.NET Rocks!

Carl and Richard talk to Joel Semeniuk about various styles of agile development. The conversation starts with addressing a comment from a listener on dealing with decomposition of user stories so that they fit into sprints and how to manage research spikes. Joel talks about splitting time in sprints between feature building, bug fixing and research. Next the topics of lean and Kanban and how they...

Carl and Richard are back in space! With the SpaceX launch to the International Space Station, the boys decide they have to talk about space again. A big chunk of the conversation focuses on how a billionaire boys club has grown up around space - folks like Elon Musk who made their money in technology are now spending it to expand mankind's reach into space, and perhaps make a buck or two along th...

Carl and Richard talk to Beth Massi about the latest incarnation of LightSwitch. In 2011 LightSwitch shipped as a separate install, but the upcoming version of LightSwitch is part of every SKU of Studio 11. Beth talks about how LightSwitch has evolved to be an awesome consumer and creator of data, making it simple to create oData interfaces over anything. The conversation also digs into the role o...

On Sunday, May 6th, Carl went to Washington, DC for a Fly-In at the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) for the purpose of talking to Senators and Representatives about issues around technology. He also talked to many of the developers and IT people who were attending these meetings, some of whom are regulars on .NET Rocks! This is a very special .NET Rocks! We hope you enjoy it. Support...

Carl and Richard talk to Micheal Learned about the new ALM features coming in Visual Studio 11. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to the one-and-only Rob Conery about CoffeeScript. Why would you use a language to generate Javascript? Rob talks about how CoffeeScript is designed to be human readable while JavaScript is much more machine-readable. Indents matter! No curly braces! Dogs and cats living together! It's chaos! But it's a happy chaos. Check it out! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.co...

Carl and Richard talk to Brian Noyes about the Single Page Application (SPA) feature coming in MVC 4. Brian talks about the similarities of the design patterns for SPA to the more classical Silverlight or WPF application with RIA or WCF services on the back end. While hardly new to the web space (SPAs can be traced back to Outlook Web Access circa 2002), SPAs are going to be part of Studio 11. Bri...

Carl and Richard catch up with Ted Neward - it had been too long since he was on! The conversation starts off talking about the maturity of .NET and how unimpressed Ted is with Async and Await. Ted also talks about Javascript and Ruby and the evolution of languages as a whole. Finally, NoSQL makes an appearance with a discussion around the issues of ORM. Has Ted Neward become a grumpy old man? Sup...

Carl and Richard talk to Glenn Block about node.js on Azure. Glenn digs into how node.js has grown in popularity, and points to the Cloud9 IDE as a development environment in the Cloud as an example of a node.js application - which happens to be able to build node.js applications. And Cloud 9 can deploy node.js to Azure. The conversation digs into the Azure stack and the diversity of technologies...

Carl and Richard continue the Geek Out series on alternative energy with wind power. The conversation starts with the admission that as much as has been done with wind power so far, it's just a tiny drop in the bucket of total power consumption - less than 1% of US power comes from wind. Then the boys dig into the different types of wind power generation, the challenges that the power grid has inc...

Carl and Richard talk to Jeroen Hulscher about web accessibility. Accessibility challenges come in lots of different forms, and the way we build web pages can make it impossible for some to use your site. Jeroen talks about the tools and techniques to help developers understand what you need to do to make your site easy to use no matter what challenges you might have. As Jeroen says, at some point...

Carl and Richard have a discussion with a vegetable. Yeah, that's right, we interviewed a leek named Ricky Leeks. Beyond all the endless puns, is a great conversation about memory management in .NET. Ricky also lets us know about a free e-book on .NET Memory Management you can download from the links in the show. Check it out! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to John Bennett and Colin Hicks from MSNBC along with Oren Eini about the role RavenDB has played in building applications. John talks about how MSNBC was using SQL Server essentially as a blob store, storing stories as XML documents inside of the database. The conversation digs into the challenges of running a web site with well over a billion page views a month, the impact...

Another panel discussion from DevConnections, this one focused on how cloud computing is impacting developers. No holds are barred as the panel digs into virtualization, infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and more. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

A panel discussion at DevConnections in Las Vegas digs into different styles of web application development in 2012 - comparing web forms to MVC to the up-and-coming Single-Page style of web app. Carl handles questions from the audience while Richard causes trouble on the panel. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Bart de Smet about the beta of Reactive Extensions (Rx) Version 2. Currently in beta when the show was recorded, Rx 2.0 works with .NET 4.5, both for desktop and metro, as well as Silverlight 5 and Windows Phone 7.1. Bart talks about how Rx lets you write LINQ expressions over top of events, completely changing the way you think about responding to events. If you're tired...

Carl and Richard talk to Bill Wilder about Hadoop on Azure. Hadoop is a technology for analyzing massive (petabytes) amount of data efficiently. Originally developed by Yahoo, it was given to the Apache Foundation as an open source project. Google, Facebook and others have all contributed to the project. Microsoft has come late to the game, but with a very compelling offering - you can run Hadoop...

The first of many alternative energy geek outs, Carl and Richard talk about solar power. The boys talk about using solar in the home in the form of thermal as well as photovoltaic, at utility scale with solar thermal, even space-based power. The conversation explores the huge diversity of photovoltaics, including concentrators and quantum dot technologies, the advantages and disadvantages involved...

Carl and Richard talk to Bryan Hunter and OJ Reeves about programming in Erlang. Erlang is a language built by the telecommunications industry for maximizing concurrency, distribution and reliability. If you're looking to develop applications that take advantage of parallelism, you owe it to yourself to look at Erlang! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at the Prairie DevCon in Calgary, Carl and Richard moderated a panel discussion on the future of the web with panelists James Kovacs, Andrew Nurse, Bil Simser and James Chambers. The conversation ranged over the quality of web content today and a general push to try and improve it, discussions around monetization, the fragmentation of HTML 5, the role of mobile and some of the cool new techn...

Carl and Richard talk to Mike Diehl about Data Quality Services (DQS) in SQL Server 2012. DQS is a new tool for SQL Server, as Mike points out, Microsoft acquired it. It adds into the suite of tools in SQL Server including Integration Services (SSIS), and Master Data Services. Mike talks about how DQS improves the quality of data by cleansing and de-duplication. Not a typical developer tool, but s...

While at the Prairie DevCon in Calgary, Carl and Richard chatted with Steve Rogalsky about User Story Mapping. Steve explains how User Story Mapping helps with visualizing beyond a serial list of features into categories of features in the product. The conversation also explores how Kanban, Scrum and other techniques work with User Story Mapping, as well as the struggles of using Microsoft Project...

Carl and Richard talk to Phil Haack about his life after Microsoft. Phil talks about his viewpoint on open source, both software and projects (not the same!). The conversation also digs into how NuGet works in the open source world and Phil's on-going role with it. Finally, Phil talks about his work at GitHub - he's all about making GitHub more appealing to .NET developers. Support this podcast at...

Carl and Richard talk to Tim Huckaby about his work with the latest version of Kinect, Kinect for Windows. Tim talks about his work building interactive kiosk applications for hotels, airports and the like. Gesture is a huge part of the interactive kiosk applications - and Kinect is at the front. The conversation digs into how Kinect for Windows changes the API dramatically, but opens the door to...

Carl and Richard talk to Rob Mensching about the WiX Toolset, a popular Open Source project for all your software installation needs. How good is WiX Toolset? Visual Studio uses it for installation of itself! Rob talks about different installation solutions and how he eventually came to develop the WiX Toolset as an XML-centric 'set of sets' hierarchy for managing installations. As Rob says, setup...