.NET Rocks!

Carl and Richard chat with Brian Noyes about the state of affairs with WPF, Windows 8 and the Prism project. Brian starts out the conversation talking about WPF is far from dead - Microsoft continues to invest in it, and lots of folks, including Brian's customers, are building great applications with WPF. This leads to a discussion about how the changes to Windows 8 at Build affect the WPF story a...

Carl and Richard talk to Burke Holland about building mobile apps. But the conversation starts out with an announcement - Telerik's KendoUI is going open source! Burke talks a bit about the history of KendoUI and how it has evolved over the years, including a KendoUI Mobile (which is also open source). That leads to a discussion about mobile development as a whole, including his preferred tools an...

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...

Carl and Richard go back to space with Uncle Bob! What started at NDC last Fall finishes today! But first, a quick conversation about an episode with Alan Stevens around the software craftsmanship movement, which Uncle Bob is a key part of. Then off to interstellar space! Bob pulls no punches, jumping straight into why nuclear technologies are key to significant space travel. Lots of history in th...

Carl and Richard talk to John Papa about the current state of Single Page Application development. John digs into his latest focus on libraries, the constant evolution in the Javascript world, and how AngularJS is still a big pile of awesome. The conversation also turns a bit philosophical, with a discussion of Javascript being the assembly language of the web, and how languages like Dart, CoffeeS...

Carl and Richard chat with Nicholas Blumhardt about his work on Serilog, a structured logging tool. But first, the conversation dives a bit into Octopus Deploy, an awesome tool for helping you manage your application packages and help deploy them to testing, pre-production, production, and so on. Then on to the main event - Nicholas' amazing Serilog product. Logging is a pain, and Serilog makes it...

Carl and Richard talk to Hugh Jones about EU Data Protection laws. But first, a long discussion about the NSA revelations and the surveillance culture we're living in today. Hugh talks about the evolving perceptions around privacy and how data needs to be better protected. From there, Hugh dives into the EU Data Protection laws, which apply not only to companies doing business in the EU, but compa...

The first of the new Tablet Shows as .NET Rocks episodes, Carl and Richard talk to Scott Allen about the continued evolution of JavaScript. The conversation starts out with a comment from a listener about a past show with Scott on Modernizr, and Scott talks about how things have changed since then - the focus on newer browsers (if IE9 counts as new) means that the tool needs change. Scott also tal...

A flash from the past! Carl and Richard chat with Robert Scoble! Carl and Robert go back to the VBits days and the beginning of the public internet, the first blogs and Robert's time at Microsoft. Then the conversation turns briefly to Robert's work at Rackspace and their attempt to make the cloud even better. Robert also talks about his book the Age of Context, the stories they collected to creat...

Carl and Richard talk to Marcel de Vries about CodedUI - the test functionality built into Visual Studio that nobody knows about. CodedUI tests are tests built to automatically operate your UI so that you can test your application top-to-bottom, no short cuts. Marcel talks about how CodedUI tests are actually built using a test recorder and then tweaking the tests to increase coverage. You can bui...

Carl and Richard chat with Micheal Learned about modern release management with Visual Studio. The conversation starts like many do when it comes to ALM: what's hard, and what's easy. And let's face it - releasing software properly is often hard! Micheal talks about the various pitfalls that folks fall into around releasing software and how today's environment just won't tolerate those mistakes an...

Well, you knew this was coming - a geek out on the not-fun topic of nuclear accidents. Richard runs down the fundamentals of nuclear accidents, with some story telling around what happened at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Then on to the main event - Fukushima. The situation is serious, but progress is being made and the Japanese remain committed to fully cleaning up the mess made there. So is n...

Carl and Richard talk to Amber DeRosa and Alicia Hatter about usability testing. The conversation starts out by digging into what usability testing is all about - actually looking at how users are using your software... or perhaps would want to use your software. Amber and Alicia talk about working through usability studies even before the software is built to get a feel for what the user would re...

Carl and Richard talk to Alan Stevens about his views on software craftsmanship. Well, if he just agreed with it, it wouldn't be much of a show now, would it? Alan starts off talking about what it really means to be a craftsman - referencing such wonderful talents as Kevin Ryan Guitars and Steinway pianos as examples. This leads to a discussion about function, construction method and artistry - th...

Carl and Richard chat with Rob Conery about his open source project called Biggy. Biggy is a project in GitHub that puts a wrapper over top of Postgres (and SQL Server for that matter) to allow you to handle documents (aka JSON) efficiently and fast. Rob takes on thinking around noSQL in general, including graph and document databases. This leads to a whole discussion on what we should store and w...

While at the ModernApps2013 event in Mountain View, California, Carl and Richard got a chance to sit down with David Chappell and get his views on the changing landscape of software and software development. David talks about how applications have evolved into a devices+services model, where parts of the application live in the cloud, and the rest live in the various form factor devices that we al...

Carl and Richard talk to Neil Danson about his experiences with F#. The conversation starts off connecting Carl's thoughts on neural networks and a listener question - so what is the role of F# in the big data analytic world? Neil digs into how F# has permeated all types of development in the .NET world, even WPF! There's also some serious discussion about quality of code in F# and how Bob Martin'...

Carl and Richard chat with David McCarter about what it takes to be successful when you are interviewed for a job. But David goes well beyond just the interview - are you pursuing the right job for you? Are you looking for it the right way? The conversation digs into the value of recruiters and difference between good ones and bad ones. And when it comes to the interview itself, what preparation s...

Carl and Richard talk to Hilton Giesenow down in South Africa about what it takes to build real enterprise-class SharePoint systems. Hilton talks about the history of SharePoint and how it's twists-and-turns have left a bad taste in the mouth of some developers. The conversation also digs into the infrastructure side, which is unavoidable when it comes to SharePoint - there are lots of moving part...

Carl and Richard talk to Benjamin Howarth about his experiences working with Umbraco. Umbraco is a CMS system built in ASP.NET. Benjamin discusses how Umbraco has become a key part of his work with Universal Music - and how its affected the entire development practice. After a digression into DevOps, the conversation comes back around to what you need to know to be successful with Umbraco - where...

Carl and Richard talk to Michael Kennedy about using Python with .NET. Michael talks about the nature of Python and what makes it great (like whitespace counting). The conversation digs into the many forms of Python, some Windows friendly, some not so much, and many with specializations. Don't miss the discussion about the Zen of Python, and check out the huge collection of links for various Pytho...

Time to geek out on Bitcoin! Well, more than Bitcoin, let's talk cryptocurrency in general. But first, a history lesson - Richard runs down the fundamentals of currency and banking from the neolithic era, ancient culture, the middle ages, all the way to today. The history lesson sets the stage for why cryptocurrencies have come into being. While there are many cryptocurrencies, the boys focus on B...

Carl and Richard talk to Tatham Oddie about his work with Neo4j. The conversation starts out exploring the core concepts behind graph databases - of which Neo4j is one. This leads to a more general conversation about NoSQL, what it's good for and where it struggles. Can NoSQL and SQL work side by side? You bet! Tatham talks about some of the applications he's built using both technologies, and how...

Carl and Richard talk to Jonathan Zuck about the state of software patents today. The conversation starts out talking about some of the craziness around software patents - patent trolls, extortion-like letters and the like. Jonathan talks about the changes made by the US to patent law in 2012, and how the biggest challenge today is cleaning up poorly written patents from the DotComBoom era. Also m...

While at the Denver stop of the ModernApps2013 tour, Carl and Richard talk to Tim Huckaby about the latest on the Kinect. The Xbox One comes with the Kinect 2, which by summer 2014 will be available for PCs. The conversation starts out explaining the differences between the old Kinect and new (it's three times better!) and some ideas of what can be done with it. But don't stop there - from gesture...