.NET Rocks!

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 things go faster and work in more configurations. And then it's on to Xamarin Essentials - combining all your favorite Xamarin plugins into one easy-to-install-and-manage package!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Can Artificial Intelligence help protect the Earth? Jennifer Marsman says yes! Carl and Richard talk to Jennifer about her new role working with Microsoft Research on implementing machine learning systems to support agriculture, environmental protection, biodiversity and more. Some of the projects originate within Microsoft, but there are a number of external projects supported by the team with Azure credits and funding. AI for good!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

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 of which is Unity - and not just for writing games!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

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 Phone and Xamarin Forms!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Ready to add UX to your skills? While in Berlin at the Telerik Modern Web Tour, Richard interviews Jessica Engstrom on how developers can add UX skills to their repertoire. Sure, it would be nice to have a dedicated UX person, but that's not always an option. So what do you need to know to get started? Jessica talks about the Tenets and Traps card deck that lists a variety of key tenets and the traps that you can fall into when it comes to making great UX experiences. Lots of great thinking!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

So many ways to build mobile apps - what works best for you? Carl and Richard talk to Matt Netkow about the past, present and future of PhoneGap and how the Progressive Web App is playing in the mobile dev world. Matt talks about the many JavaScript-based solutions for mobile cross-platform development including PhoneGap, Cordova, NativeScript and Ionic. But with Progressive Web Apps being supported by browsers on mobile devices, could you just be writing native Javascript for your web app? Lots of good discussion!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

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 kinds of drivers and production code that cares how fast things go. There are lots of new developers on lots of new projects in the C++ world, check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

GraphQL continues to evolve - should it be in your toolbox? Carl and Richard talk to Cory House about how he's been working with GraphQL. Cory talks about how he appreciates the lack of ceremony around GraphQL and it's strengths in dealing with a diversity of clients and bandwidth availability. Comparisons with oData are inevitable, and the jury is kind of out on it - both technologies are viable. GraphQL has a great ecosystem growing up around it, and is well worth a look if you need web-callable APIs!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Containerize all the things! Carl and Richard talk to Ben Hall about his on-going work with software in containers. Ben talks about Docker being pretty much synonymous with containers now, but when it comes to orchestration, there are a few more choices. Kubernetes seems to be the popular choice in the public cloud space, but Docker Swarm, Apache Mesos and Red Hat OpenShift all can play a role as well. Ben also digs into the role of serverless in a container world, and how these cloud-native architectures make you think about software differently!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

We've all heard of volcanoes - but what's a supervolcano? Time for a Geek Out! Richard starts out with a discussion on the core concepts behind our understanding of volcanoes and vulcanism - and how before modern times, there have been occasional massive volcanic eruptions so large they are classed as super-eruptions. The best-known supervolcano today is the Yellowstone Caldera, and depending who you ask, it's due for an eruption. What would a super-eruption look like, and what can we do about it?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Azure loves Node! Carl and Richard talk to John Papa about running JavaScript on the server side, in the cloud and otherwise. John talks about the tooling around doing web development in Azure, including the Azure CLI and more. The conversation also digs into the client side of development with VS Code and the huge array of extensions available that allow you to personalize and automate your development experience - the right tooling makes all the difference!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

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 varying skill levels and community engagement. Mads loves his role, and C# is better for it!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

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 features, let your customers extend your software the way they want!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Want to extend Visual Studio? Carl and Richard talk to Mads Kristensen about what its like to build Visual Studio extensions - and how he's now responsible for helping others build extensions too! Mads is the person behind Web Essentials, which used to be a big stand-alone download. Today it's a bunch of Visual Studio extensions. Today Mads is a program manager for Visual Studio extensions, and wants to help YOU be successful at building them too!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

.NET Core in Action! Carl and Richard talk to Dustin Metzgar about his new Manning book, .NET Core in Action. Dustin talks about the challenge of writing faster than the .NET team can ship code - how do you get a book done? The conversation also digs into effective strategies for working with .NET Core, the kind of tooling you care about, approaches to debugging, internationalization and more!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How can Azure help your applications be secure? Carl and Richard talk to Daniel Piessens about his experiences using various features of Azure to secure applications. The conversation starts out with application secrets stored in Azure Key Vault - not just for SSL certificates, any information that your application needs should be in there. To access it, you'll want Azure Active Directory, and that leads to a discussion on multi-factor authentication and increasing sophistication of identity - all features that come automatically from Azure. Whether your application is in the cloud or on-premises, you can make it more secure with these tools!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Put machine learning into your .NET app! Carl and Richard talk to John Alexander about ML.NET - a set of libraries that Microsoft has been using internally for years, now available for you as a NuGet package that you can add to your application pretty painlessly. The conversation dives into what sorts of machine learning tasks make sense for ML.NET and your application, and there are a ton. From sentiment analysis to pricing prediction, machine learning has a ton of possibilities. ML.NET provides a .NET friendly layer over top of a number of machine learning technologies!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How do you handle faults in your application? Carl and Richard talk to Dylan Reisenberger about Polly, the open source library (now part of the .NET Foundation) that helps organize fault recovery into a set of policies. Dylan talks about creating good fault solutions, not especially hard code, but it can get messy at times - creating policies makes your code more readable as well as easy to maintain when your approach to faults needs to change. And now Polly is a recommended tool for working with .NET Core 2.1!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

The .NET Framework continues to evolve! Carl and Richard talk to Kathleen Dollard about her work at Microsoft - helping to provide tooling and new features for maintaining existing applications and creating new ones. Kathleen is also responsible for Visual Basic .NET, and talks about how it's being maintained based on the needs of VB.NET developers - stability is a focus! The upcoming Core 3 offers some interesting opportunities for existing applications to get new features, and Kathleen talks about how the team will integrate the new features. The framework continues to evolve!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Everything fails eventually - how do you recover? Carl and Richard talk to Barry O'Reilly about building anti-fragile systems. Anti-fragility is the philosophy of accepting that things can break and you need to be able to detect and recover from that failure, whatever form it might take. Barry talks about the four aspects of anti-fragility: redundancy, diversity, modularity and loose-coupling. They're all common terms, but understanding how to do them well within your system is a challenge. How reliable do you need to be? What's an acceptable level of failure? This is what modern software systems are all about!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Microsoft acquires GitHub! What does this mean? Carl and Richard talk to Phil Haack about what's going to change and what isn't - starting with, at least for the foreseeable future, Phil is not a Microsoft employee! GitHub is going to be a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft, operated independently. But having Microsoft resources available does open some interesting doors - Phil talks about the vast amount of resources that Microsoft has to move quickly on cool features and projects around the open source world!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Where has Uno been all your life? Carl and Richard talk to Francois Tanguay and Jerome Laban about Uno - the open source cross-platform UX library based on the Microsoft Universal Windows Platform (UWP) - the other flavor of XAML! Francois and Jerome talk about using various versions of Uno the past four years to build cross-platform applications for Windows, Android and iOS - more than 200 of them! Now they have implemented a web assembly version as an experiment and are open sourcing the framework to broaden the community and explore more UX ideas - check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

C# is not done - there's more to come! Carl and Richard talk to Mark Michaelis about his work on Essential C# 7 which digs into the new bits in the 7.x version of C# - which is cool, but so is the conversation around what happened at the Build event and how that is reflected in C#. Mark talks about the new language features in C#, even going into some things that should appear in version 8 to deal with modern programming problems. And then there's Core 3 - what will it mean to have WPF and WinForms? Could they be cross-platform? Should they be? Lots of good thinking!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Azure is good - but tooling makes it great! While at Build in Seattle, Carl and Richard talked to Paul Yuknewicz and Andrew Hall about the latest tools available in Visual Studio for developers wanting to get the most out of Azure. The conversation starts out with a response to a listener about debugging services in Azure - the challenge of following an execution path through your software and the various service offerings of Azure that your application might depend on to understand where problems lie. Then a dive into the new bits - new container support, tooling around Kubernetes and more!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

