.NET Rocks!

Are you ready for C# 6? Carl and Richard talk to Bill Wagner about the latest changes to C# 6, with some features being dropped (perhaps to appear in a later version), some syntax changes, and digging deeper on some of the more complex features available. Now that everything around C# is open source, you can see the process of developing new features going on, and even participate in it! Bill and Richard also talk about Humanitarian Toolbox, their ongoing effort to build open source software for disaster relief organizations. And even a little discussion about C# 7!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

So what comes after Durandal? Rob Eisenberg talks to Carl and Richard about Aurelia! The conversation starts out focused on AngularJS and Rob's role with the open source project and ultimate departure. But that was back in November 2014 - what happens next? Aurelia is Rob's vision of what web developers need to build effective browser-based client applications. Rob talks about implementing Aurelia to utilize ECMAScript 6 and 7 while still polyfilling back to ES5 - the Javascript you recognize. This leads to a whole discussion on transpiling and how its possible to move a language forward without breaking backward compatibility, even a language as diverse as Javascript!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Are you ready to build web pages with web components? Cory House is! Carl and Richard talk to Cory House about the web component specification and what that will look like in your modern web development. As Cory explains, the key idea behind web components is to provide a framework for Javascript library extensibility that doesn't force you to own the library yourself. While the standard is still being discussed, Cory mentions some libraries that have already gone ahead and implemented a variation of this extensibility, such as Steve Sanderson's amazing KnockoutJS. Web components make Javascript that much better to use!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Looking at moving from WinForms to WPF? Phil Japikse can help! Carl and Richard talk to Phil Japikse about the changes in thinking that have to happen to make WPF work for you if you're coming from a WinForms world. The conversation starts out discussing the strengths of WinForms and why they persist to this day - it just works! And there's no designer experience like it, including WPF. No matter where you go, after WinForms, you're going to spend more time looking at code for your UI. Do you have to learn MVVM? It depends! Phil talks about the different approaches to making WPF work for you, and taking your UI to it's full potential.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Time for a craftsmanship update from Uncle Bob! Carl and Richard talk to Bob Martin about the growth of developers, and how the number of new developers is overwhelming the available teaching and mentoring resources available today. The discussion turns to the fact that customers would rather have mentors writing code than teaching new developers - better to throw the new folks in a room and let them fend for themselves, maybe software will come out! Uncle Bob talks about the rise of professionalism, the need for professional associations or guilds, taking on the liability of software - the challenge is getting there.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Are you building mobile first? Carl and Richard talk to Chris Love about his work building mobile apps - in two styles! First Chris talks about working with a startup, with the latest tools and lots of experimentation. On the other side, there's the corporate development world, which is far more conservative and resisting change. Then the conversation turns to progressive enhancement, making new versions of web pages using modern tools and letting the old pages serve older browsers until its no longer needed. IE8 has one year of life left, its time to move!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Still resisting going to WPF? Billy is here to help! Carl and Richard chat with Billy Hollis about the ever-improving ability of WPF to build great looking desktop applications. Billy talks about techniques for getting the most from WPF and paths for new developers to take to be successful. There's a huge array of options out there in WPF, it can be terribly confusing to know where to get started. WPF is eight years old - as old as Visual Basic ever got! Shouldn't everyone be using it by now?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

One more alternative energy Geek Out - generating power with water! The conversation starts with hydroelectric power, but then moves to tidal and wave power. Some work, some don't, and it's not just about the technology either, how the business models are built matter a lot. But there's a lot of energy from wave and tides to be had, the trick is knowing how to capture it! From tidal barrages to underwater turbines, buoys, snakes and air turbines, there are a lot of approaches to capturing this massive power resource.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Duck punch your JavaScript lately? Todd Gardner talks to Carl and Richard about the practice of changing object behaviors in JavaScript for good or evil. After an explanation of how duck punching (or monkey patching, pick your favorite silly term) works, the discussion turns to the dark side of how hackers can intercept your Javascript library calls, capture keystrokes and otherwise subtly change your web pages. Could you tell? Then Todd dives into using your powers for good - strategies for testing, aspect-oriented programming and so on. Duck punching does have significant limitations, so use sparingly, but when it works, its amazing! (NOTE: no ducks were harmed in the making of this podcast)Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Dominick Baier and Brock Allen about the new version of Thinktecture IdentityServer. As Dominick explains, as soon as you have more than one web application that needs authentication, you want to go to a centralized authentication and authorization scheme, and that's where IdentityServer comes into play. Working with oAuth2 and OpenID Connect, you can create identities for your users from Active Directory, other IMAP stores or just a plain old SQL Server. Take your authentication strategy to the next level!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Ready to think beyond the SPA? John Papa talks about the continuing evolution of HTML 5. Carl and Richard chat with John about web components, an evolving standard to make JavaScript libraries more extensible and organized. AngularJS comes out in the conversation as well, especially version 2 with its breaking changes - but you don't need to migrate if you don't want to. V1 will continue development. John also digs into his current suite of tools for building, deploying, and debugging web pages. The technology is maturing, and that means better tools!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Can computing cure cancer? That's Evelina Gabasova's goal! Carl and Richard talk to Evelina about her work using machine learning and data analytics to understand the genetics of cancer, its variations and subtypes. Part of her goal is to get to personalized medicine - where your doctor uses your genetic information to determine the ideal treatment, custom-made for you. So how does that involve statistics? Evelina talks about her evolution from computing into informatics and the various tools used to analyze data deeply, rather than widely - including F#!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How many different ways can you store data? David Simons knows at least ten! Carl and Richard talk to David about a wide variety of data storage approaches. Some are SQL, some are NoSQL, but David digs into each one talking about strengths and weaknesses. The conversation digs into the idea that using one data store for all purposes is archaic - while it always depends on your application's needs, have two, three, or four different data stores isn't crazy! David talks about various classes of data stores including graph, object, time series, relational, and more... there are lots of ways to store your data, and with the right store, coding and maintaining get easier! The trick is to deal with the essentials of every data store: reliability, backup, and recovery. Here's a great list of choices for your app!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What does Sharepoint Development look like today? Carl and Richard talk to Sahil Malik about the amazing changes that have happened to the Sharepoint development community with the impact of Azure and Office 365. Sharepoint used to be a very insular development environment, separate from everything else, but today it is expected to interact with cloud services, on-premise system and a variety of clients, including iPhone, Android, WinPhone and more. Sahil talks about gluing all the pieces together - you can't build it all yourself!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Do you know about Google Cloud? Brad Abrams does! Carl and Richard talk to former Microsoftie Brad Abrams about the other big cloud player - and there's a lot to say. Brad starts out focusing on the Platform-as-a-Service offerings of Google such as the App Engine which lets you run Python, Java, PHP, and Go in the cloud with all the scaling options you could ever want. Rather a virtual machine? The Google Compute Engine handles that, with Windows as an option coming soon! Then the discussion turns to containers: lightweight, OS-agnostic virtual machines that work with Google Container Engine and scale with Kubernetes. And that's still only the beginning; there's storage options of all sorts and Brad's favorite bits, great tracing and debugging tools. There's room for a third player in the public cloud world!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard moderated a panel of Ben Hall, Peter Mounce, Jeff French and Enrico Campidoglio to talk about the state of DevOps in the .NET world. While DevOps is going strong in the open source world, it is coming slowly to .NET. The panelists discuss their preferred toolchains for speeding deployment, testing and instrumentation of software, as well as the cultural changes that have happened in their organizations as an effect or demand of DevOps. The conversation also turns to looking at the tools Microsoft is building to support DevOps vs. the open source tools that are adding Windows and .NET support. There's still a long ways to go!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Jonathan Pepper is back with another great Xamarin case study! Carl and Richard talk to Jon about the Hanx Writer, an iPad application made with the help of Tom Hanks to recreated the mechanical typewriter experience on a tablet. Remember skeuomorphism? Here is an awesome manifestation! Jon talks about the process of creating the effects of three different mechanical type writers in an iPad application, including the keyboard, sounds of keystrikes, even the fonts! But most amazingly, the app is built using Xamarin, and not just for the cross-platform capabilities, since the app is only out for iPad at the moment. Jon just loves C#!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talked with Bryan Hunter about the language Elixir. Bryan tells the story of how the folks behind Ruby got interested in Erlang, thinking to bring some of Erlang's features to other languages - but then discovered it was impossible, since Erlang is its own operating system. So instead, they created a new language within Erlang, and that is Elixir. Taking the favorite features of many languages including Ruby, C#, F# and others, Elixir makes for a pleasant programming experience while still having the power of Erlang behind you. Check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talk to Enrico Campidoglio about including databases in your continuous delivery process. Enrico talks through a few different strategies for getting your database moving as fast as your application, without losing data along the way. The conversation digs into issues around version control for databases, keeping schema and reference tables in your source control system, and recognizing that database updates don't happen at the same time as application updates - there can be updates before and after, or otherwise independent of the application itself. Lots of little tips and tricks for managing your database updates more effectively!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard sat down with Mark Rendle to talk about the latest version of Simple.Data - version 2! Simple.Data started out years ago as a simple abstraction for data access, all open source with numerous additional projects built on it to support a huge variety of data stores. Mark talks about going back into his old V1 project and realizing he did some interesting twists and turns to make it work, and how a rethink of the design brought out the idea of V2. The conversation also digs into the fundraising efforts he did to incentivize getting an alpha version of V2 together. Lots of fun digressions on various projects and ideas as well!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Another great show from NDC London, Carl and Richard talk to Ben Hall about Docker. Docker has been taking the industry by storm, bringing a lighter-weight approach to virtualization by getting the operating system out of the package and focusing on automated configuration and implementation. Ben talks about the origins of Docker and its focus on the Linux world - but that is rapidly changing with Microsoft promising an implementation running on Windows. The potential of Docker for facilitating efficient development is obvious, but could this change how we use applications as a whole?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard got the amazing opportunity to go to the NASA Goddard Space Flight center to see the James Web Space Telescope in person. And while there, they sat down with Craig Tooley, the Project Manager of the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission (MMS) to understand a bit more about space weather and the remarkable science and engineering that goes into a mission like MMS. The MMS mission utilizes four identical spacecraft flying in formation to measure plasma interaction effects between the Earth's magnetosphere and the sun. The goal of MMS to capture (by flying through) a magnetic reconnection event, where a huge amount of plasma energy is discharged. As with most things in the universe, reality is a complex thing, and the MMS is at the forefront of our understanding of the universe, at least around our planet!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

At the NDC London conference, Carl and Richard talk to Steve Sanderson about his work on the Azure Portal and building arguably the greatest Single Page Application (SPA) around today. Steve talks about the approach the Azure Portal team has taken to deal with memory management as well as a flexible plugin architecture that allows the various Azure related teams to plug into the common "shell" component of the Azure Portal. The conversation digs into the challenges of SPAs as the scale and utilization goes up. You can make it work, but it isn't always simple! Steve also discusses the choices you can make around SPAs, it's not just about AngularJS, there are many ways to build a SPA toolchain.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at NDC London at the Excel Center, Carl and Richard talked to Phil Trelford about building your own compiler. First off, why would you do that? Phil talks about the various ways that compiler technology can be used and help improve your own understand of languages and tools. You probably don't need to replace the C# compiler for your applications, but you might want to use parsing technology to provide algorithmic support in your applications. The power of F# is apparent when you start working on compilers, with its amazing pattern matching and parsing capabilities. Phil also mentions some toolsets to make experimenting with compilers easier, check out the show links for more info!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at the NDC London conference, Carl and Richard talk to Liam Westley about building your own software business. It starts with the idea that the most destructive thing to your software business is support calls - or more broadly, the accumulated cost of your past business. The conversation digs into the power of being a business of one, rather than having employees, and thinking beyond just your development work, digging into all the other aspects of business: marketing, sales, accounting, and so on. As Liam says, starting a software business is easy, staying in business is hard!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard talk to Shay Friedman about the Chrome Developer Tools. The conversation starts out talking a bit about the state of web development, the jump in JavaScript performance, and the huge increase in the complexity of web applications - which naturally leads to the challenge of debugging said JavaScript-based applications. Enter the Chrome Developer Tools. Firefox was the original web developer browser, but Chrome has slid into that slot with more capabilities than ever. More than just element inspection, the Chrome Developer Tools let you look at your web application executing on the browser. Shay talks about tracking down memory leaks in complex Javascript code, where many variables are created, but few are destroyed. You need these tools in your kit!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talk to Ian Cooper about hexagonal architectures. Turns out the important part is not the six sides - it's the idea of ports and adapters. Originally talked about by Alistair Cockburn, this is an architectural approach that focuses on being tolerant to testing as well as separating commands from querying. It's not quite Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS), but you can see it from there! Ian discusses testing in a hexagonal architecture and how Test Driven Development (TDD) works so well with the separation of concerns that ports and adapters offers. If you're working on a long lived application that needs to be maintainable, you should be looking at hexagonal architecture!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Julie is back and all about the latest version of Entity Framework - version 7! The conversation starts out with a bit of a state of the union, with Julie describing how moving Entity Framework to GitHub has opened up an amazing level of communication between the EF team and regular developers. Which leads to the scarier part of the discussion: The breaking changes coming to EF7 from EF6. Like ASP.NET vNext, EF7 represents a substantial break. But Julie says you shouldn't worry, there are lots of solutions. Oh, and did she mention that they are planning on including support for non-relational (NoSQL) data stores? Really!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to David Božjak about the Lumia Imaging SDK... or is it the Nokia Imaging SDK? Caught in the midst of a name change since the acquisition of Nokia phones, the SDK is called Lumia Imaging on the blog sites, but is still Nokia Imaging on NuGet. Certainly it'll all be Lumia some day. David talks about the huge array of features available in the SDK to take photos, apply filters and effects to them, and then render the images. The conversation digs into how to handle huge images when you have limited memory, so that thumbnails and partial renders keep the memory footprint down, and streamed rendering lets something phone size still render the full image. Cool stuff for your mobile app!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Rocky Lhotka about where universal apps in Visual Studio are really going. But first, a bit of a landscape discussion, especially a laugh about the "comeback" of .NET and C#. Did Xamarin save the day? Rocky talks about how universal apps aren't all that universal, but with Xamarin in the mix, you start to look at a common code base for desktop, laptop, tablet and mobile development. Almost. Maybe. It's always more complicated than you think! But Rocky is optimistic that things are going the right way, so that everyone can start building cross-platform applications for their customers really soon.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Itamar Syn-Hershko about adding search technologies to your application. The conversation starts out focused on what SQL Server can do for search... the LIKE operator. What about NoSQL? Itamar talks about the role that data stores like RavenDB can play as far as finding data. But then you get to dedicated indexing and search tools like Lucerne.NET, ElasticSearch and Solr. Itamar talks about the advantages of using these tools in terms of speed of indexing and search, as well as the ability to bring multiple data sources together under a common indexing strategy. How do you do search in your app?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Jonathan Stark about the wearable landscape today. But first, a crazy story about a Starbucks card. Jon is the guy behind Jonathan's Card, where he put a Starbucks card online for folks to add money to and buy coffee with. Crazy! Next up is a deep dig into the spectrum of watch like devices available today - Samsung Gear, Pebble, the Apple Watch and more! The variety of programming opportunities is just getting bigger.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at the MVP Summit, Carl and Richard sat down with Pratap Lakshman, Peli de Halleux and Nikolai Tillman to talk about automating unit testing in .NET. Originally a Microsoft Research Project, PEX is now part of Visual Studio 2015, and digs deep into the IL of your application to generate a huge variety of unit tests. The team also talks about some of the other cool projects they've built using the PEX engine, including CodeHunt, a tool using testing to teach you to program. Check out PEX on Microsoft Research, and get ready for Studio 2015!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk about two space accidents that happened in the same week - the explosion of Orbital Science's Antares Rocket on October 28 and the breakup of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo on October 31. Richard begins with the Orbital Science's mission to supply the International Space Station. Part of NASA's Commercial Resupply Services, the ORB-3 mission included the Cygnus spacecraft carrying supplies to the ISS as well as a number of smaller payloads, including the Arkyd-3. The Antares rocket exploded a few seconds after launch. The discussion digs into the origins of the rocket design and Orbital's subsequent actions to deal with the loss of the rocket - they're still responsible to get those supplies to the station! The second part of the show is even more serious, since it involves a fatality - the breakup of SpaceShipTwo during a test flight, resulting in the death of co-pilot Michael Alsbury. Is making space commercially viable worthwhile even at the expense of someone's life?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Rob Irving and Simon Jackson about advertising on mobile apps. The conversation starts out with Ad Duplex, which is an ad exchange and a way to advertise your mobile app on other mobile apps like yours - all in an effort to get more users. Rob talks about alternative ways to get users, such as pursuing reviews, using crowdsouring and in general taking marketing seriously. Simon digs into more traditional advertising using the open source Adrotator library, which takes the discussion into the complexity of advertising - multiple providers, different systems for different locations, and how often you don't actually *get* an ad!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Scott Ford about taking over existing software projects. There's lots of negativity around existing code, calling them "brownfield" and "legacy projects." Scott looks at existing projects more like an older home that has been well used, but needs updating. The conversation digs into how to understand not only the code of the existing application, but also the intent of the app - more focus on why things are the way they are, rather than just the how parts. But once you understand the why, there's no reason to stick with old tools and techniques, and Scott talks about using modern tools to quickly take control of an existing codebase and make it more reliable, understandable and sustainable.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to David Dennison about his complete change of development career: From C# and .NET to Scala and the JVM! David talks about getting work at iTrellis, and their move to a services stack of Scala, Akka and Spray. The discussion focuses on the many things that are the same between the platforms, as well as the differences - it's all managed code in the end! David also talks about getting into the mindspace of the new platform he is working in, as well as dealing with entirely new development tools and infrastructure. Could you change platforms if the opportunity arose?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Greg Shackles about making continuous deployment work in the mobile apps space. The conversation starts out with the projects that Greg is currently working on, and the need to get them deployed routinely to iOS and Android devices - this means, of course, deployment to the AppStore, which only goes so fast. Greg talks about avoiding the AppStores by finding ways to make changes internally, rather than a full deploy. The discussion goes down his preferred toolchain and inserting as much automation as possible - not so much for speed as for repeatability! Check out Greg's talks and slides in the show notes on this subject.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Michael Van Sickle about developing web applications using the Dojo Toolkit. Not heard of it? You're not alone, but Dojo has been around since 2006! Michael talks about Dojo's focus on backward compatibility, making sure that web applications built with the framework continue to function as HTML, Javascript and CSS evolve. Heck, Dojo started before HTML 5 browsers were even available! If you're concerned about the longevity of your web applications, you should check out Dojo.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Roger Johansson about Akka.NET, a library to help you build concurrent and distributed applications. Akka.NET is a port of Akka for Java, and is open source on GitHub. As Roger explains, Akka.NET uses the actor model to create a level of abstraction ideal for building concurrent applications. This is similar to the Orleans Framework from show 969, but with some distinct advantages. The conversation gets into how folks focus on object orientation can struggle with concurrency and Akka.NET solves these problems differently that TPL and reactive extensions.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Laurent Bugnion about Xamarin Forms. Now that the forms capability has been out for a few months, Laurent digs into the strengths and weaknesses of the approach. The goal of Xamarin forms is to simplify cross-platform mobile development between iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Has it delivered? Laurent focuses in on building one project, but different builds with different bits of code for each device. You can't have one code base run everywhere, nor do you want to - there's still a need for tailoring for each device, but Xamarin Forms makes that smaller and simpler.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Brian Randell about the latest on Visual Studio Online (VSO). As Brian explains, this isn't about putting Visual Studio itself into the cloud, but rather surrounding your copy of Visual Studio with services in the cloud that make development easier. The conversation goes down the list, starting with source control in general and TFS specifically. One huge advantage of VSO - you don't have to deploy TFS yourself! Beyond source control and task management there are deployment tools and testing, all of which can be run in the cloud, where you're only billed for what you use. This is modern development at it's finest!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at the NSBConf in Brooklyn, New York, Carl and Richard moderated a panel of Udi Dahan, Ted Neward, Oren Eini and Yves Goeleven about the future of the service bus. And the future is bright! Without much contention, the panel focused in on the advantages of message passing and creating coherent boundaries between application layers to make scaling and management much easier when building large applications. There is also a discussion about rendering the update of components asynchronous, so that not everyone has to be ready to upgrade at the same time - less big bang, more continuous delivery!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Fresh from the keynote at Tech Ed Europe in Barcelona, Jeremy Thake talks to Carl and Richard about the latest announcements around Office 365. The development story in the cloud continues to evolve, and Jeremy talks about the Office 365 APIs going into general availability, along with an Android SDK. The iOS SDK is right behind it, currently in preview and ready for you to start building apps for iPhone and iPad that work with Office 365. The story is huge - new programming models for Exchange and Sharepoint in the cloud mean its easier than ever to create automation and make your company's Office experience even better!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Jen Myers about user interface design on the web. The conversation starts out with a broad focus on what has been happening on the web with HTML 5 - the emergence of the Single Page Application (SPA) and the improvements on separation of data, structure and formatting. Jen focuses in on the challenges of the least mature of the trifecta of web applications - CSS. CSS is only at version 3; HTML and JavaScript are older and more mature. And while CSS3 is a pretty good version, there are still challenges there and there are tools to address them.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

A Geek Out with a real astrophysicist! Carl and Richard get giddy geeky with the amazing Dr. Amber Straughn who is part of the Project Science team for the James Webb Space Telescope. Considered the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, Amber talks about how the JWST is bigger and different - with a six meter reflector and orbiting 1.5 million kilometres from Earth. The conversation digs into why the JWST is looking into the infrared spectrum, what the cosmological red shift is all about and a whole ton of other amazing concepts around what it means to look back in time to near the beginning of the universe!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Ready to be scared? Carl and Richard talk to Troy Hunt about the security concerns of the Internet of Things. Troy does what he does best - run down a series of scenarios with existing IoT devices like the LIFX Light Bulb and talk through how they can be exploited. Exploit a light bulb? Sure - to get access to your WiFi! The conversation explores key ideas for protecting your gear, why you need defence-in-depth and what a robust API really looks like - especially if you hack it first!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Miguel Castro about his work building modern web pages for his clients. After a couple of years working hard on WPF applications, coming over to the web world was a challenge - but as Miguel discovered, the MVVM pattern he used in WPF apps works great on the web as well! Miguel talks about working with Knockout and other libraries on his way to discovering a comfortable pattern of development using AngularJS and ASP.NET MVC together. That's right, using ASP.NET MVC to do MVVM page design! Miguel talks about how his approach to web pages creates something testable and maintainable, which is what you look for in a great business web site.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Jeff Palermo about building new applications without making the mistakes that end up creating legacy projects. The conversation starts out with Jeff describing ClearMeasure, his new organization focused on end-to-end services for his customers - Jeff considers his organization an outsourced IT department, handling development and operations. This leads to the topic of building sustainable applications. Jeff details key steps he takes to make better quality applications, many of which are simple steps like keeping individual code files small, having create source control and a plan for using that source control properly. He also talks about getting the infrastructure right at the beginning so that it's an asset to building software, not a liability. And when it comes to selecting technology for the project, the key measure is the certainty of success. Business software is pretty well understood these days, how do you build it as cost-effectively and reliably as possible?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at the NSBConf in Brooklyn, Carl and Richard talk to Oren Eini about the latest version of RavenDB. Oren talks about the huge number of changes that have happened in version 3 of RavenDB - it's come a long way from a little transactional document store of years ago! The conversation digs into how the feature set was developed; Oren talks about digging into various customer projects to see how they have pushed his product in ways he had never considered before. The discussion also digs into other document stores, including Microsoft's recently announced Azure DocumentDB - and Oren is not that impressed, but it *is* a preview after all. Oren also talks about his views on MongoDB and what its strengths and weaknesses are. There are lots of different ways to store data, and you can pick the one that is right for you... there is no one way to do it!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations