geothermal. There's a lo...

How many different decisions do you need to make before starting web development? Carl and Richard talk to Cory House about picking out a JavaScript development environment. Cory talks about his own experiences getting into the groove with the React stack, but that is certainly not the only way to build a web application. When you think more broadly about building web apps, the number of decisions...

How are containers doing in the world today? While in Haarlem for DevIntersection Europe, Carl and Richard hosted a panel with Michele Bustamante, Dan Wahlin and Rick Van Rousselt about how they are currently working with containers and what they see coming in the future. The panel discusses how making containers work is really about working with Linux, which is entirely viable in the .NET world w...