.NET Rocks!

What's the current situation with containers in Azure? While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talk to Michele Leroux Bustamante about the continuing evolution of containers in the cloud, especially around Azure. Michele digs into the story of Docker and the idea of configuration-as-code extending to the virtual machine. Then the discussion turns to analyzing the various tiers of container service provide by the major cloud provides, including Microsoft. Ultimately there is a vision of a Platform-as-a-Service offering around containers, but what that looks like is still evolving. Could Azure Service Fabric be the solution? What about Windows 2016? There's more to come!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Are space elevators really possible, or just science fiction? Time for a Geek Out! Carl and Richard chat about the idea of being able to build a cable from the surface of the Earth into space to make space transport 100 times cheaper than rockets. The conversation starts out focused on the concept of space tethers, of which the space elevator is one particular species. Tethers have actually flown in space and demonstrated some amazing properties, including using the magnetic field of the earth to generate electricity. Tethers can also be used as Skyhooks to lift and fling payloads into orbit. Richard then digs into the details of space elevators themselves, including the materials needed for the cable, construction approaches and the sheer scale of what is needed to make an elevator. Possible? Maybe!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Glimpse is moving to version 2! Carl and Richard chat with Anthony van der Hoorn and Nik Molnar about the latest version of Glimpse and what moving from version 1 to 2 really means. Still in beta, Glimpse V2 is very much a rethink of how you instrument a client while still keeping what you love about V1 - a great dashboard to understand what's going on with your web app. Anthony and Nik talk through the changes and the power of taking everything you've learned about a project to a clean slate. Glimpse is only getting better, you need to check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Time for a GitHub sync with Phil Haack! Carl and Richard chat with Phil about the latest developments at GitHub, including the on-going evolution of the extensions to Visual Studio (getting better) and a bunch of other third party components that can help you use GitHub more effectively. Phil talks about Gitter, the chat system associated with GitHub projects. GitHub is not just about source code, there are all sorts of projects going into GitHub, including blogs, legal documents, even creation of new open source fonts. If you haven't gotten into the GitHub community, it's a great time to take a look!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Encrypt all the things! Carl and Richard talk to Stephen Haunts about how to use cryptography properly. And as it turns out, you don't have to be a mathematician to put crypto to work for you! The conversation starts out focusing on password hashing - lots of ways to do it wrong, salting seems complicated, but in the end, there is a built-in, poorly named function in the .NET Framework that will give you proper leading edge password hashing, you just have to know what it is (check the links on the show page). From there Stephen talks about 2-way symmetric and asymmetric encryption. Best used together, and best used on any and all data that you have. Good stuff!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What does it take to successfully implement test automation on your application? Carl and Richard talk to Arnon Axelrod about his work using test automation. The discussion dives into the diverse world of testing, both manual and automated, as well as the variety of tests you can write. How do you go about building tests that aren't so fragile that you have to rewrite them all after every build? What tests are actually valuable to the overall quality of your software? And why automate? What can automation do that can't also be done manually? Arnon also digs into a set of open source libraries he's built to make it easier to automate testing. Check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Messaging is taking over the world! Arguably it already has. Carl and Richard talk to Clemens Vasters about his ten years of work at Microsoft building messaging systems, starting way back with the .NET Service Bus. Clemens discusses his work with OASIS and OPC-UA developing more advanced messaging standards, it's importance in the Internet of Things space, and how versions matter - different protocols have different capabilities, and the need for unified communications is only getting bigger. Messaging is forever - message systems will be passing messages between ever shrinking computing devices for a long, long time.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What is it like managing a mature open source project? Carl and Richard talk to Jimmy Bogard about his experiences with AutoMapper, an open source project he started back in 2009 that is still going strong today. While open source has been around for many years, the ecosystem has been evolving, and Jimmy talks about how site like GitHub and Stack Overflow has made it much easier to stay engaged with your user base and have meaningful conversations about code - without having to repeat yourself over and over. The discussion also dives into the challenges of contributions, people's sometimes unreasonable expectations, and just being patient with the world while you write code you actually use. Great thinking from a guy who's been there!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Microservices built with a functional language? You bet! Carl and Richard talk to Rachel Reese about her work with jet.com building microservices in F#. It turns out that the good practices of building functional code lend themselves neatly to the same principles in microservices. Rachel also talks about the actor model as a natural fit for this architecture as well, writing code with simple entry and exit points as functions in F#, focusing on composability to relate elements together. There are lots of ways to build microservices, but the functional/actor approach makes things easier once you've gotten your head around it - check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Do you have a DevOps stack? Carl and Richard talk to Brian Randell about his experiences implementing tooling for DevOps practices using Visual Studio and other Microsoft tools. The conversation runs the gambit of elements in the DevOps stack, including continuous deployment, package management, configuration-as-a-code and instrumentation in production. The more automation the better when it comes to moving fast and reliably. While DevOps often focuses on the culture and process that goes into building software, great tools can make all of those things happen much more easily - you just have to figure out what stack is right for you!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What is the good and bad of being an old programmer? To wrap up 2015, Carl and Richard chat with Gary Wisniewski about his blog post on the subject and more! Gary is the same Gary of Carl and Gary's VB Home Page, one of the first web sites on Visual Basic way back in 1994. The conversation digs into what's great about having lots of experience, and how it came hold you back as well. There's no magic to being a programmer at 20 years old and there's no magic when you're 60 either - it's got more to do with your thinking than your age! And hey, while we're at it, have a great new year! See you in 2016!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Do you understand how to develop software with GitHub? Carl and Richard walk through the fundamentals of GitHub with Bill Wagner. Bill walks through the key differences between the distributed source control that is GitHub versus the more classic central control style source control systems. Often it is harder for experienced developers to deal with the reality of GitHub than someone new to source control! The conversation explores all the concepts of GitHub - repositories, cloning, forking, push and pull requests, merging and rebasing. There's a lot to know, but there are great tools for getting started. And at the end, a quick discussion about Humanitarian Toolbox and their awesome open source projects to help save lives - you can help!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

When was the last time you thought about Windows Workflow? Carl and Richard talk to Blake Helms about the projects he's been building with Workflow - and they're awesome! Blake talks through how Workflow has evolved into the latest version for .NET 4.5, with better visualization tools and a consistent interface that is easy to work with. The conversation digs into how Workflow separates work from flow - activities are code and flows are the relationships between them. This separation lets you see where there are holes in your decision-making system and helps keep code organized and focused. The question is, when wouldn't you use Workflow? Wait. What?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How technical is technical debt? Carl and Richard talk to Einar Høst about how technical debt has more to do with your understanding of a system and the intentional shortcuts we take to make deadlines than anything specific to technology. The conversation dives into the domain driven design thinking of Eric Evans and the challenges of deeply understanding the domain of a system well enough to build great software to model it. As Einar puts it, some complexity is intentional, and some is accidental. That accidental complexity can be considered technical debt, but it is always challenging to measure it. In the end, the key is communications!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

So what's the story with Power Apps? While at the Tel Aviv stop of the Azure Tour, Carl and Richard chatted with Julia White about the on-going evolution of Azure and Office 365 including the introduction of Power Apps. Power Apps is a tool for building mobile applications for iOS, Android and Windows Phone without writing code or having to deploy to the store. While it may not be a tool that developers will be keen to use (or will it?), its certainly something to pay attention to - this might be a source of new application traffic in your organization!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

So what can you do with Reactive Extensions (Rx)? You know, really? While at the Azure Tour stop in Tel Aviv, Carl and Richard sat down with Tamir Dresher to talk about Rx in the real world. Tamir is the author of Reactive Extensions in Action and he talks through the practical applications that Rx has, and where it can make your software better. This is not an all-or-nothing proposition, you can slide Rx into spots where you want to react to key bits of data while ignoring others, so where you want to focus on the relationship between two different bits of data - this is not just about high velocity streams of data!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Time for the Smart Home Geek Out! Carl and Richard chat about what the house of the future is like. Future homes have been predicted for a long time, and the discussion dives into some of those earlier predictions from the 1960s. When thinking of what smart homes can become, it helps to think like a developer - have an array of sensors that measure the state of the home, its environment, contents and people. Then write code - get all those things talking to each other! Today we're starting to have connected homes, where different elements communicate with us. What will it take to get them communicating with each other? And while we're at it - here's the $5000 draw!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