More news from Build - the release of Visual Studio for the Mac 7.5! Carl and Richard talk to Mikayla Hutchinson about the latest features coming for the former Xamarin product. The biggest news is support for Razor, JavaScript and TypeScript intellisense, which sounds simple, but involves a ton of changes and makes VS for Mac more than just that mobile development tool. There's plenty of improvements in the mobile dev space too, and the first steps to integrating with VSTS!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Could there be life on other planets? Time for a Geek Out! Richard chats with Carl about Fermi's Paradox, Drake's Equation and all the latest science we've gathered around how common life is on other planetary bodies. This does lead to a discussion about what makes a planet a planet in the first place - that definition is changing and being heavily debated. And as for intelligent life... well, that's a whole other problem!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Desktop installation needs to get better! While at Build in Seattle, Carl and Richard talked to Andrew Clinick about MSIX, the next generation installation technology from the Windows team. MSIX is open source and available at GitHub, and works to make your desktop application installation experience a bit less painful. Andrew discusses the various approaches that Microsoft has taken over the years around installation and some of the unintended consequences that have come along - all that learning has been merged into MSIX to make desktop installation better. Check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Tabs for Windows apps? While at Build in Seattle, Carl and Richard talked to legend Raymond Chen and Jason Watson about the upcoming Sets capabilities in Windows 10. The conversation dives into the virtual desktop, Windows 10 timeline and other tech to get you back to a productive state quickly, from one device to another. Jason and Raymond talk about how developers can add functionality to their applications to take advantage of Sets to further increase productivity. Windows continues to evolve!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

.NET Core is fast, but does how you write code in .NET Core help with performance? Carl and Richard talk to Ben Watson about the 2nd Edition of his HIgh Performance .NET Code book. The original edition came out in 2014 when .NET Core was just beginning (ASync/Await were brand new too!) and so an update is welcome. Ben explains that there is no one right way to write high performing code, every implementation is on a case-by-case basis. You need to benchmark and instrument to understand where bottlenecks are, then measure performance carefully before you start trying to improve. But there are a bunch of options available to improve performance!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

