.NET Rocks!

How do you migrate to Azure? Carl and Richard talk to Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Christos Matskas about his work helping companies move workloads to Azure. The conversation starts out focused on what you can move to Azure - which is less a technical problem and more of a political one. Christos discusses Azure Site Recovery as a sort of gateway drug for getting organizations into Azure - much cheaper than running a backup data center, Site Recovery keeps images of all your active servers so that you can switch over to them in a disaster. And then the catalog is opened up, there are a ton of products in Azure, which ones do you use? Lots of great discussion on the various approaches to moving to the cloud!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Are there new C++ programmers, or just old people? Carl and Richard chat with Kate Gregory about her discovery of a whole new generation of C++ programmers, who just haven't had to go through the same pain that the old folks once did. Kate talks about going to cppcon, the premier C++ conference in the world, and seeing packs of young people getting into C++. The good news is that C++ has evolved and the coding techniques are very different than they used to be. Yes, you can still build drivers and embedded systems with C++ and it's still pretty tough, but for regular software development, the new language features make life much more fun - check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Have you seen the new docs for C# (and many other Microsoft products)? Carl and Richard talk to Bill Wagner about his work with Microsoft getting great C# docs together on http://docs.microsoft.com. But first, a conversation about side projects, including Carl's work bringing the Polly library to the .NET Foundation as well as Bill and Richard's work on Humanitarian Toolbox. Then on to the docs - which are fully editable via GitHub, so anyone can help build the docs. Lots of interactive code options, the samples are real (and tested), video, great detailed descriptions and more. What if docs didn't have to suck? Because they don't!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How do you make your website progressive? Carl and Richard talk to Christian Heilmann about the latest approach in web development - the progressive web app (PWA). Christian talks about how PWAs really are progressive - you can add bits of these new capabilities to your existing web sites and see some benefit. It starts with the manifest that helps create an icon on a desktop or smartphone to get access to the website, so your user doesn't have to type the URL anymore. And it goes from there, adding offline capabilities, notifications and more. Different browsers are in different states of implementation with PWAs, but the movement is clear, doing more with web apps!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

You need to markdown to make good markup! Carl and Richard talk to Rick Strahl about his work building Markdown Monster, which is a Windows-based editor for creating markdown code that ultimately becomes HTML. Or leave it as markdown, which is a popular format (going back to 2004) for blogs, readme docs in GitHub and more. Rick talks about his experiences putting together a desktop app (WPF!) but still keeping it open source. Pay for it if you use it, but try it for free, or fork it on GitHub! Lots of great conversation about modern development on the desktop, including updates, packaging and so on. You can still make desktop software make sense!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What happens when your college buddy decides later in life that he wants to switch to software development? Carl and Richard talk to Will Gant about his efforts bringing BJ Burns into his organization and apprenticing him as a software developer. What can you build with the earliest set of skills in modern development? How is an apprenticeship different from more traditional schooling? Will and BJ tell the story of how the apprenticeship came to be and where it is today - a great story of becoming a developer!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

With the release of Visual Studio 2017 Release Candidate, the truth is out - no more web essentials! Carl and Richard talk to Mads Kristensen about his decision to stop making Web Essentials, but not to stop making all the Web Essentials goodness! Rather than make one big bundle of tools for web developers, Mads has broken down the package into individual add-ins that you can download separately and install. It all comes down to manageability - not everyone wants everything, so now you can pick and choose. Key to managing the add-ins is the Web Extension Pack, that will help you install the components you need. Web Essentials lives on!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Friendship bracelets that teach girls to code! Carl and Richard talk to Sara Chipps about her experiences bringing Jewelbots to life. Sara talks about her idea to get girls more interested in coding by creating something programmable that girls will like - a friendship bracelet! Sara and her team put together a kickstarter in 2015 to raise $30,000 and ultimately raised $167,000 - the product was a hit right from the beginning. The story digs into the challenge of actually making a physical consumer product (as opposed to software), especially how much slower everything takes. But alls well that ends well - the product is shipping and people love it! Check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What does it take to keep AngularJS moving forward? Carl and Richard talk to Jules Kremer about her work as the head of Angular Developer Relations at Google. Angular started out as an internal library at Google and is widely used all over the organization. But as it's popularity grew, the outside world became interested in it also. Jules talks about learning how the rest of the world uses Angular and the role that played in the significant shift that happened in Angular 2, including the move to TypeScript, becoming more opinionated, and so on. The conversation also goes to the future of Angular, including the focus on Progressive Web Apps and a great set of docs. Oh, and we give away $5000 worth of technology to one lucky member of the .NET Rocks fan club!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Ionic is growing up! Carl and Richard talk to Justin James about his work building mobile apps with Ionic Framework, now at version 2! Justin talks about the tight relationship between Angular and Ionic, including the significant changes from V1 to V2 - mostly due to Angular, but still. As such, Justin recommends sticking with Ionic 1 for existing apps but building new apps with Ionic 2. The conversation also digs into tooling choices (Visual Studio or not?) deployment options, emulators and side loaders and the fun that is app stores. Mobile development is never easy, but it is getting better with tools like Ionic!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

There are more ways to go serverless! Carl and Richard talk to Glenn Block about his work with WebTask. WebTask uses nodeJS to build services that are unique units of work with their own scalability. Glenn also talks about using WebTask as a Webhook, allowing you to do call backs based on an activity - it's this tooling that can help you automated builds and deployments and more. Using the Webhook approach, Glenn digs into techniques for building custom commands for Slack and a bunch of other environments - WebTask can become cloud-driven glue for your apps!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

As requested by a listener, a Geek Out on worldwide energy production! Richard starts out with a discussion on how to measure the energy production of humanity, and explores how energy is used on the planet - it's not just about electricity! Then into the hard stuff, looking through all sorts of energy sources including oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind, solar and even geothermal. There's a lot of ways to make and consume power, some with more impact on the planet and some with less. What are the prospects going forward? Can we actually move away from fossil fuels, or is it just too expensive? Last Geek Out of the year, see you in 2017!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How many different decisions do you need to make before starting web development? Carl and Richard talk to Cory House about picking out a JavaScript development environment. Cory talks about his own experiences getting into the groove with the React stack, but that is certainly not the only way to build a web application. When you think more broadly about building web apps, the number of decisions can be daunting, and hence the increase in starter kits and other tools like the JavaScript Services toolkit for making it easier to get all your tools together. Lots of great links in the show notes for different tools you can use!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How are containers doing in the world today? While in Haarlem for DevIntersection Europe, Carl and Richard hosted a panel with Michele Bustamante, Dan Wahlin and Rick Van Rousselt about how they are currently working with containers and what they see coming in the future. The panel discusses how making containers work is really about working with Linux, which is entirely viable in the .NET world with .NET Core, but Windows Containers looks to change that in the coming years. What will modern development look like in the next couple of years as containers take ahold of the entire development cycle? Exciting times!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Are you an imposter? Carl and Richard talk to Rob Conery about his battle with imposter syndrome - starting with a definition. Rob talks about how often folks that don't have formal computing science education feel like they are faking it when it comes to software development, no matter how significant their contributions are. And part of his process for dealing with his own issues was to write a book on the subject - self-published. One of the focuses of the book is to dig into core concepts in computing science that are actually valuable in your day-to-day development efforts, such as estimating the difficulty of a computing problem or describing core algorithmic concepts. Learn from the smart people that have come before in computing!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How does security work in ASP.NET Core? Carl and Richard talk to Roland Guijt about the security features of ASP.NET Core - many of which are the same as the original .NET, but there are some significant changes! The conversation starts out dealing with the idea that retrofitting security at the end of a project is fraught with perils that ultimately endanger your application and users. It's worth taking some time to figure out how security is going to be part of your app from the beginning. Roland talks about what makes sense to build directly into your ASP.NET Core app and what can be externalized with tools like Identity Server. And there are claims - lots of claims!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Entity Framework Core has shipped - now what? Carl and Richard talk to Julie Lerman about what this new version of Entity Framework does to the data layer. Julie digs into how EF Core has the same relationship with EF 6.x as ASP.NET Core has to ASP.NET 4.x - they are parallel versions aimed at different goals. The Core editions are all about cross-platform where the originals continue to be Windows-centric. Both versions of Entity Framework are open source on GitHub so you can see the development is on-going - and participate in it if you wish!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

There are software design patterns and anti-patterns, but does the same hold true for business? Carl and Richard talk to Steve Smith about business anti-patterns, that is, practices and approaches to business that while they may appear to be useful on the surface, are actually quite harmful. While the problem tends to be around development, since it's often not understood by business, many of these anti-patterns affect all aspects of a business.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What the heck is a Progressive Web App? Carl and Richard talk to Kirupa Chinnathambi about his experiences building at the edge of the modern web with Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). PWAs are trying to bridge the gap between traditional applications and web applications, starting with keeping a web app functional when there is an interruption in Internet connection. But it's more than that - how do you appear as an icon on a desktop or app surface, provide notifications and otherwise look and act like every other kind of application? Check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How hard is it to build a search engine? Carl and Richard talk to Anthony Brown about his efforts to build his own search engine using Azure and F#. The conversation starts out with the question "Why?" which quickly turns into an indictment of the modern search engine, which, while useful, is bothered by the necessities of business with advertising and gaming of the system. Anthony talks about getting effective at exploring web pages for meaningful content using the ability of F# to write intelligent, tolerant parsing. Azure Search plays a huge role in taking that data and indexing in a way that makes it fast. Lots of great thinking about how these complex problems get solved!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

The choices for SQL Server continue to expand! With last week's announcements at Connect, SQL Server is coming to Linux in a big way. What does that mean for the average consumer of SQL Server? Tony talks about the on-going evolution of the product to store data in lots of different ways, not just relational. And on top of that, the latest SQL Server is great at taking relational data and making it available in super-fast and efficient ways. There are more SQL choices than every before!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What does it take to make a really great UI? Carl and Richard talk to Mark Miller about his latest work on helping people build the best possible UI. Mark has developed an amazing course teaching all of the details of making a great UI, directly connecting it to how humans see, perceive and interact with technology. Color, contrast, hue and intensity all affect perception of information on the screen, and Mark has organized every bit of it with awesome examples to help you make a really great UI. Check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

.NET used to be all about Windows - but it's not anymore! How do you market something so diverse? Carl and Richard talk to Beth Massi about her new role as the Marketing Manager for .NET. Today .NET runs on all sorts of platforms, and you can develop .NET code on multiple platforms as well. Beth talks about reaching out to the new audiences that may have never considered .NET before because of it's former focus on Windows. Now .NET runs everywhere, on all sorts of devices, and into even more operating systems. Where would you like your code to run?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

So many amazing things announced at Connect! Carl and Richard talk to Scott Hunter about his favorite bits of Connect, including a ton of important announcements including new support in Visual Studio for containers, cool new integration with SQL Server 2016, the on-going evolution of .NET Core and it's tooling and so much more! You've seen the keynotes, now listen to a deeper dive with one of the key people behind .NET today!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Functional programming for mobile development? Carl and Richard talk to Scott Nimrod about his experiences building mobile apps with Xamarin using F# as the primary programming language. Does functional make sense for mobile development? Sure, but F# can handle OOP problems too. Scott calls it "functional first". The conversation digs into the power of staying within Visual Studio - tools that you know and understand! But there are also features in Visual Studio that don't necessarily work well (or the same) with F#, so it does take time to learn your way around your new language. But worth it!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How do you get to coding quickly with the new web development frameworks? Carl and Richard talk to Steve Sanderson about JavaScriptServices, which is actually a set of templates for helping you set up your development environment for Angular, Knockout, React and/or React-Redux. Steve talks about all the bits and pieces necessary to actually get to your code-run-debug cycle of development. Along the way he mentions a number of tools involved to make life easier, including Yeoman and WebPack. The conversation also turns to this diversity of client development stacks and the philosophy behind them - more great thinking by a web leader!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

DC Lighting real, and Richard has installed it! Time for a Geek Out! You've heard bits and pieces about the flood in Richard's basement and the year long effort to get it restored and renovated - including DC LED lighting! Richard discusses his experience getting the LumenCache lighting system working in his basement, along with the various kinds of lights possible: new dedicated LED light fixtures, refitting existing light fixtures with LED and custom making LED lighting with aluminum extrusions and LED light tape. Power efficient, cool running and cool looking - this is what modern lighting should be!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

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 tooling that helps you verify correctness for schema assignments, references, and so on. There's also help with code generations, navigation and a variety of other utilities. Check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