So what does it take to make your web applications secure? Carl and Richard talk to Bill Sempf about his work educating developers on writing secure software. The conversation focuses on the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) and all the resources there for securing your web applications. Bill leads the .NET side of OWASP, providing tools, techniques and links for everything you need to build a more secure web application. You'd be amazed how many great security resources are built into the .NET Framework, you just need to know where to look, and OWASP can help you - check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

It's only date and time, how hard could it be? Carl and Richard chat with Matt Johnson about the challenges of really managing dates, times and time zones properly. The world is a complicated place, and time zones are a relatively new invention that is as much driven by politics as geography. And then there's daylight saving time, which is even worse! Matt talks about the simple mistakes that developers can make assuming behavior around dates and time that can lead to significant failures in your application. He also digs into the tools to make your life easier, especially Noda Time, an open source library for doing dates, times, time zones and daylight saving time right. Time to check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

So how many shortcuts do you know in Visual Studio 2015? Carl and Richard talk to Joseph Woodward about his conscious efforts to learn more shortcuts and speed his development pace. Every time you take your hand off the keyboard, you slow yourself down, and more importantly, interrupt your flow! But not all shortcuts are created equal - the discussion focuses first on navigation shortcuts to move around your code more efficiently, and then into block editing and moving. Of course there are tools to take it further like Code Rush and Resharper - which ones are your favorites?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Time to revisit MassTransit! Carl and Richard talk to Chris Patterson about his work on MassTransit and more. MassTransit is an open source .NET service bus that is happy running on-premise or in the cloud. The conversation explores the evolution of MassTransit and the way the Enterprise Service Bus has evolved. SOA is a fine idea and SOAP works, but is there an easier way? Chris talks about better queuing with RabbitMQ, to the point that the latest version of MassTransit doesn't support MSMQ. And then there are microservices... does this make sense in the modern service-oriented application?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How do you build a tool that bridges data silos? Carl and Richard talk to Tim Ward about his work on CluedIn, a tool for connecting documents, email and other business resources together so that employees can see what everyone is working on with a minimum of fuss. Tim talks about using different data stores within CluedIn to leverage their strengths - the graph storage of neo4J maintains relationships between documents where ElasticSearch actually finds things. The art of tagging and cataloging is key, so fighting the tools isn't the best plan. Give a try!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

The Software Craftsmanship Calendar is back for 2016! After a one year hiatus, Steve Smith and Brendan Enrick have made a new calendar with the help of .NET Rocks listeners and others via Kickstarter. The conversation starts out with the challenges of crowd funding a project like this, including some mistakes made... but overcome! And then the fun starts, talking through some of the hilarious anti-pattern software craftsmanship elements in the calendar - many that were suggested as part of the fund raising process! This is the calendar that software developers want for Christmas!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

So what does developing web apps with F# look like? Carl and Richard talk to Henrik Feldt about his efforts to use F# end-to-end when building web sites and web services. The conversation starts out with suave.io, a nodeJS-like web server written in F# that runs in a totally non-blocking fashion across Linux, OS X and Windows. Henrik also digs into WebSharper, a web framework for building functional and reactive .NET applications - a natural for F#, although WebSharper works fine with any CLR language. The list goes on, check the awesome set of links for this show including links to videos to teach you to use the tooling and more great F# content!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

HTTP/2? No really! We're only now getting to the second version of HTTP! Carl and Richard talk to Robert Boedigheimer about the next version of HTTP. In truth, this will be the fourth version of HTTP. Robert talks about how long-in-the-tooth HTTP/1.1 has gotten and the need to update the protocol to reflect the reality of the web - much bigger pages with many more resources on them. While a portion of the change represented by HTTP/2 is plumbing - modern browsers already support it, the web servers are coming soon, eventually web page design will be affected, mostly simplifying performance tuning tricks. It'll make a better web!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How do you stop your data lake from being a data swamp? Carl and Richard talk to Tom Kerkhove about Azure Data Lakes. The conversation digs into the impact the cloud has had a data warehousing - when you have as much compute and storage as you need on demand, does it still make sense to jump through all the hoops that data warehousing requires? Tom talks about Data Lakes storing all data as it arrives from a huge variety of sources and leaving that data in its native format, so that it is available for analysis as needed. Universal SQL (U-SQL) is the query language of Data Lakes, which is more LINQ-like, but speaks to the power of being able to join anything to anything with the cloud!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How do you make the Single Page Application (SPA) better? Carl and Richard talk to Benjamin Howarth about his experiences with building SPAs and solving some of their limitations. Users love the look of a SPA, its responsiveness and styling are powerful. But SPAs have problems - they are very hard to test properly, they resist search engine indexing, are bandwidth hungry and not accessible to folks with visual impairments. Benjamin talks about his library RomanSPA (see what he did there?) that builds a normal MVC app behind the scenes and then can selectively render pages via MVC or the SPA approach as needed. Could this be the better SPA?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Microservices and Azure together! While at the Stockholm stop of the Azure Tour, Carl and Richard chatted with Corey Sanders in front of a live audience about the announcement at the Microsoft Connect event about Azure Service Fabric's direct support for microservices. Corey digs into the core concepts of microservices, focusing on single domain APIs that use HTTPS and REST to connect and communicate. The challenge of microservices is proliferation - between redundancy and scalability, a large application can have hundreds, even thousands of instances. Azure Service Fabric provides tooling and resources to manage the complexity of microservices while keeping the flexibility and power. Check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

So what does the future hold for commercial air travel? Carl and Richard chat about the on-going evolution of airliners, starting with the latest generation: the Airbus A380 and the Boeing 787. They represent the pinnacle of traditional airliner design so far. But is it time for a radical break? How can airliners be improved to lower costs, emissions and so on? Richard digs through the on-going evolution in turbofan engines, and looks to the future of more radical engines. Will supersonic flight ever make a comeback? And why stop there, what about hypersonic flight? Nothing is easy, but there's lots to think about!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How is mobile development evolving? Carl and Richard talk to Lino Tadros about his current work building mobile apps with lots of different technologies. Lino talks about build mobile apps natively with Objective-C and Java as well as a variety of hybrid approaches: C# using Xamarin, Javascript/HTML with Cordova and even good old fashion responsive web design. So what works best for you? Lino highlights some strengths and weaknesses of the different platforms, recognizing that it mostly comes down to skillset - what tools are you most comfortable with? That's what ultimately makes the difference. No matter how good a tool is, your ability to use it has the largest impact on how well your mobile app turns out.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

So what are microservices anyway? Carl and Richard talk to Paul Mooney about his work architecting applications with microservice principles. Paul talks about getting granularity right, and keep services simple using REST. Gone are the monolithic, verbose and complex services from the SOA age, it's all HTTP and simple language. The conversation digs into key architectural elements like queuing - in this case, with RabbitMQ. This is a tricky design pattern, but allows for lots of scalability and creates natural separation points between application elements. Microservices are still emerging as a cloud-centric way to build applications!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How does the .NET Foundation change the way you build software? While at the MVP Summit, Carl and Richard met with Martin Woodward and Beth Massi to talk about how the .NET Foundation was created and is evolving to carry .NET open source software forward. As Martin explains, even though key platform tools like the .NET Core, ASP.NET and MVC are all part of the foundation, Microsoft still makes a retail build of the products - so if you don't want to use open source, you don't have to! But if you and your organization are looking at open source, the .NET Foundation provides a certain level of coherence and structure to open source projects so that you can be sure the code will be there when you need it. Check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

