.NET Rocks!

Visual Studio 2015 came out in July 2015, and with it, a new version of F# - version 4.0! Carl and Richard talk to Lincoln Atkinson, late of Microsoft, about the cool new features and capabilities in F# 4. The conversation ranges through the thinking around functional programming and new very functional features added - like TryList, as well as the more hybrid capabilities that let F# be a more ge...

Have you seen The Martian? Don't listen to this show until you do! WARNING: SPOILERS! But if you've seen it (or don't care), have a listen to this Geek Out about the movie and a deeper dive into the challenges of Mars, picking up where the last Geek Out on Manned Mars Missions left off. How is the movie different from the book? (they're both great, read or watch in either order) And how sciencey i...

Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a mature methodology now, right? So how do you get it right? Carl and Richard talk to Justin Searls about his experiences helping teams implement TDD. As Justin says, TDD is just a tool in the toolbox for making long-lived software. In its maturity, different flavors of TDD have emerged, and Justin digs into the Detroit or Classical TDD versus the London TDD. It's...

Ever heard of property-based testing? Carl and Richard talk to Mark Seemann about doing property-based testing with F#. As Mark explains, functional programming techniques work especially well for property-based testing, allowing you to define parameters (properties) that will generate ranges of values to test against. The conversation digs into tooling, specifically FsCheck, an open source librar...

How do you handle credit card payments in your applications? Carl and Richard talk to Craig McKeachie about his work with different payment solutions, including Stripe. The conversation digs into the challenges of building your own payment system versus using a third-party system - starting with PCI compliance! Craig talks about different tooling for embedding payment, including the stripe.net lib...

Hang on to your hats, here comes a ServiceStack update! Carl and Richard talk to Demis Bellot, who for the past couple of years has been full time on ServiceStack, and wow, a ton of development has been done! Demis (at very high speed) rattles through the feature list of ServiceStack, talking about the array of platforms it supports - which is pretty much everything from the phone to the cloud. Wh...

How much can a language do with only 25 keywords? Carl and Richard talk to Michael Van Sickle about Google's Go Language. The focus in Go is on simplicity and structure - it's amazing what you can do with so few keywords, plus fixed locations for braces, indentations, and so on. The benefit of Go is easy-to-read code that has great concurrency capabilities - the Actor model is a standard pattern o...

There's more great stuff in Studio than you realize! Carl and Richard talk to Charles Sterling about the web performance testing tools built into Visual Studio 2015. Actually, the testing tools have been there since 2008, but only in the test edition, and after that they were moved to the Ultimate Edition - they were part of what made that product so expensive! But as of 2015, the testing tools ar...

If you've been listening to the latest episodes, you've heard Omnisharp mentioned - time for a show on it! Carl and Richard talk to David Driscoll about his efforts contributing to Omnisharp. Omnisharp is a set of tools to bring .NET development to all sorts of different development environments, including Visual Studio Code. David discusses the impact that working on a dev tools project like Omni...

Rob Conery has the Elixir bug! Carl and Richard chat with Rob about being on show 1200, and how Elixir has sucked him in. Elixir is the syntactically friendly language over top of Erlang that has gotten a lot of attention lately. The conversation digs into the strategies around learning a new language, starting with building a good old fashion forms-over-data application. Rob used the Phoenix MVC...

Kathleen Dollard has been exploring different development environments and wants to tell the world! Carl and Richard talk to Kathleen about her experience using Python and Django with JetBrain's IntelliJ development environment. As Kathleen says, it's the whole development suite, not just a given language, that you have to evaluate as a whole. But if you're going to live in the dynamic language li...

Ready to do some method interception? Carl and Richard talk to Ricardo Barbosa about CodeCop, his method interception library that you configure with JSON. The conversation starts out talking about why you would want to do method interception in the first place - aspect oriented programming, instrumentation, isolating plumbing code, and so on. There are a bunch of ways to address these problems, a...

Document databases as a service? For sure! Carl and Richard talk to Ryan CrawCour about Azure DocumentDB. DocumentDB is a JSON store - with an amazing set of features, including SQL querying. What? Ryan talks about how DocumentDB provides a fast, scalable place to store objects and write your queries any way you like. You write the rules for how your data partitions between collections, as well as...

The most requested (and most postponed) Geek Out of them all - Quantum Computing. How much is hype, and how much is real? Richard walks through the history of quantum computing, starting with the understanding of quantum mechanics in the first place, and how modelling that in a classical computer created problems. As it turns out, there are many approaches to quantum computing, and no "one right w...

So what does a web development stack look like today? Carl and Richard talk to Dan Wahlin about his explorations with the new ASP.NET vNext stack, checking out Angular2 (as opposed to the separately developed Angular1) and getting into using containers for development. Containers take virtual machines to the next level, with lower resource requirements and detailed manifests. As Dan points out, co...

It's been on the news, but do you really understand what happened with the Ashley Madison hack? Carl and Richard talk to Troy Hunt about his experiences around his web site Have I Been Pwned and how the Ashley Madison hack blew up his traffic and made him think deeply about privacy. You may not care for the company, but you can't deny the significance of a multi-million dollar business blown up by...

Universal Apps are all about XAML! Carl and Richard talk to the original XAML believer, Billy Hollis, about the new Universal App model and its focus on XAML. As Billy says, both Windows 10 and Office 2016 are using XAML now, so it's not going away. But first a quick digression on Windows Phone and Android - is the Universal App model going to save Windows Phone? Or should it all be Android in the...

Heard of NativeScript? Carl and Richard talk to Sam Basu from Telerik about NativeScript, a dev stack using JavaScript to build native mobile applications. Sam describes how NativeScript is different from Cordova, since it doesn't use HTML or a runtime that essentially hosts a browser - instead it has a custom UI markup language that is rather similar to XAML and compiles into native code on iOS a...

Ci with SQL Server? Are you crazy? Carl and Richard talk to Ike Ellis about what it takes to get databases changes happening as smoothly as application changes. Really! Ike talks about the concept of database lifecycle management and how it is orthogonal to application lifecycle management. The tricky bit is managing the data! And to help with that, Ike discusses a great tool chain of source code...

So what about building apps with Unity 3D? Carl and Richard talk to Brice Fernandes about what it takes to build using this cross-platform 3D framework. Brice talks about the important elements of gaming, including the art, user experience and game play itself. You need all three to some degree, great games do all of them well. The conversation digs into the variety of styles of games and the stre...

Ready to React? Carl and Richard talk to Cory House about his experiences building applications using Facebook's React library. The conversation digs into the philosophical differences to web page design that React is focused on - and how they upset a lot of folks! Cory describes React as an approach for building UI components, which means combining HTML, Javascript and even CSS together! He also...

So what's it like to build web apps with ASP.NET 5? Carl and Richard talk to Rick Strahl about his experiences with the rapidly evolving open source project that is ASP.NET today. As Rick says, it might be called a beta, but it is acting more like an alpha at this point - new features and breaking changes are occurring regularly as the toolset develops. On the plus side is the server-side cross-pl...

Are you a social developer? Carl and Richard talk to Jeremy Clark about his experiences trying to draw developers at events out of their shells. In the end, especially at an event, people want to talk - you just have to get the conversation started. The conversation turns to skills that can benefit your career, including public speaking and writing. Being able to communicate effectively in various...

Web development is moving fast, and John Papa is in the race! Carl and Richard talk to John about his current views on Angular and other SPA frameworks - coming to Anglebrackets this fall! The conversation dives into the inevitable comparisons between Angular, Aurelia and others - but there is no one right way. Then John talks about the new Visual Studio Code, which really hasn't got much to do wi...

Roslyn is out - and it's awesome! Carl and Richard talk to Dustin Campbell about his work building Roslyn over eight years. Eight years is an awful long time, but when you're rebuilding a codebase from scratch, it's hardly unprecedented. Dustin talks about some the decisions made in the re-engineering of C#, including whether or not to keep in the bugs! Taking Roslyn open source is also a huge asp...