.NET Rocks!

The rumors of the death of WebForms is greatly exaggerated! Carl and Richard talk to Jeff Fritz, who runs with WebForms team (yes, there is a team!) about what's happening in the WebForms world. While WebForms is not coming to ASP.NET Core, it is a part of regular Windows-centric ASP.NET Framework, and there are new features continuing to be built. Jeff talks about what a modern WebForms app looks...

What's an "Emerging Experience" and why would you want one? Carl and Richard talk to Giorgio Sardo about Microsoft's overarching term for all of the new ways we connect humans to computers, and how much more fun it is to program beyond the keyboard and mouse! Of course it's easy to jump right to HoloLens, which is very cool, but there is so much more in the space. Giorgio talks about some of the C...

What if a data storage library just stored and retrieved your data? What if it wasn't a mollusk? Carl and Richard talk to Mark Rendle about his refocusing on his open source library called Simple. Data - now with .NET Core! Mark talks about why Simple. Data is not an ORM, and why you don't want to use an ORM anyway. And yeah, the conversation gets sillier from there! Mark also talks about what it...

Can you build a line of business web application and not write any JavaScript? Carl and Richard talk to Tomáš Herceg about his open source project called DotVVM. With DotVVM, you write your ViewModel in C# and your View in HTML. The JavaScript is generated at run time, and you never need to look at it. While there are free open source elements to the project, there are also "pro" editions of some...

Are you building XAML-driven applications yet? Carl and Richard chat with Billy Hollis about what it takes to get going with building XAML applications. As Billy says, XAML is a "compositional" platform, which is a very different way to think about how to build user interfaces. Ultimately, these design principles become platform-agnostic - you can use whatever tools you want to build them. Is it h...

Are you adding feature toggles to your apps? Carl and Richard talk to Daniel Piessens about his approach to adding feature toggles, using frameworks to keep things organized. The conversation starts out talking about different kinds of features toggles, starting with the classic one that allows you to build features over time, but keep the code in the trunk, just not visible to the users until you...

How about *no* JavaScript libraries? Carl and Richard talk to Chris Love about his passion with making the smallest, fastest web applications possible. The conversation starts out with the idea that JavaScript libraries, like most code libraries, constantly grow - old code, support for things that don't matter any more, and features that you aren't using, all add up to a lot of bytes and compute t...

React comes to Windows! Carl and Richard talk to Matthew Podwysocki and Eric Rozell about using React for Windows to build native Windows applications while programming in JavaScript! Originally intended for mobile apps, React Native works equally well building Windows 10 apps that work on phone, tablet and desktop. The conversation also turns to the conjunction of all things react and reactive -...

We all want to believe we have good habits when it comes to programming - but what about the bad habits? Carl and Richard chat with Steve Smith and Brendan Enrick about some of the many anti-patterns that exist in software development. Part of this conversation also ties back to a cool product that Steve and Brendan create - the Software Craftsmanship calendar! Be part of the Kickstarter and get y...

Why would a client-side Javascript library have a command line interface? Carl and Richard talk to Joseph Woodward about the power of the Angular CLI. It's all about the scripting! Joseph talks about all those tedious tasks involved in getting an application set up when you're ready to push out to the world. Angular CLI is all about automating that process using NodeJS style modules. The conversat...

A new version of Akka. NET has shipped! Carl and Richard talk to Aaron Stannard about Akka. NET 1.1. The discussion starts out talking about some of the new features in the latest release, which is focused on providing the tooling needed to build highly reliable and scaling enterprise class software. Aaron also digs into the differences between Akka. NET and other actor model frameworks. Akka is g...

More cloud choices! Carl and Richard welcome Chris Sells back onto .NET Rocks after three years and a career change - Chris is now at Google! And he's been busy, excited to announce that Google is provided extensive support for .NET in the Google Cloud, including Visual Studio add-ins to make your implementation even easier. The conversation ranges over the modern cloud development pattern of buil...

There has been lots of conversation about cross-platform mobile apps, but how about cross-platform desktop apps? Carl and Richard talk to David Neal about the Electron framework, letting you build cross-platform desktop apps using HTML, JavaScript and CSS. Electron is how visual Studio Code is built! The conversation also turns to Xamarin - would you rather code in C# and XAML? Lots of choices for...

Ready to move to .NET Core? Carl and Richard talk to Stackify's Matt Watson about their efforts to migrate their applications to the RTM editions of the .NET Core and ASP.NET Core. For better or worse, there have been a number of major changes between the two RCs and the RTM. But this is the version to stick to, so if you haven't started to move, now is a great time. Matt also talks about the chal...

Could there really be airliners powered by electricity? Time for a Geek Out! The conversation starts out with Richard talking about the Solar Impulse, a single seat aircraft with a wingspan larger than a 747, that has flown around the world powered solely by the solar panels covering it. So yes, electric aircraft are real, but could they be made commercially viable? NASA continues to fund various...

What's a really modern web app look like? Carl and Richard talk to Qiming Liu about the Reactive Trader Cloud, demonstrating the synergy between the cloud, containers, microservices, the Reactive Extensions Framework and ReactJS on the client to make a real time currency trader application. The application is on GitHub, you can take it out for a spin for yourself and get a feel for this cool archi...

What does it take to make an application support multiple customers? Carl and Richard talk to Paul Stovell about his work making multi-tenant applications. As with most things, making multi-tenant apps is more complicated than it seems! Paul talks about making architectural decisions around separation between various customers - do they each get their own database? What about web server and/or app...

How long does it take you to get an idea into a URL? Carl and Richard talk to Daniel Moore about HyperDev - a tool to make the shortest possible path between writing code and putting it online. Initially only implementing Node and HTML, you can use your Javascript skills to build a quick prototype that is easily shareable, even allow multiple people to work on the code together. At this point the...

F# that transpiles to Javascript! Wait, what? While at NDC is Oslo, Carl and Richard chatted with Tomas Petricek about the Fabel project, combining F# and the Babel project to turn F# into some tight Javascript code. Tomas talks about the easy parts of Fabel first, because Javascript does have some functional elements, and it is possible to write immutable-style code in Javascript if you really wa...

So how's your DevOps doing? While at DevTeach in Montreal, Carl and Richard hosted a panel of Stephane LaPointe, Dylan Smith, William Buchwalter and Alexandre Brisebois to discuss the ups and downs of getting teams to work closer together to make better products and provide better services. The conversation focuses first and foremost on culture - the chant of People, Process and Products around De...

How do we get more women involved in programming? Carl and Richard talk to Astrid de Laval and Andreas Persson about CodePub, a gathering hosted by NetLight to get women coding. The events have been running in Stockholm, Helsinki, Oslo and more over the past several months, drawing larger and larger crowds. Every event involves some coding exercises even for complete novices who have never coded b...

Ready to learn R? While at NDC Oslo, Carl and Richard sat down with Jamie Dixon and Evelina Gabasova to talk about what .NET developers need to know to get conversant in R. Data science represents a huge opportunity for developers these days, helping businesses actually take advantage of the data the company has. Jamie comes at R from a traditional .NET developer perspective, talking about how the...

Time to get scared times three! While at NDC Oslo, Carl and Richard hosted a security panel of Troy Hunt, Niall Merrigan and Stephen Haunts in front of a live NDC audience. The conversation starts where most security conversation start - on passwords. Yes, passwords suck. The challenge is making them suck less. Beyond passwords, what aspects of application security are the responsibility of the de...

Ready to talk about Thorium again? Since the last Thorium Geek Out in 2013, there have been a number of important developments. Richard takes Carl on a tour of why we want Thorium as a fuel, molten salt as a reactor design, and the choices we can make around different turbine technologies. Aspects of molten salt reactors continue to mature, offering continuous fuel reprocessing that means more of...

How do we get all our IoT devices talking to each other? While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard chatted with Jimmy Engstrom about AllJoyn, a Qualcomm started project now part of the Linux Foundation that provides a common language for devices to communicate with. Jimmy talks about the different elements of AllJoyn, servers and clients and how they share information about their capabilities. There'...