When will ASP.NET 5 ship? While at the MVP Summit, Carl and Richard talk to Damian Edwards about his work getting ASP.NET 5 out the door. The answer to the question is the first quarter of 2016. Damian talks about the experience of building ASP.NET vNext out in the open, on GitHub, using YouTube to publish all of the standup meetings with the team about the product. It's a new Microsoft building software a different way!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Have you taken Visual Studio Code out for a spin yet? While at the MVP Summit, Carl and Richard talk to Sean McBreen about his work building Visual Studio Code. VSCode was released back in the Build time frame of April 2015, and has put out a major update almost every month since. Sean hints about some major announcements coming for Visual Studio Code coming at the Microsoft Connect() event in New York November 18 2015. The conversation also digs into the choices you can make in your development platform with a mix of VSCode, Visual Studio Online and all sorts of other tools.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Can you be a software craftsman and not test? Scott Nimrod says no! Carl and Richard chat with Scott about his experiences using TDD practices to build software and how that affected his approach to craftsmanship. Scott talks about how writing testing code to quickly test your app code is a far more efficient use of time compared to repeatedly compiling and running an application, then manually navigating to the feature in question and playing with it. Proper tests are faster, more accurate and repeatable, resulting in better code. And they're even more important when the app gets bigger, the number of developers increase and time passes - build your software right!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How can Azure change your business? Carl and Richard talk to Jason Zander, one of the original developers of .NET and now a corporate vice president, about the power of Azure to affect change in your business. Jason talks about the landscape of Azure today, and how the engineers are able to push out a feature almost every week - 500 new features in the past year! You may not need to move that fast, but it's nice to know if you build against Azure, that's what is possible. The conversation ranges over the role of IoT, security, web sites and more - there's a lot of things that can be built in Azure, and the opportunities are massive!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How do you build a cloud-oriented application? Carl and Richard talk to Vishwas Lele about his views on making software that takes advantage of features of the cloud, including dynamic resource allocation, resiliency and reliability. Vishwas runs down a list of ideas, starting with error handling - how many failures can be recovered in the cloud with new resource allocation, etc? Next up, instrumentation and logging - the cloud offers a lot of tooling to make real-time instrumentation a possibility. How do you take advantage of the costs of computing? What about scaling your application? Vishwas digs into it all!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Can you really built virtual reality apps in .NET? You bet! Carl and Richard talk to Matthew Wilson about his work with Novus-Res, building VR apps for businesses. The conversation ranges over the typical hardware set - primarily focused on the Oculus Rift. Matthew talks about the different skills and tools needed to build a VR space, including 3D modelling. But when it comes to programming, Unity 3D leads the way, and you can write C# with Unity! What makes sense as a VR app? How do you keep folks from getting motion sick, and really make the VR experience real? Lots of cool thinking here, and we're still at the beginning!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What does it take to make web pages that work in multiple languages? Carl and Richard talk to Diego Iastrubni about localization and internationalization. The conversation focuses first on the complexity involved - its very easy to forget how different languages and cultures apply to information being display. Does text go left-to-right, or right-to-left, left-aligned or right-aligned? And how does it apply to numbers? Diego goes on to explain core concepts in web localization, focusing on UTF-8 for character set and CSS for direction and alignment. There are frameworks to make this easier! Things get harder when you look at mobile and desktop apps, and every dev environment approaches it differently!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Visual Studio 2015 came out in July 2015, and with it, a new version of F# - version 4.0! Carl and Richard talk to Lincoln Atkinson, late of Microsoft, about the cool new features and capabilities in F# 4. The conversation ranges through the thinking around functional programming and new very functional features added - like TryList, as well as the more hybrid capabilities that let F# be a more general purpose language. And most impressively, F# 4.0 was built out in the open, as an open source project, including having third party contributors. Sure, the bulk was built by Microsoft folks (including Don Syme), but check out the contributors list!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Have you seen The Martian? Don't listen to this show until you do! WARNING: SPOILERS! But if you've seen it (or don't care), have a listen to this Geek Out about the movie and a deeper dive into the challenges of Mars, picking up where the last Geek Out on Manned Mars Missions left off. How is the movie different from the book? (they're both great, read or watch in either order) And how sciencey is the science? The movie is remarkably technically accurate, but there are some bits that are Hollywoodised, as well as dramatized for effect. But who cares? It's an awesome movie and a fun Geek Out! Have a listen!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a mature methodology now, right? So how do you get it right? Carl and Richard talk to Justin Searls about his experiences helping teams implement TDD. As Justin says, TDD is just a tool in the toolbox for making long-lived software. In its maturity, different flavors of TDD have emerged, and Justin digs into the Detroit or Classical TDD versus the London TDD. It's all about testing, but with some style variations. How do you keep your tests resilient as software evolves? Justin talks about the right amount of abstraction and organizing a hierarchy of tests so that you can manage change effectively. TDD works!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Ever heard of property-based testing? Carl and Richard talk to Mark Seemann about doing property-based testing with F#. As Mark explains, functional programming techniques work especially well for property-based testing, allowing you to define parameters (properties) that will generate ranges of values to test against. The conversation digs into tooling, specifically FsCheck, an open source library for doing property-based testing in F#. If you'd rather work in C#, Mark's project AutoFixture can do similar work in that language. But Mark talks up the advantages of F# from a functional perspective, creating very terse, easy to read tests. Check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How do you handle credit card payments in your applications? Carl and Richard talk to Craig McKeachie about his work with different payment solutions, including Stripe. The conversation digs into the challenges of building your own payment system versus using a third-party system - starting with PCI compliance! Craig talks about different tooling for embedding payment, including the stripe.net library on GitHub for plugging into Stripe, and so on. Taking payments is important, so is doing it right - you have to think about security in a deep way. Don't build what you don't have to!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Hang on to your hats, here comes a ServiceStack update! Carl and Richard talk to Demis Bellot, who for the past couple of years has been full time on ServiceStack, and wow, a ton of development has been done! Demis (at very high speed) rattles through the feature list of ServiceStack, talking about the array of platforms it supports - which is pretty much everything from the phone to the cloud. While the focus has always been on providing web services, Demis also talks about running the entire stack inside a machine so that you can provide local services as well. Check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How much can a language do with only 25 keywords? Carl and Richard talk to Michael Van Sickle about Google's Go Language. The focus in Go is on simplicity and structure - it's amazing what you can do with so few keywords, plus fixed locations for braces, indentations, and so on. The benefit of Go is easy-to-read code that has great concurrency capabilities - the Actor model is a standard pattern of development for Go. Michael also digs into the tooling around Go, using Atom for an editor and various plug ins to make coding and debugging easier. So how good is Go? Docker is written in Go! Check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

There's more great stuff in Studio than you realize! Carl and Richard talk to Charles Sterling about the web performance testing tools built into Visual Studio 2015. Actually, the testing tools have been there since 2008, but only in the test edition, and after that they were moved to the Ultimate Edition - they were part of what made that product so expensive! But as of 2015, the testing tools are available as part of Visual Studio Online, which means they're free for teams of five or fewer as well as all MSDN subscribers! Chuck talks about what it takes to build really great load tests - the kinds of questions you can answer, and how to build those tests into your continuous deployment system. Check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

If you've been listening to the latest episodes, you've heard Omnisharp mentioned - time for a show on it! Carl and Richard talk to David Driscoll about his efforts contributing to Omnisharp. Omnisharp is a set of tools to bring .NET development to all sorts of different development environments, including Visual Studio Code. David discusses the impact that working on a dev tools project like Omnisharp has had on his own career, changing the way he thinks about development - for the better! If you're digging into open source web development in the new Microsoft stack, you really should know about Omnisharp!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Rob Conery has the Elixir bug! Carl and Richard chat with Rob about being on show 1200, and how Elixir has sucked him in. Elixir is the syntactically friendly language over top of Erlang that has gotten a lot of attention lately. The conversation digs into the strategies around learning a new language, starting with building a good old fashion forms-over-data application. Rob used the Phoenix MVC framework with Elixir to build web pages quickly. He also talks about changing your thinking - how his Elixir code rapidly evolved from an old way of thinking to new, with terser syntax and taking advantage of the language style to build in a new way!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Kathleen Dollard has been exploring different development environments and wants to tell the world! Carl and Richard talk to Kathleen about her experience using Python and Django with JetBrain's IntelliJ development environment. As Kathleen says, it's the whole development suite, not just a given language, that you have to evaluate as a whole. But if you're going to live in the dynamic language like Python, you need to take testing seriously - and Kathleen dives into her experience of doing semantic testing to build resilient tests that are easy to read and have comprehensive coverage. The conversation turns to the story of how all this came to pass - Kathleen's new job and new leadership role with a consulting firm has pushed her to try new things!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations