.NET Rocks!

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

Kate Gregory is back! Carl and Richard chat with Kate about the state of C++ today. The conversation starts out with a discussion about the recent C++ conference in Redmond that brought the best-and-brightest in the industry together to talk about how C++ is currently being used and how the standards can continue to evolve. Kate talks about the challenges of the language, how it is not typically used for CRUD apps, but rather applications that live on rovers on Mars, in games, in drivers, operating systems and a whole host of diverse platforms. That's what makes C++ amazing, it's everywhere! The discussion continues on how C++ does continue to evolve, adapt the best ideas from other language (looking at you, lambdas!) and today's code is dramatically different from just a few years ago. Check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Jimmy Bogard about his experiences scaling an MVC web site to thousands of pages and thousands of users. The conversation starts out focused on why to use MVC - comparing original ASP with ASP.NET Web Forms and MVC. Jimmy talks about the early days of MVC and the challenges of making a very new product work, but in exchange for some substantial benefits - but perhaps not the ones you'd think! Jimmy also digs into scaling an MVC web site across multiple servers, dealing with state management (Session is evil!) and what you can do to web pages to keep them performing well with large numbers of users. The discussion also moves to managing huge number of pages and developing patterns for UI and object naming to simplify development and testing. Automation is key when you're working at scale!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Jim Holmes about managing technical debt - while still getting your work done. The conversation starts out talking about what exactly technical debt is... it's not just the code you're afraid of! Jim also digs into the business justification for reducing technical debt, focused on how you can show the cost of your technical debt in the form of tech support or how it slows down the development of new features. Once you've got cycles for mitigating technical debt, how do you go about it? Remember that this was the code you were afraid of in the first place, so tackling it takes time and care to do well. Jim digs into how to split your time between new features (and keep the lights on) as well as retiring the technical debt in your organization. After all, getting too deeply in debt is also a way to turn out the lights on your business - you need a plan to fight back!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at the NSBCon in Brooklyn, New York, Carl and Richard talk to Udi Dahan about CQRS. CQRS is the acronym for Command and Query Responsibility Segregation. Udi begins the conversation talking a bit about the history of CQRS and how it derived from Bertrand Meyer's work on CQS back in the 80s. The cornerstone of CQRS is a separation between commands (insert/update/delete) and querying in databases - not just relational databases, of course, but certainly the focus is there. The power of the pattern is its ability to handle huge volumes of data in both directions, simplifying application design as the load increases. Great thinking from Udi as usual!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Steve DelBianco about taxation and software development - including the new Marketplace Fairness Act. But first the focus is on the history of sales tax, which as Steve explains, is focused on physical goods transacted in person. The first crisis of sales tax came in the 30s when catalog sales became popular and more consumers starting buying products from other states. This presents the idea of Use Tax, effective a self-declared sales tax collection process for good you buy out-of-state. Yeah, that's right, you're suppose to assess sales tax on yourself! Steve has been involved for more than a decade in the effort to modernize sales taxes to handle internet sales, which leads to the current situation around the Marketplace Fairness Act - which is not at all what the name should be. The states are trying to garner the right to collect taxes and demand from anyone in any state - and this law might actually pass! Check out the links below for ways to make your voice heard.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Lino Tadros about his viewpoint on doing mobile development using the plethora of cross-platform development tools available today. First up - Xamarin's tools for building iOS and Android apps. Windows Phone also makes an appearance, especially with Xamarin Forms. The Xamarin stack continues to evolve and improve, and Lino is pretty impressed. Then it's over to the HTML/JavaScript world of Adobe Cordova, with implementations in Visual Studio as well as the Telerik Platform. Lino talks about its strengths around working beyond even the three top mobile platforms for when you really want to deal with the long tail, but the implementations vary a bit, leading to the ecosystem of plugins to fill in the gaps. Both these approaches work, Lino focuses in on the skillsets needed, and reminds of the reality - there is no cross-platform solution out there that doesn't demand you understand the platforms you're working with.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Ben Watson about his work around writing high performance .NET code. Ben talks about how the Bing team decided to use .NET code internally, which seems like an obvious choice for a Microsoft group, but it isn't really - when milliseconds count, does .NET makes sense? Ben says it does, and he's done the work to prove it. Ben's book "Writing High Performance .NET Code" focuses not only on coding techniques, but also the larger practice of having a deep understanding of how .NET works, and the processes that take place to turn .NET code into machine code. The conversation also digs deeply into the need for performance measurement, especially Event Tracing for Windows. .NET can be fast when you do it right!