MFractor grows up! Carl and Richard talk to Matthew Robbins about the progress he's made over the past 18 months (since his last show) on MFractor - now an extension for Visual Studio for the Mac to make building mobile applications with Xamarin easier. Matt talks about improving the mobile development cycle - the time it takes from writing code on your PC to it running on your smartphone, and recognizing that it's not just about compile and transfer times. It's also image sizing and copying, catching errors early and more - things that can be done while writing code!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Fresh from Build (actually recorded before Build) - a new version of .NET Core! Carl and Richard talk to Scott Hunter about the announcement of .NET Core 3. Scott leads off with a conversation around .NET Core 2.1, now a release candidate at Build. And then the big news, the next version of Core bringing love to the desktop side, at least for Windows. Versions of WinForms and WPF run against Core. It's a separate package because it's not cross-platform, but it certainly brings new Windows desktop development to Core! Check out the build.microsoft.com site for video on Core 3!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Do constraints liberate? Carl and Richard talk to Mark Seemann about the very constraints that developers often argue against - pointing out how those constraints can actually make us more productive. Mark talks about memory management, such as garbage collection in .NET, while a constraint (you can't do what you want with memory) actually liberates you from thinking about memory. The same with static typing - decide on a type once, and stop worrying about it. The question is, are you surrounding yourself with the constraints that liberate you?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Where do you store your objects? Carl and Richard talk to Kamran Ayub about the latest version of RavenDB. Kamran talks about his experiences implementing Raven in different projects all the way back to version 2 - and how much he appreciates that this latest version offers a ton more features and the kind of stability you need in a data storage tool. The comparisons to MongoDB are inevitable, and it's impressive how similar they are - but clearly RavenDB has a .NET spin! Of course, it's open source and cross-platform, so you can run RavenDB anywhere you like - even a Raspberry PI!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How do you build your web UI? Carl and Richard talk to Frank Krueger about his work on Ooui (pronounced whee), an open source project for implementing a Xamarin-forms like UI experience to the browser. The result is pretty amazing, including a web-based XAML editor that all runs in the browser... super fast! Frank talks about his experiences building code that runs with WebAssembly and the challenges of thinking through new UI experiences. The challenge is the variations in implementation - is XAML destined to fragment further, or can they all come together?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Blazor is getting some buzz, but is it really useful? Carl and Richard talk to Rocky Lhotka about his thoughts around how Blazor uses WebAssembly (WASM) to let C# run on the browser - and what that means for client-side development, both web-based and regular desktop client. Rocky talks about how WASM is an equal-opportunity feature for all sorts of languages, and covering the four big browsers: Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari. Could the future of enterprise apps be all in the browser? Between Progressive Web Apps and WASM, this might be the way forward!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What does it mean to have clean architecture? Carl and Richard talk to Steve Smith about his work on an e-book and template for clean architecture using ASP.NET Core. Steve describes the new tools that make life easier for following clean architectural principals as well as the separation of concerns, between business logic, infrastructure, and clients. The conversation also digs into Domain Driven Design, Test Driven Development and the ever popular Pain Driven Development. Great, common-sense thinking from Steve Smith!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What's new with Xamarin? Carl and Richard talk to Laurent Bugnion, now a Microsoft Cloud Developer Advocate, about his latest experiences with the cross-platform mobile development tool. It's been two years since Xamarin joined Microsoft, and a lot has happened - and far more to come. Laurent talks about both .NET and XAML Standards, and the challenges of reconciling development approaches for an array of mobile devices, the PC and the web. The conversation also dives into the truth that there is no one right way to build cross-platform mobile applications. New approaches and tools continue to be developed!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Test Driven Development (TDD), good idea in theory, but in practice? Carl and Richard talk to John Callaway and Clayton Hunt about their success with TDD. At it's simplest level, TDD is about writing tests first, before coding. In practice, everything is more complicated than that. Writing testable code isn't as simple as it seems, and refactoring existing code to become testable can cause it to break - which is why you wanted tests in the first place. John and Clayton talk through their experiences getting things right and exploring the advantages that TDD brings - more reliable software that sustains for longer and can continue to evolve!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How do you do desktop deployment? Carl and Richard talk to Paul Betts about the open source project called Squirrel, which is all about making desktop deployment less painful. As Paul says, like ClickOnce, only doesn't suck! This leads to a discussion about the various installation tools out there and what they focus on. Paul talks about what makes Squirrel different - providing the tooling to make it easier for a developer to provide unobtrusive updating of applications - as in, not when they start up!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How productive are you with Visual Studio? Carl and Richard chat with Kasey Uhlenhuth about her work making Visual Studio even more productive for developers. The conversation focuses on the huge array of features that Visual Studio has, to support all sorts of different styles of programming. Kasey talks about balancing the needs of developers - some want lots of support and hints from Visual Studio, and some want it to just get out of the way while they program. There are a ton of options, you just have to discover them. Kasey points out a productivity guide that she has helped create to help you take advantage of the power of Visual Studio - check out the link in the show notes!