.NET Rocks!

Do you know about Google Cloud? Brad Abrams does! Carl and Richard talk to former Microsoftie Brad Abrams about the other big cloud player - and there's a lot to say. Brad starts out focusing on the Platform-as-a-Service offerings of Google such as the App Engine which lets you run Python, Java, PHP, and Go in the cloud with all the scaling options you could ever want. Rather a virtual machine? Th...

While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard moderated a panel of Ben Hall, Peter Mounce, Jeff French and Enrico Campidoglio to talk about the state of DevOps in the .NET world. While DevOps is going strong in the open source world, it is coming slowly to .NET. The panelists discuss their preferred toolchains for speeding deployment, testing and instrumentation of software, as well as the cultural cha...

Jonathan Pepper is back with another great Xamarin case study! Carl and Richard talk to Jon about the Hanx Writer, an iPad application made with the help of Tom Hanks to recreated the mechanical typewriter experience on a tablet. Remember skeuomorphism? Here is an awesome manifestation! Jon talks about the process of creating the effects of three different mechanical type writers in an iPad applic...

While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talked with Bryan Hunter about the language Elixir. Bryan tells the story of how the folks behind Ruby got interested in Erlang, thinking to bring some of Erlang's features to other languages - but then discovered it was impossible, since Erlang is its own operating system. So instead, they created a new language within Erlang, and that is Elixir. Taking the f...

While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talk to Enrico Campidoglio about including databases in your continuous delivery process. Enrico talks through a few different strategies for getting your database moving as fast as your application, without losing data along the way. The conversation digs into issues around version control for databases, keeping schema and reference tables in your source cont...

While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard sat down with Mark Rendle to talk about the latest version of Simple. Data - version 2! Simple. Data started out years ago as a simple abstraction for data access, all open source with numerous additional projects built on it to support a huge variety of data stores. Mark talks about going back into his old V1 project and realizing he did some interesting t...

Another great show from NDC London, Carl and Richard talk to Ben Hall about Docker. Docker has been taking the industry by storm, bringing a lighter-weight approach to virtualization by getting the operating system out of the package and focusing on automated configuration and implementation. Ben talks about the origins of Docker and its focus on the Linux world - but that is rapidly changing with...

Carl and Richard got the amazing opportunity to go to the NASA Goddard Space Flight center to see the James Web Space Telescope in person. And while there, they sat down with Craig Tooley, the Project Manager of the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission (MMS) to understand a bit more about space weather and the remarkable science and engineering that goes into a mission like MMS. The MMS mission utili...

At the NDC London conference, Carl and Richard talk to Steve Sanderson about his work on the Azure Portal and building arguably the greatest Single Page Application (SPA) around today. Steve talks about the approach the Azure Portal team has taken to deal with memory management as well as a flexible plugin architecture that allows the various Azure related teams to plug into the common "shell" com...

While at NDC London at the Excel Center, Carl and Richard talked to Phil Trelford about building your own compiler. First off, why would you do that? Phil talks about the various ways that compiler technology can be used and help improve your own understand of languages and tools. You probably don't need to replace the C# compiler for your applications, but you might want to use parsing technology...

While at the NDC London conference, Carl and Richard talk to Liam Westley about building your own software business. It starts with the idea that the most destructive thing to your software business is support calls - or more broadly, the accumulated cost of your past business. The conversation digs into the power of being a business of one, rather than having employees, and thinking beyond just y...

While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard talk to Shay Friedman about the Chrome Developer Tools. The conversation starts out talking a bit about the state of web development, the jump in JavaScript performance, and the huge increase in the complexity of web applications - which naturally leads to the challenge of debugging said JavaScript-based applications. Enter the Chrome Developer Tools. Firef...

While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talk to Ian Cooper about hexagonal architectures. Turns out the important part is not the six sides - it's the idea of ports and adapters. Originally talked about by Alistair Cockburn, this is an architectural approach that focuses on being tolerant to testing as well as separating commands from querying. It's not quite Command Query Responsibility Segregation...

