.NET Rocks!

What's the best way for you to learn new technology? Carl and Richard talk to Ben Hall about his latest creation, KataCoda. KataCoda is a free web site that hosts tutorial systems for a variety of technology content including Docker, Erlang, C#, Jenkins and so on. Rather than make you set up an environment to experiment with new tech, KataCoda is all set to go and has great scenarios and walkthrough for you to practice with. And when you're ready to try your own thing, there are playgrounds also! The conversation digs into the different learning styles of developers and the challenges of doing effective hands-on practice. Give KataCoda a try!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Write your build scripts in C#! While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard talked to Gary Ewan Park about Cake - aka C# Make. Cake is a cross platform build automation solution - it works on Windows, OSX and Linux. Gary talks about being able to work in C# to define everything that needs to happen in your build process, including testing, documentation generation and so on. Your script can call other scripts so that you can contain complexity based on task. And since it's an open source project, if you want to use something that isn't directly support it, you can add it yourself. Take a look!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Quick, how long can a file path in .NET be? Carl and Richard talk to Jeremy Kuhne, who has taken on the challenge of breaking the 260 character limit on file paths in .NET. Why has this problem persisted for so long? Jeremy references some blog posts from Kim Hamilton back in 2007 when the issue came up big - at the time, .NET was deeply intertwined with Windows, and there were too many things to fix. But the creation of .NET Core presented an opportunity to fix the problem once and for all, and Jeremy jumped on it. What happens next?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

The Hololens SDK edition is out - are you ready to write some code? Carl and Richard talk to Rene Schulte at NDC Oslo about his work building apps for the Hololens. The conversation explores the differences in virtual reality and augmented reality and the huge number of possibilities out there for Hololens. Rene talks about what it's like to develop for Hololens, discussing the relative merits between writing code in Unity3D and the Universal Windows Platform (XAML!) - it's all C# in the end! There's as much to discuss about the capabilities of Hololens as there is to talk about the potential solutions it can generate. There's a lot to think about!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How does testing contribute to the failure of a project? Todd Gardner chats with Carl and Richard at NDC Oslo about his experiences with failing projects and testing. More than just the usual case that a lack of testing led to unreliable software, Todd also talks about how testing the market is important too - what if you build software nobody wants? The focus has to be on relevant tests, because every test represents an overhead of computing and maintenance. This ultimately comes back to understanding the value proposition of your software: What does your software do that is valuable, and how do you assure that value with testing?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What does it mean to build for the cloud? While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard chatted with Paul Stack about thinking about architecture specific for the cloud - not necessarily Azure or AWS, but the overall concepts of what it means to be in the cloud. It starts with the idea of everything you build being virtual and portable, whether than be VMs or containers. But there's also so-called 'server-less' designs as well, where your software runs on a platform in the cloud. If you could get rid of the need to patch operating systems, wouldn't you? Paul also talks about the smaller cloud providers and some of the cool stuff available there as well - there are lots of choices!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Can you detect lies with machine learning? Jennifer Marsman can! Carl and Richard chatted with Jennifer while at the NDC conference in Oslo. Jennifer talked about gathering EEG data with Emotiv headsets to do lie detection by taking base line (known true and known false) questions and then applying Azure Machine Learning to classify the data. The conversation dives into the different machine learning techniques available on Azure and how certain algorithms are more effective on different data sets - it turns out EEG data works great with deep neural networking! There are lots of different opportunities in the machine learning space, time to check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Ready to go deeper into Elixir? While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard caught up with Rob Conery to see how his obsession with Elixir and Erlang has evolved. Rob talks about getting comfortable in the space and getting serious about building software using the Phoenix MVC library and other tools. The conversation turns to the Actor Model pattern and how it becomes a way of life when you're working in Elixir - as fundamental as objects are to C#. Rob discusses the building, testing and deploying aspects of an Elixir project, and how you can integrate elements built in Elixir into the rest of your software.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What's next for C#? While at NDC Oslo, Carl and Richard talked with Mads Torgersen about what's coming up in C# 7. But first some fun, talking about how languages evolve and the challenge of bringing new features to life while avoiding breaking what has come before. It's not easy building languages, especially popular ones! Mads talks about the process of deciding what is in and what will be pushed out for the next version of C#. Along the way, the discussion turns to grabbing onto great ideas from other languages (like pattern matching from F#) while still remaining true to the C# way of doing things. If you want an F# feature, use F#, but that doesn't preclude running with good ideas. A fun discussion with the guy who drives C# forward!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Time to get Geeky in space! Carl and Richard talk about what it takes to make a truly reusable spacecraft. First up is the venerable space shuttle, which wasn't so much reusable as rebuildable. It never really made economic sense, but it definitely drove the technology forward. SpaceX has been able to recover four first stage rockets from Falcon 9 flights, but hasn't reused any yet, and Richard gets into the nitty gritty details of the challenges of reusing rocket engines. It may require a different engine design to be truly reusable. And what about the rest of the rocket? Reusability is hard, and the economics may not make sense - it's important to understand the trade-offs!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

It's an exciting time for .NET! While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard sat down with David Fowler and Damian Edwards to talk about the development of .NET Core, ASP.NET Core 1 and the Kestrel web server. The conversation digs into the challenges of writing a cross-platform web development framework, including some controversial pivots that have frustrated some developers - looking at you, RC2! Damian then discusses Kestrel, the cross-platform web hosting environment. This is a wide-ranging conversation and the excitement is palpable!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Time for a new version of CSLA! Carl and Richard talk to Rocky Lhotka about the latest incarnation of the venerable business object framework that started all the way back at Visual Basic 5! CSLA has always been about keeping business logic out of your user interfaces and databases - keep it in the middle where it belongs. And today that is clearly wise architectural design: The diversity on the client side means you have a lot more devices accessing your application, and CSLA supports most of them in one form or another. The same is true on the back end, it's not all about SQL Server anymore, and CSLA stays out of your way when it comes to data storage. The framework is open source and on GitHub, check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Virtual Reality is here, and there are choices! Carl and Richard talk to Jason Weimann about the HTC Vive, the competitor to the Oculus Rift. Jason talks about how the two devices are similar and how they are different. And one place they are similar is the programming model - it's all about Unity3D. The conversation focuses in on what it takes to really learn Unity - you're working in Visual Studio with C#, but the platform and tooling are quite a bit different. And don't worry too much about 3D art, there are tons of free assets! VR is here, are you ready?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Do you know how people are actually using your mobile apps? Carl and Richard chat with Greg Shackles about his work instrumenting mobile apps in production. The low hanging fruit is actually gathering data about every crash or error that occurs in the field. Getting that information back to your dev team can make the application better, but what if operations were able to respond to the failure? What if you could turn a crash into a moment of delight for the user? The conversation then dives into deeper instrumentation - what can we learn about how people use the app, what is hard and easy, and what we could add to make the app more awesome. Lots of great thinking on taking mobile apps to the next level!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Is DevOps dead, or just a fad? Carl and Richard talk to Wes Higbee about his experiences building great software. As Wes says, don't let any methodology stop you from doing the right thing. The conversation digs into the challenges that come around the term DevOps, much the same way they impact the term Agile. It's very easy to start using terminology to define practices rather than focus on the common goal of building great software. Do the labels developer, tester and IT separate us or unify us? Shouldn't everyone talk to the customer and be sure they're working on the right thing? Time to think beyond DevOps!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How can competition teach machine learning? Carl and Richard talk to Anthony Goldbloom of Kaggle about competitive machine learning. Kaggle hosts competitions provided by industry and academia to find machine learning solutions on different data sets. While the competitive aspects tend toward only particular types of data sets, Anthony talks about how two very different machine learning algorithms - Gradient Boosting Machine and Deep Recurrent Neural Networks - have risen to the top. Want to learn machine learning in a hurry? Join a competition!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Here comes Windows Containers! While at Techorama in Belgium, Carl and Richard talk to Els Putzeys about the current technical preview of Windows Containers on Windows Server 2016. Els discusses how the Windows Containers can be built using templates so that you have a configuration-as-code capability, making repeated creation fast and easy. Now your documentation for building a system is code that actually creates it! We're still a few months away from Server 2016 being released, but it looks to be an important version of server for development!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How do you do continuous deployment? While at Techorama in Belgium, Carl and Richard sat down with Marcel de Vries and Rene van Osnabrugge to talk about their efforts working with various customers trying to help them get further down the DevOps line of productivity. The conversation digs into the various elements that go into getting to continuous delivery, including a lot of conversation about automating testing - if you're going to build fast, you need to test fast too! Marcel also talks about feature toggling, giving operations the ability to turn features off and on to understand how they behave and improve software quality in the process. Lots to deploy!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Ready to think differently about programming? While at Techorama in Belgium, Carl and Richard chatted with Mark Seemann about his experiences with Haskell, helping him to be the best functional programmer he can be. Mark talks about the battle of developing in F#, and how it's easy to fall into object-centric development methods, even when F# strongly encourages function-centric coding. By spending time in a pure functional language like Haskell, you strengthen those functional reflexes! The language has been around for a long time and runs on all sorts of platforms including Windows. It's a great tool to make you a better developer!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Even more new stuff from Xamarin! While at Techorama in Mechelen, Belgium, Carl and Richard sat down with James Montemagno to talk about all the goodness that came out of the Evolve conference. The conversation focuses first on the new edition of Xamarin Forms, building UI abstracts for your mobile apps to increase your code sharing across platforms. James also talks about data pages as a way to present data on your mobile apps, with some great styling options. Xamarin is continuing to build awesome things!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How do you manage your non-relational data? While at Techorama in Belgium, Carl and Richard talk to Oren Eini about his work with RavenDB and getting companies to really think about organizing non-relational data in a sensible way. The conversation focuses on how much relational database methodology (like normalization) has permeated thinking in development, so that we tend toward similar behavior when working on a non-relational data store. Store the objects as objects, it's going to be okay!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How do you change a developer's mind? While at Techorama in Belgium, Carl and Richard talk to Julie Lerman about her experiences working with a variety of teams moving into new technologies and techniques. While some folks are happy to jump into the latest-and-greatest, others are more cautious or even resistant - and often for good reason. There's always a productivity hit with changing up tooling and process, with substantial benefits coming further down the path. How can you help people "get over the hump" of engaging with a new tool or approach? What do you do about the poisonous folks that resist change through verbal and in some cases even direct sabotage? Everyone is different, and you need to take the time to understand where people's concerns lie. Often once someone is understood, they are much more open to change!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What does modern open source look like? While at Techorama in Belgium, Carl and Richard moderated a panel of Bill Wagner, Udi Dahan, Nik Molnar and Jimmy Bogard to discuss their experiences working in open source in this day and age. Much of the discussion focuses the various approaches that folks make a living while building and maintaining open source projects. Does it make sense for a commercial product to be open source? What's the right way to go about that? Why would someone put their project into an entity like the Dot Net Foundation? What happens when large companies want to take a dependency on your little open source project? Lots of great thinking from folks who have been there!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How can you keep your customer identity information safe? While at Techorama in Mechelen, Belgium, Carl and Richard talk to Vittorio Bertocci about Microsoft's offerings around Azure Active Directory. With all the data breaches going on these days, its wise to consider offloading the work of managing your customer's personally identifiable information to a service that has as much security around it as possible. Vittorio talks about the new B2C service on Azure offering the ability to store custom information, authorization tokens - everything you'll need to know who your user is and what they are able to do. That's half your security battle done, just gotta secure your transactions!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

More Geeking Out on GMO Foods! This time, Richard digs into the more controversial side of genetic modification - making crops that are resistant to pests and pesticides. And to make it even more fun, part of the conversation includes scientists from Monsanto! First up is Bacillus Thuringensis, better known as BT - a biopesticide that is a naturally occurring bacteria found back in 1901. BT is used on organic crops! Today, key genes from BT have been incorporated into plants so that you no longer need to spray BT, it's built in. Then the big topic: glyphosate, also known as Round Up. The most popular herbicide in the world and effective at killing most plants, except for ones that have been genetically modified to resist it. Does the use of Round Up ready crops increase the amount of glyphosate used? What happens when glyphosate is in everything? How do we know it's safe?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Where is the .NET community going? Carl and Richard talk to Sam Basu and John Bristowe of Telerik about the data they've gathered in their 2016 Developer Report. The conversation explores what languages and tools developers visiting the Telerik site are using, with lots of exploration around the evolution of mobile development. Desktop development plays a role as well - and lots of folks are still building WinForms apps! The latest news out of Microsoft has piqued folks interest in open source and cross-platform development, but how important is it to developers right now? Grab a copy of the report and follow along with the analysis!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What is slowing your web site down? Carl and Richard talk to Matt Watson, CEO of Stackify, about their free product called Prefix. Method profiling has been around for awhile, but it takes a lot of time and tuning to get right - and running profilers on production servers can be a career limiting behavior. Prefix runs on your development workstation so that you can see what parts of your code are taking time - including how much is involved in communications time, query processing, and so on. Take a look!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

That scary guy is back! Carl and Richard talk to Troy Hunt about the latest state of affairs in the hacking world. Yes, SQL Injection is still a thing, and the hacks are actually getting bigger - entire voting populations of some countries have had data stolen. What happens with this data? What is the right response to a breach like this? Troy talks about his experiences with good breach management and bad. The conversation also turns to ransomware and that ongoing battle. It's a real thing, and it's being successful. Developers are able to help in this fight, educate yourself about security!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How do you think about Android? Carl and Richard talk to Josh Vergara, Android-fan, non-developer and head of Android Authority about his experiences around Android phones and tablets. Josh talks about the various flavors of Android, including Cyanogen, and the move to make Android more open source and less Google-centric. And then there are the tablets, the poor old Android tablets. Will anything good come there for the marketplace? Cool viewpoint from a consumer of tech!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

So is every class a service? While at DevIntersection in Orlando, Carl and Richard talk to Juval Lowy about how his statement nearly ten years ago has in some ways come true. Juval talks about how services evolved back in the 2006 time frame into monolithic, unmanageable software and the swing to simplification that has led to the current microservices movement. Keeping services small and flexible is the key, to the point that you see service aspects appearing down in very fine grained parts of software: Integer as a Service? Great thinking from an experienced architect of how services continue to evolve!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How do you deploy your applications? While at DevIntersection, Carl and Richard chatted with Damian Brady from Octopus about the latest version of Octopus Deploy. Damian talks about all the changes that have come in Octopus 3, using SQL Server to store deployment information, getting more involved with deployment to Azure, and so on. The conversation also digs into the impact of open source and support for Linux and OSX, which means looking at a change of dependencies when it comes to things like nuget. There's lots to talk about in deployment, things are only getting better!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Scott Hunter is back and managing the whole .NET platform! While at DevIntersection in Orlando, Carl and Richard sat down with Scott to talk about his new role as director of the entire .NET platform. That includes all the open source goodness - and Scott digs into his team's efforts to make ASP.NET the fastest web development platform on the planet (they're almost there!) and what it takes to bring all the incarnations of .NET into a common standard, both for the old school close source editions as well as open source across the platforms. One .NET standard is coming to you soon!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How do you manage the building, monitoring and maintenance of mobile apps? Carl and Richard talk to Donovan Brown about how all the pieces have come together in the Microsoft stack to make creating, testing, deploying, maintaining and monitoring of mobile apps better. Donovan talks about all the good stuff from Build in mobile, including Xamarin being part of the toolset, but also tools like HockeyApp and Release Management. While Microsoft provides a ton of tools, you can bring your own as well - everything is optional and changeable. Ultimately, it's the synthesis of all the parts into a whole that provides the greater value. Check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Universal Apps are becoming more universal - arriving on the XBox One! Carl and Richard talk to Chris Gomez about the announcements at the Microsoft Build event around building software for the XBox One. Now, any developer can write code using the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) approach, which means you can code in C#, Javascript... pretty much any language you want in the CLR space. Chris explains that while you have limited access to all the resources in the XBox One, the UWP approach is a starting point to building bigger things if that's what you want to do - the XBox team is watching!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

The Web is broken - time to fix it! While at DevIntersection in Orlando, Carl and Richard sat down with Douglas Crockford to talk about the problems the web has and what can be done about them. Doug rightfully focuses on how the web was never intended to do what its doing - it was meant for sharing academic papers, and has far outgrown that initial requirement. Security is the key, and security with the least amount of trust is best. How do we build something inherently secure and still easy to work with?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What do developers need to know about information security? Carl and Richard talk to Kim Carter about his experiences helping developers secure their web sites. Kim has written a series of books on the subject to help get developers thinking about infosec as they develop, rather than try and cram security on at the end of a project. All kinds of great tools in the show links, including OWASP ZAP, which does fast penetration testing on your site - you can incorporate it into your build process so that your code is security tested as you're building it! InfoSec isn't optional, you need to make it part of your routine development process!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Concorde is gone, what will replace it? Time for a Geek Out! Richard talks about the aeronautical evolution that led to supersonic airliners, Concorde being the big one that flew from 1976 to 2003. What went wrong? Why did it stop flying? Besides the technological challenges, it all comes down to the sonic boom and laws that make it illegal to fly a civilian aircraft above the speed of sound. Richard talks about how technology has advanced enough now that aircraft can mitigate their sonic boom with specific shapes and flying capabilities. However, in the end, supersonics only get you there faster, typically for more money. Would you pay for to go faster?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How has hardware evolved when it comes to the Internet of Things? While at Build 2016 in San Francisco, Carl and Richard sat down with Jon Bruner from O'Reilly SOLID Con about his experience watching and working with the makers of hardware for IoT. Jon dug into the challenges of making production IoT stuff, especially going to China to get things made at scale. Automation is taking hold in that space, soon where it's done won't matter all that much. The conversation also explores additive and subtractive manufacturing with CNC milling machines, laser sintering and more. Lots of cool hardware ideas!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How can the command line be cool? Carl and Richard talk to Richard Turner, freshly back into Microsoft, and working on the Bash on Windows project. So why would you want a Linux command line prompt? As Richard explains, there are cool bits of code you can create on your Windows box but don't really behave all that well - some Ruby Gems, etc. Having Linux, real Linux, running in Windows helps all that work better. And if you're headed toward the cross-platform world in the mobile space, or Linux on the backend, these tools can help you be more productive and less frustrated. It's early days yet, but there's lots to check out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Ready to code for XBox One? Carl and Richard talk to Tom Spilman about his efforts to bring MonoGame to the XBox One. When the XBox One came out a few years ago, it did not support Microsoft's Indie game platform, XNA. MonoGame has stepped up to fill that role. And as an extra perk, it runs on everything - iOS, Android, Mac, Playstation and Nintendo devices. And of course, everything is coded in C#. Tom talks about how more and more, performance in games is not an issue, and the price of coding in C++ is just too high, without significant advantage. You want to make games? Make them in C# - with MonoGame!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Are there startups running .NET? Sure! Carl and Richard talk to Alec Lazarescu about his experience running LearnBop. The applications are built in .NET, but being a startup is about more than just programming languages. Alec talks about having the agility of a startup, being able to rapidly scale while tightly controlling costs - there's only so much money in a startup! To get startup dynamics, you need to look beyond just Microsoft tools - Alec's team uses tools like Chef, which comes from the Linux world. Blending the two communities together has its own challenges, but the results are worth it!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Ready for JavaScript on the server? Carl and Richard talk to David Gatti about building the backend with nodeJS. The conversation starts out with why to use node - its not always an obvious answer! The philosophy of node moves away from the "do everything" web server of IIS and into turning on just what you want. With node you specify where you're listening and what you're listening for, and can construct exactly what your code should return as well. Templates make life easier - want to return a web page? There's a template for that. Just a service? You can do that too. David also talks about deploying through Heroku and automating the updating of your site with just a check in from GitHub!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Have you checked out Microsoft Band? Carl and Richard talk to Charles Stacy Harris about his work building Band apps. The Band is stuffed with sensors, strapped to your wrist, which opens the door to a ton of interesting information. Stacy talks about several programming options for the Band, including the web tiles that will essentially push an RSS feed onto the band. There's also SDK development options for the Microsoft Health app that communicates with the Band and works with iPhone, Android and Windows Phone. You can work natively or with cross-platform tools like Xamarin, so there are lots of choices - The Band is a great wearable device to explore!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Time for an Aurelia update from the man himself! Carl and Richard talk to Rob Eisenberg about the latest developments in the Aurelia project - and what a year it has been! Rob talks about the architectural decisions in Aurelia that allowed for rapid development and an ability to just grab the bits of the library that you need. Lean-ness is the new mantra in JavaScript libraries, and as few custom tags as possible. Aurelia has focused on efficiency from the outset, and Rob is taking it even further. The conversation also dives into the more component-based approaches to web development including ReactJS - there's more to come!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

When do you choose Cordova over Xamarin and vice versa? Carl and Richard chat with Brian Noyes, who has built apps on both stacks and talks through the details! The conversation starts out on Cordova, which takes a bit of effort to assemble a coherent code-build-debug cycle from. As Brian says, your productivity is directly measureable by how quickly you can get around that cycle, and he's worked hard to optimize it. Things are a bit more integrated on the Xamarin side, and with the recent announcements, a lot more financially feasible also - the hybrid mobile development space is heating up!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Microsoft as a Service? Carl and Richard chat with Jeremy Thake about all the goodness coming from the Office 365 team and beyond in the Azure space. Jeremy describes the new Microsoft Graph, which literally provides REST calls to Microsoft related products, starting with Office. The story continues with web callbacks to provide event driven ways to capture activity within accounts on services like OneDrive and the whole Skype Developer SDK so that you can embed Skype functionality into your apps. There's a lot of moving parts here, but the potential is to make it much easier to build the modern mashup of various Microsoft products - more to come!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Microsoft buys Xamarin! While at Build, Carl and Richard chatted with Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza about what the acquisition of Xamarin means. The big news is that the Xamarin tools for making iOS and Android apps are now part of Visual Studio - all versions, right down to the Community Edition. And there's more (of course), so have a listen. Miguel digs into what this means for the average .NET developer going forward: .NET now runs everywhere you could possibly want to run code, and maybe a few spots you've never thought of. It's true, .NET really does rock!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

MSDeploy can do it! Carl and Richard talk to Robert Schiefer about his experiences using MSDeploy to automate complex deployment solutions throughout the enterprise. Robert talks about the fact that MSDeploy is part of WebDeploy and includes a ton of features that are not always obvious - doing far more than just installing software, it can also modify security settings, update registry keys, even handle the deployment of databases using DACPAC. The documentation isn't great, but if you dig around, there's lots of capability there. If you're looking to save money, spend a little time understanding MSDeploy better!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What do you know about genetically modified foods? Time for a Geek Out! Richard starts with some history as usual - humans have been modifying food plants for 12000 years! With selective and cross-breeding, humankind has managed to create and modify domesticated plants and animals in remarkable, and sometimes shocking ways. So genetic modification has been going on a long time now - why is there so much concern today? Technology has brought much more precision and options to genetic modification, and that raises all sorts of questions on what sort of changes make sense, and what should be done. There's lots of hype around GMO - what are the facts?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Ready for the new Angular? Carl and Richard talk to John Papa about Angular 2 being in beta. And really in beta - John mentions that for the past few betas, updating his samples have only taken a few minutes, not hours. The conversation also dives into the controversy around the significant differences between Angular 1 and 2, although John sees it as simplification. A lot of ceremony that existed in Angular 1 has been eliminated, or implemented as part of standard tags. The role of Reactive Extensions for Javascript is significant as well: Everything is becoming asynchronous!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations