.NET Rocks!

Making mobile apps is never simple - but it can be made easier! Carl and Richard talk to Matthew Robbins about MFractor, a tool designed to help you build mobile apps using Xamarin across platforms more easily. Matthew talks about the challenges of trying to create common code (typically C#) in Xamarin that actually runs correcting in Android and iOS. A big part of MFractor is the code analysis to...

Installation is in chaos! Carl and Richard talk to Rob Mensching about the crazy amount of change that has come to distributing and installing software. The conversation references a comment from a listener about the diversity of server installation solutions including MSDeploy. But what about the desktop? As Rob says, things have been pretty stable for a long time with the MSI - and Rob led the W...

How can you be successful with a product without good documentation? You can't! Carl and Richard talk to Ward Bell, who is serving as editor in chief for Angular docs. After complaining about the quality problems with the Angular documentation, Ward found himself in charge of the problem - and has taken it on in a big way. The docs themselves are developed in GitHub, so anyone can contribute. The...

Time for a Xamarin update - things are moving fast! Carl and Richard talk to James Montemagno, now a Microsoft employee since the Xamarin acquisition, about the on-going evolution of the Xamarin tools for building mobile and UWP applications. The conversation starts out with a comment about folks coming to mobile development for the first time: Less rocket science, more building data-over-forms ap...

Serverless is the new hot buzzword - but what does it really mean? Carl and Richard talk to Ben Godwin about his work building serverless applications - no servers, but lots of services! Ben talks about Amazon Lambda, which is similar to Azure Functions. Both these environments allow individual bits of code to run within them, written in a variety of languages, but often that language is Javascrip...

What role does distributed caching play in applications today? Carl and Richard sit down with Iqbal Khan to talk about nCache, an open source product built to do distributed caching in the .NET world. The conversation starts out with the traditional role of a distributed cache - state storage for a large scaling websites. It's never as simple as it sounds! From there, Iqbal dives into comparing ca...

Compiled PHP on .NET! Carl and Richard talk to Benjamin Fistein and Jakub Míšek about Peachpie, and open source project to implement PHP on the .NET Core. While the project isn't complete yet (you can help - it's open source!), the potential power is huge - taking existing PHP code and being able to compile it down to the CLR. Ben and Jakub talk about the challenge of mapping functionality across...

Version 6 of nServiceBus is imminent! Carl and Richard talk to Udi Dahan about his on-going efforts to build a great service bus in a sustainable business way. The conversation starts out talking about sustainable open source businesses and what has worked (and not). Udi then dives into the cool new features of the latest version of nServiceBus, with a strong focus on asynchronicity. Reliability a...

The rumors of the death of WebForms is greatly exaggerated! Carl and Richard talk to Jeff Fritz, who runs with WebForms team (yes, there is a team!) about what's happening in the WebForms world. While WebForms is not coming to ASP.NET Core, it is a part of regular Windows-centric ASP.NET Framework, and there are new features continuing to be built. Jeff talks about what a modern WebForms app looks...

Can you build a line of business web application and not write any JavaScript? Carl and Richard talk to Tomáš Herceg about his open source project called DotVVM. With DotVVM, you write your ViewModel in C# and your View in HTML. The JavaScript is generated at run time, and you never need to look at it. While there are free open source elements to the project, there are also "pro" editions of some...

More cloud choices! Carl and Richard welcome Chris Sells back onto .NET Rocks after three years and a career change - Chris is now at Google! And he's been busy, excited to announce that Google is provided extensive support for .NET in the Google Cloud, including Visual Studio add-ins to make your implementation even easier. The conversation ranges over the modern cloud development pattern of buil...

There has been lots of conversation about cross-platform mobile apps, but how about cross-platform desktop apps? Carl and Richard talk to David Neal about the Electron framework, letting you build cross-platform desktop apps using HTML, JavaScript and CSS. Electron is how visual Studio Code is built! The conversation also turns to Xamarin - would you rather code in C# and XAML? Lots of choices for...

Ready to learn R? While at NDC Oslo, Carl and Richard sat down with Jamie Dixon and Evelina Gabasova to talk about what .NET developers need to know to get conversant in R. Data science represents a huge opportunity for developers these days, helping businesses actually take advantage of the data the company has. Jamie comes at R from a traditional .NET developer perspective, talking about how the...

Quick, how long can a file path in .NET be? Carl and Richard talk to Jeremy Kuhne, who has taken on the challenge of breaking the 260 character limit on file paths in .NET. Why has this problem persisted for so long? Jeremy references some blog posts from Kim Hamilton back in 2007 when the issue came up big - at the time, .NET was deeply intertwined with Windows, and there were too many things to...

The Hololens SDK edition is out - are you ready to write some code? Carl and Richard talk to Rene Schulte at NDC Oslo about his work building apps for the Hololens. The conversation explores the differences in virtual reality and augmented reality and the huge number of possibilities out there for Hololens. Rene talks about what it's like to develop for Hololens, discussing the relative merits bet...

It's an exciting time for .NET! While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard sat down with David Fowler and Damian Edwards to talk about the development of .NET Core, ASP.NET Core 1 and the Kestrel web server. The conversation digs into the challenges of writing a cross-platform web development framework, including some controversial pivots that have frustrated some developers - looking at you, RC2! Dam...

Virtual Reality is here, and there are choices! Carl and Richard talk to Jason Weimann about the HTC Vive, the competitor to the Oculus Rift. Jason talks about how the two devices are similar and how they are different. And one place they are similar is the programming model - it's all about Unity3D. The conversation focuses in on what it takes to really learn Unity - you're working in Visual Stud...

Even more new stuff from Xamarin! While at Techorama in Mechelen, Belgium, Carl and Richard sat down with James Montemagno to talk about all the goodness that came out of the Evolve conference. The conversation focuses first on the new edition of Xamarin Forms, building UI abstracts for your mobile apps to increase your code sharing across platforms. James also talks about data pages as a way to p...

What is slowing your web site down? Carl and Richard talk to Matt Watson, CEO of Stackify, about their free product called Prefix. Method profiling has been around for awhile, but it takes a lot of time and tuning to get right - and running profilers on production servers can be a career limiting behavior. Prefix runs on your development workstation so that you can see what parts of your code are...

Scott Hunter is back and managing the whole .NET platform! While at DevIntersection in Orlando, Carl and Richard sat down with Scott to talk about his new role as director of the entire .NET platform. That includes all the open source goodness - and Scott digs into his team's efforts to make ASP.NET the fastest web development platform on the planet (they're almost there!) and what it takes to bri...

Universal Apps are becoming more universal - arriving on the XBox One! Carl and Richard talk to Chris Gomez about the announcements at the Microsoft Build event around building software for the XBox One. Now, any developer can write code using the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) approach, which means you can code in C#, Javascript... pretty much any language you want in the CLR space. Chris expla...

Ready to code for XBox One? Carl and Richard talk to Tom Spilman about his efforts to bring MonoGame to the XBox One. When the XBox One came out a few years ago, it did not support Microsoft's Indie game platform, XNA. MonoGame has stepped up to fill that role. And as an extra perk, it runs on everything - iOS, Android, Mac, Playstation and Nintendo devices. And of course, everything is coded in C...

Microsoft buys Xamarin! While at Build, Carl and Richard chatted with Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza about what the acquisition of Xamarin means. The big news is that the Xamarin tools for making iOS and Android apps are now part of Visual Studio - all versions, right down to the Community Edition. And there's more (of course), so have a listen. Miguel digs into what this means for the average ....

How is C# 7 coming along? Carl and Richard talk to Kathleen Dollard about her involvement in the very public process that is the open source development of the next C#. Kathleen talks about how there are issues in the GitHub repository for Roslyn that are actually design notes - summaries of the current thinking on the new features coming. Where things get really exciting is the comments on those...

How do you build cross-platform desktop applications? Carl and Richard talk to Curtis Wensley about eto.forms, an open source project he started back in 2006 to deal with cross-platform challenges. Originally focused on mobile, Curtis recognized that Xamarin was moving seriously into that space and pivoted to the desktop side, just in time for Silverlight to go into limbo. Under the hood, eto depe...