Julie is back and all about the latest version of Entity Framework - version 7! The conversation starts out with a bit of a state of the union, with Julie describing how moving Entity Framework to GitHub has opened up an amazing level of communication between the EF team and regular developers. Which leads to the scarier part of the discussion: The breaking changes coming to EF7 from EF6. Like ASP...

Carl and Richard talk to David Božjak about the Lumia Imaging SDK... or is it the Nokia Imaging SDK? Caught in the midst of a name change since the acquisition of Nokia phones, the SDK is called Lumia Imaging on the blog sites, but is still Nokia Imaging on NuGet. Certainly it'll all be Lumia some day. David talks about the huge array of features available in the SDK to take photos, apply filters...

Carl and Richard talk to Rocky Lhotka about where universal apps in Visual Studio are really going. But first, a bit of a landscape discussion, especially a laugh about the "comeback" of .NET and C#. Did Xamarin save the day? Rocky talks about how universal apps aren't all that universal, but with Xamarin in the mix, you start to look at a common code base for desktop, laptop, tablet and mobile de...

Carl and Richard talk to Itamar Syn-Hershko about adding search technologies to your application. The conversation starts out focused on what SQL Server can do for search... the LIKE operator. What about NoSQL? Itamar talks about the role that data stores like RavenDB can play as far as finding data. But then you get to dedicated indexing and search tools like Lucerne. NET, ElasticSearch and Solr....

Carl and Richard talk to Jonathan Stark about the wearable landscape today. But first, a crazy story about a Starbucks card. Jon is the guy behind Jonathan's Card, where he put a Starbucks card online for folks to add money to and buy coffee with. Crazy! Next up is a deep dig into the spectrum of watch like devices available today - Samsung Gear, Pebble, the Apple Watch and more! The variety of pr...

While at the MVP Summit, Carl and Richard sat down with Pratap Lakshman, Peli de Halleux and Nikolai Tillman to talk about automating unit testing in .NET. Originally a Microsoft Research Project, PEX is now part of Visual Studio 2015, and digs deep into the IL of your application to generate a huge variety of unit tests. The team also talks about some of the other cool projects they've built usin...

Carl and Richard talk about two space accidents that happened in the same week - the explosion of Orbital Science's Antares Rocket on October 28 and the breakup of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo on October 31. Richard begins with the Orbital Science's mission to supply the International Space Station. Part of NASA's Commercial Resupply Services, the ORB-3 mission included the Cygnus spacecraft car...

Carl and Richard talk to Rob Irving and Simon Jackson about advertising on mobile apps. The conversation starts out with Ad Duplex, which is an ad exchange and a way to advertise your mobile app on other mobile apps like yours - all in an effort to get more users. Rob talks about alternative ways to get users, such as pursuing reviews, using crowdsouring and in general taking marketing seriously....

Carl and Richard talk to Scott Ford about taking over existing software projects. There's lots of negativity around existing code, calling them "brownfield" and "legacy projects." Scott looks at existing projects more like an older home that has been well used, but needs updating. The conversation digs into how to understand not only the code of the existing application, but also the intent of the...

Carl and Richard talk to David Dennison about his complete change of development career: From C# and .NET to Scala and the JVM! David talks about getting work at iTrellis, and their move to a services stack of Scala, Akka and Spray. The discussion focuses on the many things that are the same between the platforms, as well as the differences - it's all managed code in the end! David also talks abou...

Carl and Richard talk to Greg Shackles about making continuous deployment work in the mobile apps space. The conversation starts out with the projects that Greg is currently working on, and the need to get them deployed routinely to iOS and Android devices - this means, of course, deployment to the AppStore, which only goes so fast. Greg talks about avoiding the AppStores by finding ways to make c...

Carl and Richard talk to Michael Van Sickle about developing web applications using the Dojo Toolkit. Not heard of it? You're not alone, but Dojo has been around since 2006! Michael talks about Dojo's focus on backward compatibility, making sure that web applications built with the framework continue to function as HTML, Javascript and CSS evolve. Heck, Dojo started before HTML 5 browsers were eve...