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Mårten Rånge about his efforts to contribute to the open source project that is F#. F# is really open source and taking public contributions, but as Mårten explains, it's not that simple. You need to get engaged with the project on CodePlex and actually get to know the team and where the project is at to hope to make a difference there. As Mårten says, everyone is very nice, but they do have a vision of where the project is going - and you can contribute to that vision! The conversation digs into what it takes to actually build your own version of F# as well as the art of making a contribution to a project that will ultimately be delivered in Visual Studio. This is just the start for Mårten, and perhaps for you also!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Trevan Hetzel about writing CSS code to do JavaScript work in modern web pages. When you're a coder, you tend to code. When you're a designer, you're more likely to style. Trevan discusses the many things that CSS can do that most coders tend to write JavaScript for instead. And once you see what's possible in CSS, the question drills in on - is this a good idea? Are we writing JavaScript that is better served as a behaviour in a style? Where do you want your stuff to live? Trevan also digs into a bunch of great tools for taking your CSS to a higher level, check them out in the show notes!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard chat with Mike Hostetler about his work with Node.js and the Sails.js MVC Framework. The conversation starts out with a recap of Node itself, how it takes on the web services problem with a minimal footprint at first, and how you can add in the bits you need with the Node Packaged Manager. Then Mike digs into Sails.js, an MVC framework to help you build well-structure web pages in JavaScript against Node on the backend - JavaScript everywhere! The discussion also deals with the state of the Node community, including the announced departure of TJ Holowaychuk, one of the most prolific Node library developers out there. Node is moving into the mainstream, have you checked it out? Lots of links below!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Once more into the breech for the last of the fusion power GeekOuts, at least for now. Carl and Richard dive into the most controversial aspect of fusion power, so-called "cold fusion." This is a sensitive topic in the scientific community, so much so that it's name changes on a regular basis. The current popular name is Low Energy Nuclear Reactions. And the name is a big deal - Richard starts off the conversation by digging into the idea that there is more than one kind of cold fusion. Then the history lesson starts, with a study of what led up to the dramatic announcement by Fleischmann and Pons in March of 1989 - and the catastrophic fallout that led to the concept of "pathological science" and forcing it essentially underground. So what's real and what is snake oil? Is there something to cold fusion after all? The answers, as always, are complex and interesting!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard chat with IdeaBlade man Ward Bell about the latest in Breeze and the whole concept of building web clients that can function in a disconnected state. It's possible with modern browsers to store information locally, which can help your web app survive an intermittent connection. Ward talks about how Breeze, his open source tool for caching, validation and querying, helps solve the disconnected problem. The challenge is finding the right patterns of development so that you don't have to litter your code with connectivity testing, just handle failures when they come without losing the user's work. Easy, right?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Kathleen Dollard about her deep dive into Roslyn. The conversation starts out with a great question from a listener about using Roslyn to step into the compiler and understand how syntax trees would look... and what the potential for visualization is. Kathleen talks about her own open source project RoslynDom to help understand what's going on inside of Roslyn. The discussion also gets into some of the cool new capabilities coming in the next version of Visual Studio, and how Microsoft has changed the shipping process entirely - it's not the Studio you once knew!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard chat with Robert Bogue about the adventure that is requirements gathering. The conversation starts out with a sharing of war stories, talking about finding the right people to talk to in order to understand the overall application requirements in general, much less individual specifications. Robert talks a bit about a variety of techniques for requirements gathering, referencing some of the Agile Manifesto in the process, but recognizing that requirements themselves are largely methodology independent - it just takes relentless investigation and a goal of thoroughly understanding the system. Check out Robert's videos on Pluralsight!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Paul Sheriff about his work building mobile web apps using ASP.NET WebForms. Yeah, that's right, WebForms! Paul talks about the problems with WebForms and how they can be overcome with some careful configuration and understanding of how WebForms really works. The conversation digs into adding Responsive Web Design to a WebForms page to make it work well on a mobile browser using Twitter's BootStrap - and also how to use WrapBootStrap to make your pages not look like BootStrap pages. Not every mobile web app should be a WebForms app, but it makes sense in some cases - Paul compares approaches to help you choose!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard chat with Dan Wahlin about his latest open source project, building a Single Page Application (SPA) using AngularJS interfacing with Microsoft Azure Active Directory Services (MAAD) and Office 365 API. Called OfficeDev and published on GitHub, this project demonstrates interacting with Office documents, Sharepoint and traditional enterprise authentication systems from within a browser. Dan discusses the thinking behind the project and some of the more challenging parts to it - but you can check all that out for yourself on GitHub, the code is all published.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Time for some more IoT! Pete Brown checks in with Carl and Richard to talk about Microsoft's continuing announcements in the Internet of Things space. The conversation starts out with a discussion about Pete's work in the music side of things and the Windows 8 API for MIDI - helping musicians use a Windows 8 tablet as the hub of a music system. Then it's on to several important announcements, including the implementation of C# with the Intel Galileo board, and the announcement of two new hardware platforms: SharksCove, which is essentially a tablet-sized prototyping platform and MinnowBoard, a Arduino-sized board running actual Intel hardware and capable of running a full version of Windows and .NET! The hardware is getting amazing, and your .NET skills are even more valuable!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Glenn Howes about Apple's new programming language for IoS and MacOS: Swift. As Glenn explains, Swift builds on the same compiler that Apple's Objective-C uses (LLVM), but optimizes a number of key aspects that were known to be slow. Swift goes beyond performance improvements to add language features like generics, type safety and more! The conversation also digs into the future of Swift running on Mac OS X as well, which then digs into the differences between apps on the iPad and apps on the Mac. Great Apple conversation!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Bill Wagner about some of the features coming in C# 6.0. The conversation starts with the history - the internal Microsoft project known as Roslyn has become an open source project on Codeplex. Bill runs down a number of cool features coming in C# 6.0, including primary constructors, improvements to Await and more. No idea when the shipping date is, but C# 6.0 is in the Visual Studio 2014 CTPs and is available for download any time you like!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to GitHub denizen and former Microsoftie Phil Haack about what it means to build open source software. The conversation starts off with a reminder that back in Phil's Microsoft days, he was a huge advocate of taking various Microsoft products open source - and today it's actually happening! Phil may have moved on to GitHub, but the spirit of open source has permeated the web team at Microsoft, the ultimate manifestation being ASP.NET vNext! So what about your projects? What does it takes to make them open source, and what benefits can you expect?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard circle back with Mark Miller for a whirlwind discussion on the biology of user interface design. Actually, it's the biology of humans as it relates to UI, focusing (no pun intended) on the eyes - how exactly does eyesight work? What cultural and psychological conditioning affects how you see? And ultimately, how can we apply the understanding of eyesight to make applications that are easier to use, easier to understand, and more enjoyable? Mark has years of experience in building great UI, and has distilled the core elements down to the biology of the user!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Daniel Piessens about building continuous delivery solutions. The conversation starts out with an explanation of the differences between continuous integration, deployment, and delivery - and the fact that there are business decisions to deal with there, not just technical decisions! Daniel also digs into the challenges around getting Operations deeply involved in the testing process so that they have control over features as they are developed and can be turned off and on of your canary servers when needed. Lots of cool thinking about the future of software development with DevOps practices.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Denise Jacobs about creativity. Denise starts out talking about her work with developers, mostly focused around understanding just how creative the software development process is. The conversation digs into the idea that flow state, which has been a talking point in a number of shows of late... is it inherently a creative state? Denise also digs into the battle with your internal critic, how to stop that critic from holding you back. Lots of personal empowerment thoughts, writing your goals down, experiments with improv, and more - it's a creative world!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Chris Love about building mobile web apps for the enterprise. The conversation starts out with a reference to a comment made on a previous show about the problems with web apps not being built well enough for your device - that they feel too webby. And Chris agrees - it's very challenging to build a web app that feels great on a mobile device. So what's the problem? Chris digs deep into what it takes to make web pages render fast and clean on phones and the biggest bugbear of them all - building a great, compatible touch interface for a web app on a mobile device.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Julie Lerman and Steve Smith about the fundamentals of Domain Driven Design (DDD). Julie and Steve have collaborated on a very popular Pluralsight course about DDD that has made the methodology more approachable for more people. The conversation digs into the fact that DDD has been around for more than a decade, but hasn't caught on near as much as it should - and why is that? There's at least one alphabet soup moment: What about DDD, BDD, TDD, PDD, ADDDD and SJDD? Listen to the show for definitions of these acronyms and more!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Well, here we go - the second installation of the fusion power geek out. While the first show focused on the "Big Science" fusion power projects like NIF and ITER, this time around Richard digs into smaller hybrid projects, like General Fusions Magnetized Target Fusion as well as Colliding Beam Fusion Reactors being built by Helion Energy and Tri Alpha Energy. These fusion approaches combine magnetic and inertial plasma confinement to make fusion a little less extreme and more manageable - with more focus on how to actually make electricity. Also, they seem to be funded by tech billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Paul Allen. Is that a good thing or bad? Is this stuff all snake oil? There's more to talk about!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations