.NET Rocks!

Carl and Richard talk to Chris Sells about his experimentation with TypeScript. The conversation starts out with a discussion about the pervasiveness of C# and how the Mono Project brought .NET to a wider audience than just Windows. From there, Chris talks about a variety of languages beyond JavaScript, including TypeScript and others (check out the links). Ultimately the conversation circles back...

Carl and Richard talk to Joe Kuermerle and Alex Papadimoulis about automating deployment as the path to a DevOps world. The conversation starts out talking about the real impact of DevOps, bringing developers and operations folks closer together. A key part of the process is to automate everything you can, including deployment. Part of the conversation is BuildMaster, which is free for up to five...

Carl and Richard talk to Chris Riley of Cloudshare about testing applications in the cloud. Chris talks about how the cloud provides a low-cost diversity of environments so that you can iterate more quickly through designs and implementations of code. Even if your organization isn't prepared to put their applications into production in the cloud, taking your testing environment there is possible a...

Carl and Richard talk to Fabio Matsui about working effectively with creative personnel in an organization. The conversation starts out just defining what we mean by design - the different types of designers (UX, visual, motion, graphics, etc) and their role in the team. Fabio then dives into the challenges of putting different mindsets together to create synergy - where the result is greater than...

Carl and Richard talk to Scott Stanfield about his experiences with Node. The conversation begins with a discussion on building software in the heterogeneous client environment of today. Scott also digs into his love of programming at the command line and how he configures his Mac in the CLI style. He also digs into his love of Node and the power of Node Package Manager (NPM) along with a number o...

Carl and Richard chat with legendary Mark Minasi of Mastering Windows fame. While Mark largely focuses on the IT side of Windows, this conversation digs into the topics that developers will find especially interesting. Mark talks about the good and bad of Windows 8, how PowerShell is an awesome tool for IT Pro and an even more awesome tool for developers! The line between the roles has blurred! Th...

Carl and Richard talk to Cory Fowler from Microsoft about how developers can put together a continuous delivery solution on Azure. The conversation starts out with a discussion about the core concepts of continuous delivery - integrating build and testing together with lots of automation to create a minimum number of manual steps as possible. Cory describes how Azure becomes the environment for de...

Carl and Richard talk to Phil Haack about his latest work at GitHub. The conversation starts out talking about semantic versioning, just trying to establish a coherent set of documents about how versioning should work. Phil then talks about licensing around GitHub, discussing a new service at GitHub to make it easier to select a software license - running down the differences between MIT, Apache a...

Carl and Richard talk to Dan Wahlin about his experiences building web pages from a Silverlight perspective. The conversation starts out talking about how XAML isn't going away - there's lots of WPF development going on out there today. And Silverlight too! Microsoft has finally published some guidance around all of these technologies, check the links for the white paper. Dan also digs into how sk...

Carl and Richard talk to G. Andrew Duthie about his work with .NET Gadgeteer. The whole concept of .NET Gadgeteer is to make it easy to build small electronic devices without needing to solder anything together AND be able to program in .NET! Andrew talks about his projects, including a hand-controlled helicopter, and his experience building custom modules for .NET Gadgeteer. The conversation expl...

Well, you knew it was coming - a geek out on whiskey. Carl and Richard talk about all kinds of whiskey, starting with Scotch whiskey as the foundation for how whiskey is made, and then digging into the differences in Irish whiskey and bourbon. The different grains, maltings, fermentation, barreling and post-processing techniques are all discussed. Making whiskey is an amazing and ancient art, and...

Carl and Richard talk to Kit Eason about how you can get your organization using F#. Kit talks about his work using F# and how he retrained himself to use the language effectively. It only takes a few days! He makes some awesome suggestions for approaches to learning the language effectively and the advantages that it brings. We're living in a polyglot world where the best language is used in its...

While at the Norwegian Developers Conference (NDC) in Oslo last week, Carl and Richard moderated a panel talking about the state of functional programming in mainstream development. The discussion reached back in time to languages like Haskell and Erlang, and looked forward at JavaScript and it's vector to seemingly take over the world. Even if you're not well versed in functional languages, this...

While at NDC, Carl and Richard talk to Jez Humble about Continuous Delivery. Jez discusses the difference between continuous integration and continuous delivery and how nothing matters until your code actually gets to the customer. So no shipping parties until it does! The conversation digs into the overall story of DevOps, how development and operations need to work closer together to continuousl...

While at NDC, Carl and Richard talked to Scott Guthrie about the latest Azure features including the announcements from TechEd. Scott talks about new support for developers in Azure, including monthly Azure credit for all MSDN subscriptions and per minute billing for developer testing on Azure instances. Even if your app isn't running in the cloud, you can use the cloud to do your testing. The con...

While at the Norwegian Developers Conference, Carl and Richard chatted with Jon Skeet about Async and Parallelism. The conversation starts out with a BKaF on parallel exception handling and a reader comment about F# and parallelism. Jon chimes in on both these subjects, talking about all the challenges around error handling, parallel or otherwise, and he knows (and doesn't know) about F#. Througho...

Carl and Richard talk about space telescopes - but first, a comment about Thorium Molten Salt Reactors and a Kickstarter for a Thorium documentary called The Good Reactor. Also on Kickstarter is Arkyd, the space telescope that anyone can use - get a picture of yourself in space! The conversation then digs into space observatories, there are literally dozens up there today. Everyone knows about Hub...

At DevTeach, Carl and Richard talk to Kate Gregory about smart clients. As Kate says, quoting Don Box, 'they're not dead, they're done.' The conversation digs into WinForms, Silverlight and WPF. They aren't changing much, but they definitely work. Kate talks about the various projects she's working on that depend on smart clients - accessing different processes, specific hardware requirements, etc...

Carl and Richard talk to James Kovacs about functional programming with JavaScript. Functional programming with JavaScript? What can't JavaScript do? James starts out talking about underscoreJS, a key library to simplify functional programming and provide some awesome features to keep your web pages running well. The conversation also digs into Single Page Applications in the context of functional...

While at DevTeach, Carl and Richard talk to Kathleen Dollard about going beyond Async. And when she says beyond Async, she means the other amazing things in .NET 4.5. First up, the portable class libraries. Then Kathleen dives into Event Tracing for Windows classes that can let you do advanced logging in your applications. The conversation also dives into the dangers of the inline update that is ....

Carl and Richard talk to Kevin Kline about the latest features in SQL Server 2012. The conversation starts out talking about the new features that developers will love, like windowing - no need for cursors anymore, you can request a window of records from a set and move easily window-to-window. Kevin also talks about the new column store index that is especially useful with repeating data. There's...

Carl and Richard talk to John Papa about Single Page Applications (SPA) - building web applications that operate on a single page for the duration of execution. John talks about the evolution of web design that has led to the SPA concept - the pros and cons of the approach as well. From there the conversation digs into the sets of open source libraries for making SPA easier to build and maintain....

Carl and Richard talk to Michele Leroux Bustamante about her experiences creating startup companies. Michele talks about getting started with a new company, deciding whether or not to take external funding from investors or just bootstrapping the company yourself, and how cloud technologies like Azure and programs like BizSpark have lowered the cost of infrastructure so that the main expense of a...

Carl and Richard talk to Derik Whittaker about his experiences migrating from being a XAML developer to being an HTML developer. The conversation starts out talking about the death of Silverlight - or at least the severe neglect! From there, Derik describes the group of tools he uses to bring MVVM design patterns to HTML development. Along with some weird digressions on WinForms, this is a fun sho...

Carl and Richard talk to Tim Huckaby about the latest developments around gesture computing. The conversation covers the latest version of the Kinect SDK (with grip!), as well as SoftKinetic, Panasonic D-IMager and Leap Motion. Tim also speculates on some of the new things coming from Microsoft with Xbox and Kinect (leaked specs in the links below), and how gesture is here to stay. It's everywhere...