.NET Rocks!

Carl and Richard talk to Paul Sheriff about his work building mobile web apps using ASP.NET WebForms. Yeah, that's right, WebForms! Paul talks about the problems with WebForms and how they can be overcome with some careful configuration and understanding of how WebForms really works. The conversation digs into adding Responsive Web Design to a WebForms page to make it work well on a mobile browser...

Carl and Richard chat with Dan Wahlin about his latest open source project, building a Single Page Application (SPA) using AngularJS interfacing with Microsoft Azure Active Directory Services (MAAD) and Office 365 API. Called OfficeDev and published on GitHub, this project demonstrates interacting with Office documents, Sharepoint and traditional enterprise authentication systems from within a bro...

Time for some more IoT! Pete Brown checks in with Carl and Richard to talk about Microsoft's continuing announcements in the Internet of Things space. The conversation starts out with a discussion about Pete's work in the music side of things and the Windows 8 API for MIDI - helping musicians use a Windows 8 tablet as the hub of a music system. Then it's on to several important announcements, incl...

Carl and Richard talk to Glenn Howes about Apple's new programming language for IoS and MacOS: Swift. As Glenn explains, Swift builds on the same compiler that Apple's Objective-C uses (LLVM), but optimizes a number of key aspects that were known to be slow. Swift goes beyond performance improvements to add language features like generics, type safety and more! The conversation also digs into the...

Carl and Richard talk to Bill Wagner about some of the features coming in C# 6.0. The conversation starts with the history - the internal Microsoft project known as Roslyn has become an open source project on Codeplex. Bill runs down a number of cool features coming in C# 6.0, including primary constructors, improvements to Await and more. No idea when the shipping date is, but C# 6.0 is in the Vi...

Carl and Richard talk to GitHub denizen and former Microsoftie Phil Haack about what it means to build open source software. The conversation starts off with a reminder that back in Phil's Microsoft days, he was a huge advocate of taking various Microsoft products open source - and today it's actually happening! Phil may have moved on to GitHub, but the spirit of open source has permeated the web...

Carl and Richard circle back with Mark Miller for a whirlwind discussion on the biology of user interface design. Actually, it's the biology of humans as it relates to UI, focusing (no pun intended) on the eyes - how exactly does eyesight work? What cultural and psychological conditioning affects how you see? And ultimately, how can we apply the understanding of eyesight to make applications that...

Carl and Richard talk to Daniel Piessens about building continuous delivery solutions. The conversation starts out with an explanation of the differences between continuous integration, deployment, and delivery - and the fact that there are business decisions to deal with there, not just technical decisions! Daniel also digs into the challenges around getting Operations deeply involved in the test...

Carl and Richard talk to Denise Jacobs about creativity. Denise starts out talking about her work with developers, mostly focused around understanding just how creative the software development process is. The conversation digs into the idea that flow state, which has been a talking point in a number of shows of late... is it inherently a creative state? Denise also digs into the battle with your...

Carl and Richard talk to Chris Love about building mobile web apps for the enterprise. The conversation starts out with a reference to a comment made on a previous show about the problems with web apps not being built well enough for your device - that they feel too webby. And Chris agrees - it's very challenging to build a web app that feels great on a mobile device. So what's the problem? Chris...

Carl and Richard talk to Julie Lerman and Steve Smith about the fundamentals of Domain Driven Design (DDD). Julie and Steve have collaborated on a very popular Pluralsight course about DDD that has made the methodology more approachable for more people. The conversation digs into the fact that DDD has been around for more than a decade, but hasn't caught on near as much as it should - and why is t...

Well, here we go - the second installation of the fusion power geek out. While the first show focused on the "Big Science" fusion power projects like NIF and ITER, this time around Richard digs into smaller hybrid projects, like General Fusions Magnetized Target Fusion as well as Colliding Beam Fusion Reactors being built by Helion Energy and Tri Alpha Energy. These fusion approaches combine magne...

Carl and Richard chat with Scott Hunter about how Microsoft is working to evolve web development for ASP.NET developers. While the focus of the discussion is on ASP.NET vNext, you can't talk web without also talking cloud, and that means Azure. Scott digs into many of the new features in Azure that can make a web developer's life easier, before digging into ASP.NET vNext. No punches are pulled - v...

Carl and Richard talk to Seth Juarez about the latest developments in the machine learning space for the Microsoft space. The conversation starts out focused on Seth's open source library for doing machine learning in .NET. Seth talks about the challenges of getting your head around machine learning, building models and testing data. Then the discussion turns to the Azure Machine Learning tools, a...

Carl and Richard chat with Dan Rosenstein about his work bringing the Windows Developer Program for Internet of Things (IoT) to life. The conversation starts out with a discussion about Microsoft's focus on IoT and the recognition that this a thing that is happening, and developers need tools to be productive. Dan focuses on the work Microsoft has done with Intel's Galileo device, which can work w...

Carl and Richard chat with Rick Strahl about his latest efforts to build mobile web applications. The conversation starts out with a recap of the continuing debate about native vs web on mobile devices. As Rick says, there are no easy answers there. Every approach to cross-platform development (and different browsers on different phones represent different platforms) have compromises that need to...

Carl and Richard talk to Mike Wood about migrating your applications to Azure. The conversation starts out thinking through the fundamentals of working in the cloud - how architecture and deployment are different. This inevitably leads to the hardest debate: Is your organization okay with data in the cloud? After that, Mike gets into some of the more interesting angles on cloud development - actua...

Carl and Richard talk to Adam Tornhill about his work understanding the psychology of programming. The conversation starts out with some thinking around getting into "the flow," being able to focus effectively on programming. Adam then digs into where bugs come from and the role of complexity in code. He has been studying code repositories to determine where bugs are likely to appear based on the...

Carl and Richard talk to Rocky Lhotka about what it means to build modern apps today. In past shows, Rocky has been pretty frustrated with the native development options and focused primarily on web development with HTML 5 and JavaScript. But things on the native side have gotten better, and Rocky talks about his experiences with Xamarin and the potential of the universal app template in Visual St...

Carl and Richard chat with Jeff Fritz about ASP.NET vNext - and yes, ASP.NET is now open source! So what does that really mean for ASP.NET developers? Jeff digs into the impact of taking open source on the development process of ASP.NET and how we can all get more involved! This leads to a discussion about the expanding reach of .NET into other platforms such as Linux using OWIN and Katana, and th...

In what is likely to become a multi-part series, Richard and Carl chat about fusion power, focused on the "hot" side of fusion - megaprojects like the National Ignition Facility (NIF) and the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). But first, a review of what is actually involved in fusing atoms together and how it differs from fission (as discussed in the older nuclear power show...

Carl and Richard talk to Atley Hunter about how he monetizes phone apps. A newcomer to .NET Rocks, Atley was a regular guest on the TabletShow and has talked about monetization before - but now he's learned even more techniques! Atley talks about the advantages of in-app purchases over try-before-you-buy, as well as asking for donations. He also digs into the idea that you can offer a variety of p...

Carl and Richard talk to Daniel Simmons about his work with PasTrak, building RFID tools for small businesses. The first half of the conversation focuses on what RFID is all about - different types of tags, scanners, security concerns, and so on. There's a lot of choice out there when it comes to RFID and its cousin Near Field Communications (NFC). Then Danny digs into the coding side of things -...

Carl and Richard chat with David Graham about what it takes to create a new developer. David starts out the conversation talking about the shortage of developers today, and how the shortage is getting worse, not better. This leads to a conversation about existing training approaches, such as a four-year computer science degree. While we all agree that the best way to learn to program is to actuall...

Carl and Richard talk to Jason and Brian Kriesel about their work building Amazon Fire Tablet applications. The conversation starts off talking about the differences between the Android world and the Amazon world - they aren't that far apart! The brothers Kriesel talk about what it takes to maintain an application that runs in regular Android tablets and phones as well as the Amazon Fire world - w...