.NET Rocks!

What does it mean to be a modern mobile developer? While at the Nebraska Code Camp, Carl and Richard talked to Heather Downing about her recent dive into mobile development. In only a few years, Heather has been involved in a number of cool projects and talks about learning on the fly to build native, hybrid, and web-based mobile applications. The conversation explores the advantages and disadvant...

How did you learn to debug? While at the Nebraska Code Camp, Carl and Richard talked to Joel Kauffman about debugging practices. Rarely is debugging taught in classes, arguably because all school code is perfect. But code in the real world has bugs, and finding those bugs can be challenging. Joel talks about helping developers understand how debugging works, utilizing stack traces, working backwar...

At the Nebraska Code Camp, Carl and Richard moderated a panel discussion with Mads Kristensen, Lee Brandt, Josh Broton, and Robert Boedigheimer exploring the state of web development on the Microsoft stack. Of course, the first topic is the upcoming ASP.NET vNext and its switch over to open source, along the way letting go of some legacy features including Web Forms. The panel also discussed vario...

How are you thinking about UX these days? Carl and Richard chat with Danielle Cooley about her talk at the Nebraska Code Camp around user experience, efficiency and effectiveness of design. Danielle talks about her background in biotechnical design and the challenges of bringing biology (that's us) and technology together in an effective way - including web design! The conversation explores a vari...

What's the difference between an Azure Web Site and Web App? Not at thing! Carl and Richard talk to Scott Hunter about the latest announcements from Microsoft about Azure App Service. Azure App Service brings together Azure Web Sites, Mobile Services and a whole bunch of other goodness. Scott explains how Microsoft has unified all of these services under one umbrella to make it easier to buy and u...

How do you do agile faster? Carl and Richard talk to Dan North about accelerating agile - but Dan has changed the name to Software, Faster. And even that is controversial, as Dan talks about focusing on delivering business needs, which may or may not involve code. The conversation also calls back to the Agile Manifesto and its abuse - it's not code with no documentation, its code over documentatio...

Where can iBeacons take you? Carl and Richard talk to Greg Shackles about some of the opportunities available using beacon devices with smartphones. While iBeacons are specifically an Apple technology, there are lots of third party implementations that are more open. The balancing act of power and capability is a constant struggle for beacons. Things get really fun when you start looking at all th...

Are you building in WPF? Are you using PRISM? Carl and Richard talk to Brian Noyes and Brian Lagunas about the PRISM project, which is a set of tools for building WPF apps. As Brian Noyes says, PRISM is the AngularJS of WPF! The conversation dives into the on-going evolution of PRISM, including support for Windows Phone and Universal Apps. The point of PRISM is composability, helping you to organi...

Is Spaced-Based Power viable? Time for a Geek Out! Carl and Richard chat about the state of space-based power, reviewing a number of designs going back to the 1970s. Can you really transmit enough power to make it worthwhile? How big does the satellite need to be? What's the best place to put the satellite? Is it a giant weapon when its done? Who will build it and why... and just how much is this...

Programming in Swift? Want to build Android apps too? Carl and Richard talk to Marc Hoffman of RemObjects about his Silver project - using Swift to program for Android. Swift is Apple's cool new language for developing iOS apps, making life easier than Objective C. Don't use Swift? No problem, how about Pascal - because RemObjects has Oxygene, which is a moderized version of Pascal. That doesn't w...

So when do IT Pros become developers? Carl and Richard talk to Steve Evans about his operations folks writing code and dealing with all the challenges that everyone finds when they write, own and operate code. The code in question is primarily PowerShell, used to automate deployment. It needs testing, source control and everything else that code requires. Steve talks about how his operations folks...

The awesome Kinect applications keep coming! Carl and Richard talk to Tim Huckaby about the on-going revolution of applications utilizing Kinect. While not especially popular in the traditional desktop setting, the Kinect is finding remarkable traction in retail and commercial spaces, as interactive signage and for connecting with customers. Tim talks about battling the creepiness factor - the abi...

Like beer? Are you using Untappd? Carl and Richard talk to creator Greg Avola about the phenomenon that is Untappd. What started as a simple tool to keep track of what beer he liked and didn't like has turned into a super popular app with millions of downloads. Greg talks about what it took to keep the app working as the number of users grew immensely, and how he and the team built the app to work...

What an amazing year for ScriptCS! Carl and Richard talk to Glenn Block about the latest developments in ScriptCS - comparing the state of affairs to the last time he was on a year previously. With Roslyn all but shipped, ScriptCS is going mainstream - perhaps it will even be bundled with Studio someday! In the meantime, Glenn and a host of other contributors have continued to extend ScriptCS to m...

Are you user accounts secure? Carl and Richard talks to Troy Hunt about all the ways you can get your accounts stolen. So what should you store and how should you store it? Troy digs into the various encryption and hashing techniques available - and the many mistakes that have been made with them. Along the way expect yet another discussion about password management, it is an endless process. And...

How are you dealing with mobile testing? Karen Johnson talks to Carl and Richard about thinking through the big picture when it comes to testing. The conversation starts out with a discussion about the tools we've had for desktop and web testing for years that are still hard to come by on the mobile platform - like UI capture of touch, gestures and typing. Its just not that easy to do capture on a...

ASP.NET continues to evolve! Carl and Richard talk to Mads Kristensen about the many amazing things he's working on in the web space, starting with Web Essentials! Mads explains how Web Essentials is a way to experiment with new features for ASP.NET, and that success comes when the feature is pulled into Visual Studio itself - and you get to be part of that process, it's all open source! The conve...

So what IoT device have you built? Carl and Richard talk to Suz Hinton about her experiences building IoT devices. Suz starts out talking about Meow Shoes, a pair of shoes she added sensors and an Arduino too - and used cat meows to test with. All sorts of hilarity ensues, but there are a number of interesting applications can be made from capturing someone's movements, even through their feet. Th...

How do you test your mobile applications? James Montemagno talk to Carl and Richard about various testing approaches for mobile apps. James talks about the Xamarin Test Cloud with thousands of different devices you can test against... for a fee of course. This leads to a conversation about automating UI testing, testing against local devices and only going to the cloud when you're ready to test on...

So where is Azure at today? Carl and Richard talk to Michele Leroux Bustamante about her work with a number of customers utilizing Microsoft Azure. The conversation digs into what Michele considers new Azure vs. old Azure. She still has customers depending on web and worker roles, while many have moved purely over to WebSites. And the evolution continues, with better analytics, the beginnings of c...

How do you test your cross platform applications? Carl and Richard talk to Paul Mooney about building software in .NET and Java and wanting to use a common set of testing protocols. Tricky, but possible! The conversation focuses in on abstractions, which are key to creating sufficient separation of functionality to allow you to insert testing code regardless of what language you work in. And it tu...

So how do you build your cross-platform mobile apps? Carl and Richard talk to Troy Miles about his experiences building mobile apps with the Ionic Framework. Built over top of Adobe Cordova, Ionic takes over a lot of the plumbing code that you find yourself building in every mobile app. Ionic brings controls to the table in two forms - pure CSS components and CSS/JavaScript. You could write the CS...

Jez Humble is back and building a lean enterprise! Carl and Richard talk to Jez about continuous delivery and all that amazing DevOps stuff - but then we get to the serious bit, which is really about how DevOps is a manifestation of organizational change. You need buy-in from the top to make it happen, but it can't happen all at once. How do you make gradual improvements to present the power of a...

Well, there goes another milestone - show 1100! Since Richard actually joined as co-host starting with show 100, that makes ONE THOUSAND .NET Rocks episodes together. Sure, there's 130 Tablet Shows, but who's counting? The conversation digs into a bunch of the gear used to make .NET Rocks and all the PWOP podcasts. We may not take ourselves too seriously, but we sure do take podcasting seriously....

Are you ready for ECMAScript 6? Carl and Richard talk to Jafar Husain about some of the great new features coming in ECMAScript 6 - the next version of JavaScript, at least for now. Jafar talks about the fun and challenges of participating in the TC39 committee that developed the ES6 standard which is now being implemented by browser developers. Jafar digs into Promises, Yields, Proxies and more -...