So many versions of .NET Framework, so little time! Carl and Richard chat with Immo Landwerth about the .NET Standard specifications. Now that .NET has gone cross-platform, the sheer number of implementations of the framework can be overwhelming. And if you're building products for .NET, how do you communicate with your customers about what your product will work with? This is what the .NET Standard is all about - setting specific rules on what needs to be implemented to comply with a specific version of the framework. It's early days yet, but at least there is a plan to keep everyone organized. Dive in!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Data Lakes are growing up, and you want one! While at Ignite in Atlanta, Carl and Richard sat down with Michael Rys to talk about Azure Data Lakes - a place to store your data "as is" so that you can easily query and organize the data for further analysis. Michael discusses the problems of data warehouses, with their Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) processes that manipulate the data into a particular shape for the warehouse - and make it harder to ask new questions of the data. Leave the data as it is in the data lake and then build mechanism to extract on demand for the various data marts you have. The conversation turns to USQL (U as in Universal) and HDInsights (Hadoop) as different ways to extract data from the Data Lake for analysis. Lots of choices!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What does it take to make the web more accessible? Carl and Richard talk to Aaron Gustafson about his years of work helping to create and support standards for accessibility on the web - all kinds of accessibility. While supporting visual and hearing impaired is important, there are so many more aspects to accessibility, especially today where those capabilities translate into new devices that make focus on speech or other completely different UI paradigms. The good news is, the tooling is getting better (check the links on the web page) to make it easy for you to keep accessibility in your mind as you code - don't bolt on at the end!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Are you afraid to make your API public? You should be! Carl and Richard talk to Vishwas Lele about Azure API Management, the safe an effective way to expose your API to the world and not take down your system. Vishwas talks about the array of problems in front of you once the public has access to your API: What happens if it's too popular for it's own good? Or someone builds runaway software that hammers it constantly? Or you want granular control over who can call your API, how often, and how fast? That's where Azure API Management comes in, taking on all of the front end side of APIs, even if you run the application behind the API on-premise. Check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

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 WiX Toolset project to make MSIs. But with AppStores, MSIs are looking long in the tooth. What does the new desktop installation look like?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

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 challenge is making sure they're good - everything is driven by coding samples that are as simple as they need to be and follow strict standards. The result is docs you can trust - first and foremost they are correct, and hopefully effective at getting you productive with Angular!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

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 apps for internal use. James dives into the expanding set of capabilities that Xamarin Forms has to make folks more productive building mobile apps that have to work across iOS, Android and UWP. And testing is getting better too - check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

On September 27, 2016, Elon Musk held a press conference that was more like a rock concert to an excited crowd at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico. At the event, he announced the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) and a plan to move a million people to Mars by 2050. How viable is this? Time for a Geek Out! Richard reviews the design of the Raptor engine, the ITS booster and spacecraft and the entire plan. This rocket is many times more powerful than anything ever built before. Will it work? What could you do with a rocket with this much power beyond the mission to Mars? Lots of possibilities!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What does it take to move an existing application to Docker? Carl and Richard talk to Elton Stoneman about his experiences migrating applications to Docker. The power of containers is obvious, with the ability to run common configuration across development, QA and production. But how do you retrofit your existing application into that new model? It's not a simple lift and shift - Elton talks about breaking down your application into the relevant pieces that make sense for individual containers. Part of your app can live in VMs and part in containers. The process inevitably will make your application better by drilling into what is really important!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

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 Javascript in the Node style. The advantage of this approach is eliminating a lot of the ceremony around your services set, but at the price of some new working patterns and organization. Ben also mentions the Serverless Framework as a great free tool for getting started!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Are user groups obsolete? Carl and Richard talk to Blake Helms and Robb Schiefer about their experiences starting and growing a .NET Meetup Group in Birmingham, Alabama. Modernizing on the user group with Meetup doesn't change the fundamentals - it takes dedicated volunteers, a good location, great speakers and consistency to make a group grow. Are meetups still worth your time? Definitely! The conversation turns to the power of networking: Not TCP/IP, but actually meeting and talking with people that share a common interest. If there's a Meetup group in your area, go to it! If not, start one - Blake and Robb have great suggestions on getting started!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

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 caching to noSQL stores and RDBMS - they can all have a role in your application. The discussion then turns to more complex challenges around using distributed caches for map-reduce problems, and so on. Caching can do a lot!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What the heck is Hybrid Transactional Analytical Processing (HTAP)? While at Ignite, Carl and Richard sat down with Lindsey Allen to talk about taking SQL Server "beyond relational." HTAP focuses on being able to do data analysis as data arrives in the database, independent of the transaction that actually wrote it. Lindsey talks about the power of being to get to near-real time with data analytics, rather than batch processing. Different than streams, you're still talking about data written to the database, so you already know your application logic and data integrity have been applied before you start your analysis. HTAP has huge potential for making super responsive applications!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Has voice control come of age? Carl and Richard talk to Austin Dimmer about his efforts to build a great voice control system - including for Visual Studio! The conversation digs into the complexity of recognizing a diversity of voices and being fast enough to get the words right. Then the hard stuff: How to keep words in context so that you can derive enough meaning from them to be useful. This isn't just about transcription, it's about control. Austin also talks about all the different voice-related products that Microsoft makes, it can be a confusing landscape. Is it time for voice to be part of your application?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

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 the languages, and the huge performance boost that compiled CLR code gets. How fast could WordPress be? The goal is to make PeachPie run on the .NET Core as well, so it can work on any platform you want. Check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How does Microsoft maintain mature applications? Carl and Richard talk to Dustin Metzgar about his work at Microsoft maintaining applications and libraries like Windows Workflow, older versions of ASP.NET and Entity Framework and more. These products are maintained for a long time, typically without adding features, but rather to make sure new operating systems still work with them, security is maintained and bugs are fixed. There's a ton of cool stories in this space, it's the ultimate brownfield project challenge - rarely, if ever, do folks who created a product continue with it throughout it's life time!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

You can't multitask! Carl and Richard talk about the myth and scourge of multitasking, which has been proven again and again to not actually work. Ben talks about how the human brain is not that different from a microcomputer CPU - the context shifts involved in multitasking are expensive, and if you do too much of it, you spend all your time switching contexts, rather than actually getting work done. The conversation digs into all sorts of good discussion around productivity, but first and foremost, it is about getting things done - focus on one task until you're finished, then move on!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Time to review the web application stack! Carl and Richard talk to Dan Wahlin about his current explorations into building web applications. The current stack for Dan is Angular 2 on the front-end, ASP.NET Core on the backend and Docker as the hosting environment. There are so many cool capabilities in this configuration that it can affect the way you build software as a whole, making it easier to automate deployment, accelerate testing, distribute sample versions, and so on. This could be the future of .NET development!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

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 across clouds and on-premise systems is also a key focus of this version of nServiceBus, so you can run your software where you want. Then a deep dive into the architectural models of services buses, including a great conversation on microservices and actor models. Check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Back from the wilds, Richard Campbell has stories of the Arctic Ocean! Carl asks questions to Richard about his experience on a 12-day sail around the Svalbard islands and up into the arctic ice to see polar bears, walrus and a huge assortment of sea birds. There's also stories about the crazy adventurers of the 19th and 20th century trying to get to be the first to the north pole - and most didn't make it. Ultimately the conversation comes back to the marine mammal known as the polar bear. Is it doomed? It seems inevitable now that the polar ice will melt. But it's not the first time in history that has happened to the polar bear, but mankind can help protect the bear so it has a chance to survive!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Digging into what it's like to build mobile applications today with someone who's built more than just about anyone - Atley Hunter! Carl and Richard chat with Atley about what is working for him today and what's not. Atley talks about revenue potential from iOS, Android and Windows Phone apps (yes, there still is some revenue there), and what approaches make sense for actually building cross-platform apps today. While he's capable of native development, he's also looking close at the various evolving tools out there. Atley also digs into the challenges of the various app stores - the problems continue. It's tricky to make money on mobile apps, but it is possible, you just have to know your options!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Is it worth your time to take on the latest frameworks and tools? Carl and Richard talk to Uncle Bob about fighting against "The Churn" - that is, change for change's sake. The conversation starts out focused on being professionals and holding yourself to a higher standard for your industry than just your customer. And the same issue applies for tooling - often it is easier to dive into new tools than it is to get better at your existing ones. Is this really the most productive thing you could be doing? Focusing on the broader aspects of your industry, whether a deep dive into the tooling you use or better understanding how your company really makes money, you can be more valuable and effective. And isn't that what a professional should be doing?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations