.NET Rocks!

What do developers like on their calendars? Carl and Richard talk to Steve Smith and Brendan Enrick about the making of the new 2016 developer calendar. They have been the team behind the NimblePros and later Telerik developer anti-pattern calendars for years. But there was no calendar in 2015 for a variety of reasons, leading to an outcry. In an effort to bring back the calendar, Steve and Brenda...

Do you fear the CSS? You're not alone! Carl and Richard chat with Elijah Manor about his experiences becoming a "real" front end developer and embracing CSS development. Elijah talks about making the leap from hiding behind Twitter Bootstrap and actually starting to think about CSS as its own thing. The conversation turns quickly to tools - LOTS of tools. Elijah explains his CSS stack of Sass, CSS...

Remember Orleans? Once an MSR project to scale Halo 4 multiplayer mode, it has grown into a full blown actor model implementation. Carl and Richard chat with Barry Briggs about bringing Orleans to your project. Barry talks through some great ideas on the actor model and it's focus on building distributed highly scalable applications. Orleans is now an open source project hosted on GitHub, and is w...

Time for a Geek Out experiment! Richard dives into his notes on a bunch of the past Geek Out episodes to bring you up to date on current developments. This includes solar, wind and wave power, automated driving, various developments on the fusion power front and some space related news as well. It's a grab bag full of goodness, but does the format make sense? The Geek Outs are still experimental,...

What happens when a bunch of developers get in a room with a bunch of IoT devices? Carl and Richard talk to Josh Holmes about the amazing workshops he's been running to get people looking at the potential of small computing devices in the world of Internet of Things. Josh focuses in on the key bits of what it takes to make something useful in the IoT space - the difference between prototype and pr...

So how are you using Azure for your apps? Carl and Richard talk to Mark Brown about his work inside and outside of Microsoft - after fifteen years at Microsoft, Mark is out on his own now and still working hard with Azure. The conversation digs into the amazing tool that is Web Jobs, letting you automate tasks based on time and events. Mark also talks about machine learning as his new focus, recog...

So what does it take to be a craftsman, software or otherwise? Carl and Richard talk to Bob Reselman about his work building software and guitars. Trained as a musician, Bob found software later in his life, and guitar making later still. But the process of getting good at making guitars makes it no different than making good quality software. The path to craftsmanship involves hard work, making m...

So how will you build mobile apps going forward? Carl and Richard talk to Atley Hunter about the impact of Windows 10 and various announcements at Build on your strategies for building mobile apps. After a quick conversation about the awesome that is HoloLens, the conversation dives into issues around Windows Phone adoption and app creation. Do the new tools make it more likely for companies to bu...

So what has happened with the .NET Core? Carl and Richard talk to Jay Schmelzer about his involvement from the very beginning of the .NET Core infrastructure and the interesting future it has as an open source project. But first a call back to a project that Jay led for years - LightSwitch. So where has it gone and where is it going? Then the conversation turns to the .NET Core. Jay talks about ho...

Can biology inform computing? Or computing help biology? Yes! Carl and Richard talk to MSR scientist Colin Gravill about biological computing. Alas, the conversation is not about making computers out of biological materials, but there is some discussion about using DNA to do some kinds of computing as well as building synthetic life from modified cells. Colin talks about the tools they're building...

What does it take to grow new developers into something more experienced? Carl and Richard talk to Jeff Casimir about his approach to shepherding developers, helping them to grow into experienced developers. But what sort of experiences should you have? The conversation digs into the ideas around intentional practice, something rarely done in software. Jeff also talks about the scarcity of mentors...

So where does BizTalk fit into your Azure application? Carl and Richard talk to Sam Vanhoutte about his work using BizTalk technology to integrate systems together with Azure in the middle. The conversation pokes a little fun at BizTalks's on-going battle for relevance - for the customers that really need it, it is awesome. But now it's available as a cloud product in Azure which can save a ton in...

How does your organization leverage open source? Carl and Richard talk to Jeff Strauss about open source coming into the corporate space and the challenges that exist there. Microsoft has gone into open source in a big way, how does that affect our development going forward? The conversation starts out talking about Microsoft's approach to open source, especially around the open source promise. Fr...

We're back from Build! On the last day of Build, Carl and Richard went up to the TWiT.tv studios to record a Windows Weekly with Leo LaPorte, Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley. That show went more than two hours, so we thought we'd make a more condensed version and focus on our favorite bits of Build. And feeing Leo lots of Scotch, you wouldn't want to miss that. The conversation starts out with a b...

Akka. NET ships! Carl and Richard talk with Aaron Stannard about Akka. NET, a toolkit and runtime for building highly concurrent, distributed and fault tolerant event-driven applications. Akka. NET is a port of the original Akka framework in Java/Scala. Aaron talks about the reactive manifesto as the driver for Akka. NET, to provide tools for responsiveness, resiliency, elasticity and message driv...

Ready for a GitHub Extension for Visual Studio 2015? Phil Haack is back and talking smack about the cool code being build at GitHub. The announcement about the product was made at Build, but this show dives deeper into the technology involved. This new tool goes well beyond Git integration, diving deeper into the social media aspects of GitHub and making it easier for cross-platform teams to colla...

What are the habits that make a successful developer? Carl and Richard talk with Llewellyn Falco about the ongoing process of being the best developer you can be. Llewellyn discusses his role as a consultant to different organizations, and how often he discovers that there are simple practices just not happening within a team that would make everyone more effective. How do you create change in tha...

So what is the state of open source in the .NET community? While at the .NET Fringe conference, Carl and Richard moderated a panel of Ian Cooper, Amy Palamountain, Scott Hanselman, Sebastian Lambla and James Nugent as they explore the past, present and future of open source and the .NET stack. Obviously having Microsoft open source huge tracts of the .NET stack is a huge topic on its own, but so i...

So when will Moore's Law end? Time for a Geek Out! In honor of the 50th anniversary of Gordon Moore writing the article that 10 years later would be known as Moore's Law, Richard digs into how much work goes into keeping the Moore's Law promise and its impact on society. The conversation delves into the complexities of manufacturing microchips at the nanometer scale, and all of the problems that c...

So what JavaScript libraries are you focused on today? Scott Allen is back to talk about the latest bits he's excited about, including Rob Eisenberg's Aurelia! The conversation starts out focused on the on-going evolution of Javascript, with ECMA 6 and 7 picking up more and more features of modern programming languages - it's not the JavaScript you remember from the old days! This also impacts Jav...

So how do you track errors in production? JD Trask talks to Carl and Richard about raygun.io, a service for instrumenting your clients and servers in production and feed errors directly to your project tracking and bug reporting systems. The conversation digs into how to deal with errors in your application in a way that actually delights your users - sending emails letting them know you saw they...

Are you taking care of your personal brand? Eileen Fisher talks to Carl and Richard about what it means to have a personal brand, how to define, cultivate and care for it over time. In the end, a personal brand is simply what people know you for, and everyone has one, whether they're working on it intentionally or not! Eileen dives into what makes an effective brand and why you want to own and gro...

The Three Ps: Passion, People and Participation. Carl and Richard talk to Mike Benkovich about his passion around the three Ps. The conversation starts first with a tour of favorite technologies, including a long conversation around the evolution of XAML and the challenges of modern development with a diverse set of clients. That impassioned discussion turns meta as Mike brings up the three Ps and...

So how does Docker change development? While at the Nebraska Code Camp, Carl and Richard chatted with Seth Lachner about his work with Docker and the impact it has had on him as a developer. Seth comes from the old school open source world of Linux and C, and has worked with Docker for a long time - he recognized the potential early on. The conversation digs into the concepts of Docker as a virtua...

How do you deal with failure? Carl and Richard talk to Dustin Thostenson about his experiences with failure and how they made him a better developer. The conversation starts out with a discussion of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and how that ultimately maps to our needs as developers as well. The needs build on each other, and you can have a higher-level need without a lower-level need being fulfill...