.NET Rocks!

What is gRPC and why should you care? Carl and Richard talk to Shawn Wildermuth about the new hotness that is gRPC - or is it? Shawn talks about all the different approaches we've taken over the years to communicate over the wire, whether with SOAP, REST or all the other flavors in-between. What makes sense for your application? Shawn talks about how gRPC has a solid cross-platform solution for st...

In the age of the cloud, does performance matter? Carl and Richard talk to JD Trask of Raygun software about his work making applications run fast - and knowing how to do it! JD talks about the various ways that you can measure the performance of different types of applications, especially in this modern day where you can instrument in production and actually see what your customers are experienci...

Server-Side Blazor is poised to ship at the end of September 2019 - are you ready? Carl and Richard talk to Shaun Walker, formerly of DotNetNuke fame, about server-side Blazor - starting with, how does server-side Blazor even make sense? Blazor has been a client-side technology using web assembly since Steve Sanderson showed off the prototype in 2017. But as the product matured, a server-side mode...

What is Rust and why would you use it with C#? While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard chatted with Ashley Mannix about he and the team at Datalust build Seq, a structured log server, using Rust on the back end and C# on the front. Rust looks a lot like C++, but with a great type safety system and a smart compiler that can help catch memory leaks before they happen. Rust is a modern language with m...

Build is over - what did we learn? Carl and Richard talk to Scott Hunter about the various announcements at Build connection with .NET - including the delivery date of .NET Core 3 and what happens beyond! The conversation digs into switching to a routine delivery model for .NET, so that you can anticipate when you'll need to implement the new version of the framework. Scott also talks about new fe...

Build your web site in F#! While in London at the NDC, Carl and Richard talked to Anthony Brown about the SAFE Stack - a complete set of tooling for building back-end and front-end parts of your website in F#! Anthony talks about the various pieces needed to work together, how debugging works, and his preferred tooling, including VSCode as the editor and some great plug-ins that make F# coding eas...

What's up with Blazor? While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard chatted with Steve Sanderson and Daniel Roth about the latest efforts around running C# in the browser with Web Assembly. Since its first demo back in 2017 by Steve, Blazor has grown up a lot - part of ASP.NET Core but still nominally an experimental project, parts of Blazor are now appearing in the preview editions of .NET Core 3 as...

How do you make .NET Core go even faster? System. Memory! While at the Update Conference in Prague, Carl and Richard sat down with .NET Core team member Adam Sitnik to talk about his work on Span of T and System. Memory. Adam talks about .NET Core 2.1 and C# 7.2 giving access to unmanaged heap and stack memory. Used right, you can get huge performance boosts and decreased memory footprints for cer...

The .NET Foundation is changing! Carl and Richard talk to Jon Galloway and Beth Massi about the changes in the .NET Foundation and what it means to the average .NET developer. The first announcement is that the .NET Foundation is moving to an open membership model - if you have made a contribution to .NET in any way, be it code, documentation or other, you can apply for membership and expect to be...

How do you build a mobile app in 2018? Or should you? Richard moderates a panel from DevReach in Bulgaria with Sam Basu, Jen Looper and Jo Franchetti about their experiences with different tools building mobile apps. The conversation ranges over Xamarin, Cordova, NativeScript and good ol' fashion mobile web. Is the Progressive Web App good enough now to skip going to the app store? Or do you want...

What's your dependency injection solution? Carl and Richard talk to Steven van Deursen about his work building SimpleInjector and why there seem to be so many different dependency solution options out there. Steven talks about how he came to build SimpleInjector and what makes different DI solutions valuable - including when the .NET Core team tried to build an abstraction over dependency injectio...

Looking for some build automation options? Carl and Richard talk to Matthias Koch about his open source project called Nuke - as in Nu-Make. Matthias discusses building a domain-specific language in C# that focuses on building software using fluent syntax, but looking beyond those options for more ways to work with third-party software and not getting too tangled in the details. This leads to an e...

Functions are ephemeral and stateless - right? What if they weren't? Carl and Richard talk to Maxime Rouiller about durable functions in Azure. Maxime dives into the patterns that durable functions provide, starting with the chaining pattern, where you can declare a series (or chain) of function calls that only start when the previous function completes. And then onto the fan-out pattern that allo...

Is .NET ready for the Internet of Things? Carl and Richard talk to Bryan Costanich about the current state of IoT and how his startup Wilderness Labs is building next-generation hardware that runs .NET! Bryan talks about how microcontrollers have gotten much more powerful today, but the programming stacks are still back in the 80s. The expectations of customers today is cloud integration, auto-upd...

Start programming quantum today! While at NDC in Sydney, Carl and Richard talked with John Azariah about Q# and the Quantum Development Kit that he has helped create. The conversation starts out with a refresher on quantum computing in general, including exploring a number of the myths and fallacies - John brings up the really important problems that quantum can tackle, including (no kidding!) wor...

Can you build a neural net from scratch? While at NDC in Sydney, Carl and Richard talked to Joe Albahari about using LINQPad to create neural nets from scratch. LINQPad is an interactive development environment for .NET - originally focused on helping you build LINQ expressions. But as Joe explains, it can be used for all sorts of interactive coding experiences - including learning to build neural...

SignalR is updated! Carl and Richard talk to Microsoft Cloud Developer Advocate Anthony Chu about the latest updates to SignalR - including a version of SignalR for .NET Core! Anthony talks about how SignalR has evolved since the first versions in 2011, today there is still the Standard Framework edition as well as the new .NET Core edition. And then there's also the Azure backend! You can run the...

How do you protect the source code you ship in your applications? Carl and Richard talk to Gabriel Torok, who has led PreEmptive Software for years and has provided code obsfuscation for .NET since the very beginning - for free! Today it's not enough to conceal your code, as Gabe says, it's about tamper-proofing. Not just to keep your code from being stolen, but to stop hackers from stealing data...

Migrating .NET applications to .NET Core? The Windows Compatibility Pack can help! Carl and Richard talk to Immo Landwerth about the Windows Compatibility Pack, which is a NuGet package of NuGet packages to fill in over 20,000 APIs that aren't part of .NET Core. The goal, as Immo explains, is to make it easier for developers to deal with migration, by having more parts of the framework included. B...

Xamarin keeps evolving - are you using the latest? Carl and Richard talk to James Montemagno about his on-going work making life easier for Xamarin developers. The conversation starts out referencing a comment from a listener about the code-compile-deploy time and what it takes to get going faster. James discusses the work Xamarin has done working with the different emulators out there to make thi...

How are applications being built for Hololens? While on the Modern Web Tour in Munich, Richard chatted with Jimmy Engstrom about his work building software for Hololens. The conversation starts out with the frustration over the lack of new hardware on the Hololens front - but with hope for something new soon! Jimmy runs down a variety of different programming methods for Hololens, the most popular...

Back at the beginning of WPF, before Silverlight, there was MVVM Light. While on the Modern Web Tour in Zurich, Richard sat down with Laurent Bugnion to talk about his work creating the open source toolkit that helped developers build cross-platform applications using the Model View View-Model pattern. Laurent's story crosses much of the story of XAML itself, from WPF to Silverlight to Windows Pho...

It's 2018, do you know where your C++ is? Carl and Richard talk to Kate Gregory about the resurgence she sees in C++ - but why? Kate talks about a number of factors, including the fact that C++ itself has evolved, the latest standard is from 2017 and there are plans for a 2020 edition! Anywhere that performance and resources are at a premium, C++ is there - you see it in embedded systems, all kind...

Time for a chat with the leader of C#! Carl and Richard talk to Mads Torgersen about where C# has been and where it's going. Mads discusses some of the ideas being explored for what will become C# 8, including the on-going experiments with nullable reference types. The conversation dives into how language features are developed, the challenge of dealing with a huge diversity of developers in C# of...

Serverless technology can extend your applications! Carl and Richard talk to Glenn Block about his work at Auth0 and building out WebHooks. Glenn talks about taking WebHooks to the next level with Extend, providing a SaaS offering for extensibility into other SaaS applications. This leads to a conversation about the architecture of extensibility in the cloud - rather than building a ton of feature...