.NET Rocks!

While at NDC is Oslo, Carl and Richard talked to Chris Hardy about Xamarin's latest work - Xamarin. Forms. As Chris explains, Xamarin. Forms brings a XAML-like experience to building forms for iOS, Android and Windows Phone. The conversation focuses in on what Xamarin. Forms is best suited for, when you should stick to the standard class based tools for building clients, and what it takes to have...

Carl and Richard chat with Jonathan Peppers about his experiences building phone games for different languages and cultures. The conversation starts out talking about Jon's game Draw a Stickman, originally made for the US market. The game was also very popular in China, but as a pirated game. Jon tells the story of how they evolved Draw a Stickman to be a free game with in-game purchases and cultu...

While at DevIntersection in Orlando, Carl and Richard talk to Billy Hollis about WPF. Having established that WPF is not dead a few weeks back at Build, Billy admits that he's never stopped developing for it. His work is all about client applications, and HTML just won't do. The discussion digs deep into user interaction patterns that WPF is strong at and how user interfaces and interactions conti...

Carl and Richard talk to Francesco Balena about migrating VB6 applications to .NET. Yes, that's still happening! With Microsoft ending support for Windows XP in April 2014, folks that have been hanging onto old platforms and applications are taking another look at migrating. Francesco makes an amazing tool called VB Migration Partner that analyzes VB6 apps to identify what parts of an application...

Carl and Richard chat with James Montemagno about his experiences building Xamarin applications. But first, a little history, James first getting involved in mobile development, finding Xamarin, culminating with being hired by Xamarin and going on the road trip with .NET Rocks! James talks about the kinds of apps he's been building using the tools, how he organizes his projects for cross-platform...

Carl and Richard chat with Richard Astbury about the Microsoft Research project known as Orleans. Orleans brings the Actor model of development to C# - the Actor model is typically found in functional languages, but you can write functional C#, so why not? Richard talks about Orleans being used to run Halo 4, where hundreds of thousands of players connected with each other between hundreds of Azur...

At NDC-London, Carl and Richard moderated an amazing panel about Web API... panelists included Glenn Block, Darrel Miller, Pedro Felix, Christian Weyer, Dominick Baier and Daniel Roth. What's the future hold for Web API? Is it headed the way of WCF? Can anyone get a word in edgewise around Glenn Block? Some great questions from the audience toward the end of the show as well.

While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard talk to Glenn Block, Justin Rusbatch and Adam Ralph about ScriptCS. Our first show with Glenn on ScriptCS was way back in March 2013, only a week after ScriptCS was first checked into GitHub. Nine months later, where is ScriptCS now? What are people doing with it? Justin talks about his contributions while Adam digs into how he's using ScriptCS in the field...

At the St. Louis stop of the #ModernApps2013 road trip, Carl and Richard chatted with Kathleen Dollard about code generation and Roslyn. The conversation starts out talking about the relative acquiescence of code generation in recent years and the potential of Roslyn to rekindle the movement. Kathleen talks about her own efforts with code generation and where she sees this technology ultimately go...

While at NDC-London, Carl and Richard sat down with Mark Rendle about building Zud.io, a set of tools for handling storage in the cloud. The conversation starts out with a quick chat about TypeScript and it's role in development. Mark talks about the experience of working with BizSpark Plus to build a web-centric way to programmatically handle blobs, tables, queues and more. Also discussed is buil...

Carl and Richard talk to Mads Torgersen about his work on C# and Roslyn. Mads talks about how old the Roslyn CTP has gotten - and how that may change in the future. There's also a hint about a form of Roslyn already seen in the wild (hint - it's CodeLens!). And the conversation gets crazier from there, but it comes down to one thing... is C# in Roslyn, or is Roslyn C#? Have a listen!

While at Øredev in Malmö, Sweden, Carl and Richard talk to Patroklos Papapetrou about Sonar. Sonar is an open source project for instrumenting your code quality, looking for various 'deadly sins' of programming, such as duplication, lack of documentation, etc. Patroklos talks about each of the 'deadly sins' and how Sonar can help you make better quality code.

Carl and Richard talk to Einar Høst, Jonas Winje and Bjørn Einar Bjartnes about their experiences using Reactive Extensions to control an AR Parrot Drone. The conversation starts out with a discussion on the fundamentals of reactive extensions, the idea of raising events around streams of data, and how that applies to something physical like a drone. Quickly, the core issue becomes time - we think...

Carl and Richard talk to Andrea Magnorsky and Andrew O'Connor about their experiences building games in .NET. The conversation starts out talking about the role of MonoGame and how Andrea and Andrew switched to Duality to build Honorbound. Andrea talks about working with artists and the need for visual editors that Duality provides. Andrew talks about the loss of XNA and the challenge of being an...

Carl and Richard talk to Matthew Podwysocki about the latest news around Reactive Extensions. Matthew starts out talking about how Reactive Extensions has moved into open source in a big way, with lots of cross platform support - .NET, JavaScript, C++, Ruby, Python, even Java itself! The conversation digs into the thinking around the reactive approach to development, dealing with massive streams o...

Carl and Richard talk to Chris May about building applications for the Google Glass. The conversation starts out talking about the fundamental capabilities of Glass, how it works and when/where it makes sense to use - and apparently driving is NOT one of them! While the native programming environment is Android (and locked down for the time being), there is a cloud-centric REST model with programm...

Carl and Richard talk to Chris Williams about building and programming robots - all kinds of robots! After Carl opens with a conversation about the Internet of Things, Chris digs into the cool tiny computers that make it possible, like Arduino and Raspberry Pi. Communicating with small computers takes cleverness too, so don't forget about serial and serial's grown-up cousin USB. From there, the co...

Carl and Richard talk to Bob Uva about instrumenting production software with New Relic. New Relic works with Ruby, Java, .NET and more, able to instrument applications end-to-end in production. And there's a free version you can use forever - how cool is that? Bob talks about how the instrumentation system works, reporting back to New Relic servers to give you great visualization of what is actua...

Carl and Richard talk to Jeremiah Peschka about implementing Hadoop in the .NET world. Jeremiah starts out the discussion pointing to a blog post he's done on the Basics of Hadoop (check the links) and how the focus of Hadoop is on the cloud - pre-configured Hadoop solutions in the cloud make life easier, but you have to get the data there. Jeremiah digs into the diversity of tools available to wo...

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 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...

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...

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 Mårten Rånge about Microsoft's Text Template Transformation Toolkit (T4). Don't call it code generation - Mårten talks about how T4 takes away code repetition and keeps you focused on the important stuff. The challenge is learning to build your own maintainable templates. The conversation explores a variety of examples of using T4 effectively for SQL, XAML as well as C# an...

Carl and Richard talk to Amir Rajan about his Oak project on GitHub. Amir discusses his approach to building Single Page Applications (SPA) using an array of open source tools including Rake (from the Ruby stack), nSpec, Canopy, Growl and more. The conversation digs into how C# fits into the equation and how Oak provides the dynamic typing that C# needs to work well in the JavaScript driven world...