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Programming for the Cloud! Carl and Richard talk to Vishwas Lele about the Microsoft Business Application Platform, which organizes the huge suite of tools available in Azure along with PowerApps and PowerBI to create a great place to build applications that run on Windows, iOS and Android. Vishwas talks about moving up into a higher layer of coding using Logic Apps and Azure Flow to pull together the various sources of data that already exist in your organization, including Office, SharePoint, Sales Force and so on - you already have the data, how do you surface it in an app that your users like to use?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Falcon Heavy flies! Now what? Time for a Geek Out! Richard talks to Carl about the amazing Falcon Heavy launch - what worked, what didn't and why did it take so darn long to fly? The discussion dives into how the plans for the Heavy evolved, affected by the evolution of the Falcon 9. The impact of the launch is interesting - is it a new phase of spaceflight for humanity? The Heavy just barely sneaks into the super heavy lift class, and it's flight has caused a bit of a kerfuffle - both Russia and China have announced new super heavy lift rockets. And then there's NASA... does the Space Launch System still make sense?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How do you do concurrency? Carl and Richard talk to Riccardo Terrell about his new book on concurrency in .NET. More than just ASync and AWait, there are still a ton of concurrency options available in .NET, you just need to know when and where to apply them. The conversation ranges over a bunch of different technologies, including a lot of discussion on functional programming as a whole, since it lends itself to concurrency far better. But you don't have to use F# to write functional code! Riccardo talks through a number of strategies for deciding when concurrency makes sense and how to do it safely.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Can Big Data actually hurt society? Carl and Richard talk to Cathy O'Neil about her book, Weapons of Math Destruction. Cathy has been deeply involved with machine learning and big data for decades and has a broad view of both the potential and dangers of the technology. The conversation dives into understanding how this technology amplifies bias and how that bias ultimately shapes behavior. The trick is to acknowledge that the bias exists - once you see it, it is possible to overcome its effects. Lots of great thinking from an expert in the space!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Michele is back and surviving microservices! Carl and Richard talk to Michele Bustamante about her work with microservices and the challenges that her customers have. Starting with the normal problems innate to any re-architecting exercise - what is the benefit to the customer? You can't make microservices because they're fun, they have to solve a particular problem - and typically it's the problem of over-coupling within a group of services. Update one and you derail the others. Picking what service to separate is a challenge - and how do you do it! Great conversation about containers, DevOps and management strategies!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How do you have success with Azure? Carl and Richard talk to Microsoft PFE Christos Matskas about some of the projects he's been involved in helping organizations deploy apps and services into Azure. As Christos says, it's not an all-or-nothing thing - some applications and services make more sense in the cloud, and some work great on-premises. But there are a bunch of moving parts to organize and understand to have success with Azure. Christos tells stories of where things go right, things go wrong, and how it has less to do with the technology involved, and more with how you think and work together as a team!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What is coming up for .NET Core? Carl and Richard talk to Scott Hunter, who leads all of .NET at Microsoft, about the road ahead for .NET Core. But first, a quick look back at where .NET has come from, including a discussion around performance and the impact of the Meltdown and Spectre CPU security flaws impacting performance across the board. Then into a huge raft of features coming up in the next year in .NET Core, including compilation and performance enhancements, as well as some old favorites like lazy loading in EF Core and SignalR!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How do you know how your software is working? While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard talk to Jessica White about her experience building dashboards to instrument operations, management and development. The conversation dives into what needs to be measured as well as how to represent those measurements in ways that help people understand - do it wrong and you can actually confuse people, or have your dashboard ignored. Jessica talks about how dashboards have to evolve with business needs. With new goals come new metrics and new dashboards to show those metrics. Your dashboard is no more static than your business is!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

SharePoint development continues to evolve in 2018! Carl and Richard talk to Sahil Malik about his view on the latest offerings around SharePoint. At the Ignite event in 2017, Microsoft announced SharePoint 2019, so there's definitely a new on-premises version of SharePoint coming. Obviously, it's taken from the cloud edition, which is why the development model has changed so substantially. Sahil talks about the SharePoint Framework as the model for doing SharePoint customizations, and the coding is primarily in JavaScript - now SharePoint development is web development!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What does it take to build an application where the UI is strictly voice? While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard sat down with Heather Downing to talk about her experiences building voice-driven applications with a variety of tools, including Alexa and Google Voice. Heather digs into the challenges of thinking through what the voice interface is really good at, versus more traditional screen, keyboard, and mouse driven software. This leads to a broader discussion about getting away from the desk entirely, into highly mobile and standing environments where the keyboard is just not a practical option. Voice-driven apps are a different class of app entirely - does it make sense for your organization?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations