.NET Rocks!

Carl and Richard talk to Joe Kuermerle and Alex Papadimoulis about automating deployment as the path to a DevOps world. The conversation starts out talking about the real impact of DevOps, bringing developers and operations folks closer together. A key part of the process is to automate everything you can, including deployment. Part of the conversation is BuildMaster, which is free for up to five seats, providing the glue to get automated deployment working effectively. You need the process and culture to have DevOps make sense, and then good tools can accelerate the process. This is the future of application development! Don't forget to activate your MSDN Azure account and be automatically entered to win an Aston Martin V8 Vantage!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Chris Riley of Cloudshare about testing applications in the cloud. Chris talks about how the cloud provides a low-cost diversity of environments so that you can iterate more quickly through designs and implementations of code. Even if your organization isn't prepared to put their applications into production in the cloud, taking your testing environment there is possible and palatable! Don't forget to activate your MSDN Azure account and be automatically entered to win an Aston Martin V8 Vantage!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Fabio Matsui about working effectively with creative personnel in an organization. The conversation starts out just defining what we mean by design - the different types of designers (UX, visual, motion, graphics, etc) and their role in the team. Fabio then dives into the challenges of putting different mindsets together to create synergy - where the result is greater than the sum of its parts. Great teams make it possible to do amazing things!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Scott Stanfield about his experiences with Node. The conversation begins with a discussion on building software in the heterogeneous client environment of today. Scott also digs into his love of programming at the command line and how he configures his Mac in the CLI style. He also digs into his love of Node and the power of Node Package Manager (NPM) along with a number of other libraries (check out the links! Scott sees Node as a key ingredient in getting people engaged in development again - simple, clear and with immediate feedback. This show is as much a look forward as a look back!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard chat with legendary Mark Minasi of Mastering Windows fame. While Mark largely focuses on the IT side of Windows, this conversation digs into the topics that developers will find especially interesting. Mark talks about the good and bad of Windows 8, how PowerShell is an awesome tool for IT Pro and an even more awesome tool for developers! The line between the roles has blurred! There's also a brief discussion about side-loading Windows 8 applications, it's still harder than it needs to be. It's not just about goodness of Windows 8, it's about the reality of what is hard and easy.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Cory Fowler from Microsoft about how developers can put together a continuous delivery solution on Azure. The conversation starts out with a discussion about the core concepts of continuous delivery - integrating build and testing together with lots of automation to create a minimum number of manual steps as possible. Cory describes how Azure becomes the environment for development, QA and production, and how the MSDN subscription can help at each step of the way. Lots of tools are discussed, there are many ways to get to this level of automation.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Phil Haack about his latest work at GitHub. The conversation starts out talking about semantic versioning, just trying to establish a coherent set of documents about how versioning should work. Phil then talks about licensing around GitHub, discussing a new service at GitHub to make it easier to select a software license - running down the differences between MIT, Apache and GPL licenses, and more! The discussion then digs into GitHub for Windows, or rather Phil's efforts to make GitHub generally more friendly for .NET developers. Lots of cool new features!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Dan Wahlin about his experiences building web pages from a Silverlight perspective. The conversation starts out talking about how XAML isn't going away - there's lots of WPF development going on out there today. And Silverlight too! Microsoft has finally published some guidance around all of these technologies, check the links for the white paper. Dan also digs into how skills and expectations like data binding from technologies like Silverlight have changed web development - just look at the proliferation of libraries!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to G. Andrew Duthie about his work with .NET Gadgeteer. The whole concept of .NET Gadgeteer is to make it easy to build small electronic devices without needing to solder anything together AND be able to program in .NET! Andrew talks about his projects, including a hand-controlled helicopter, and his experience building custom modules for .NET Gadgeteer. The conversation explores a bunch of projects, availability of hardware and the vast array of community built hardware available. You need to try this!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Well, you knew it was coming - a geek out on whiskey. Carl and Richard talk about all kinds of whiskey, starting with Scotch whiskey as the foundation for how whiskey is made, and then digging into the differences in Irish whiskey and bourbon. The different grains, maltings, fermentation, barreling and post-processing techniques are all discussed. Making whiskey is an amazing and ancient art, and the boys have been studying it for awhile... perhaps a bit too closely!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Kit Eason about how you can get your organization using F#. Kit talks about his work using F# and how he retrained himself to use the language effectively. It only takes a few days! He makes some awesome suggestions for approaches to learning the language effectively and the advantages that it brings. We're living in a polyglot world where the best language is used in its best role... and F# has a role!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at the Norwegian Developers Conference (NDC) in Oslo last week, Carl and Richard moderated a panel talking about the state of functional programming in mainstream development. The discussion reached back in time to languages like Haskell and Erlang, and looked forward at JavaScript and it's vector to seemingly take over the world. Even if you're not well versed in functional languages, this was a great discussion.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at NDC, Carl and Richard talk to Jez Humble about Continuous Delivery. Jez discusses the difference between continuous integration and continuous delivery and how nothing matters until your code actually gets to the customer. So no shipping parties until it does! The conversation digs into the overall story of DevOps, how development and operations need to work closer together to continuously deliver value to the customer - which is more about culture and process than it is about tools.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at NDC, Carl and Richard talked to Scott Guthrie about the latest Azure features including the announcements from TechEd. Scott talks about new support for developers in Azure, including monthly Azure credit for all MSDN subscriptions and per minute billing for developer testing on Azure instances. Even if your app isn't running in the cloud, you can use the cloud to do your testing. The conversation digs into continuous delivery in the cloud - Scott mentions New Relic as an instrumentation package for your production applications to gain deep insight into how your cloud applications are actually being used.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at the Norwegian Developers Conference, Carl and Richard chatted with Jon Skeet about Async and Parallelism. The conversation starts out with a BKaF on parallel exception handling and a reader comment about F# and parallelism. Jon chimes in on both these subjects, talking about all the challenges around error handling, parallel or otherwise, and he knows (and doesn't know) about F#. Throughout the conversation there are short discussions on his effort to teach his sons programming as well. Great insights from Mr. Skeet!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk about space telescopes - but first, a comment about Thorium Molten Salt Reactors and a Kickstarter for a Thorium documentary called The Good Reactor. Also on Kickstarter is Arkyd, the space telescope that anyone can use - get a picture of yourself in space! The conversation then digs into space observatories, there are literally dozens up there today. Everyone knows about Hubble, but what about Compton, or Spitzer or Chandra? There are different observatories for different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Richard brings up Kepler, the little telescope that has detected hundreds of earth-sized planets around other stars. And don't forget about the upcoming replacement for Hubble, the James Webb Telescope!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

At DevTeach, Carl and Richard talk to Kate Gregory about smart clients. As Kate says, quoting Don Box, 'they're not dead, they're done.' The conversation digs into WinForms, Silverlight and WPF. They aren't changing much, but they definitely work. Kate talks about the various projects she's working on that depend on smart clients - accessing different processes, specific hardware requirements, etc. It's old developer day!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to James Kovacs about functional programming with JavaScript. Functional programming with JavaScript? What can't JavaScript do? James starts out talking about underscoreJS, a key library to simplify functional programming and provide some awesome features to keep your web pages running well. The conversation also digs into Single Page Applications in the context of functional programming, where you can go wrong, and why you want these tools in your toolbox to build the best web applications you can.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at DevTeach, Carl and Richard talk to Kathleen Dollard about going beyond Async. And when she says beyond Async, she means the other amazing things in .NET 4.5. First up, the portable class libraries. Then Kathleen dives into Event Tracing for Windows classes that can let you do advanced logging in your applications. The conversation also dives into the dangers of the inline update that is .NET 4.5 from .NET 4.0... especially with the updates! Lots of subtle challenges with the latest incarnation of the .NET framework - and lots of possibilities!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Kevin Kline about the latest features in SQL Server 2012. The conversation starts out talking about the new features that developers will love, like windowing - no need for cursors anymore, you can request a window of records from a set and move easily window-to-window. Kevin also talks about the new column store index that is especially useful with repeating data. There's also a discussion on the role of SQL Server in an increasingly NoSQL world, along with cool new technologies like Hadoop, Cassandra and Hekaton. Kevin closes with an offer of some free tools at SQL Sentry, including Plan Explorer, a tool to help you understand the query plans that SQL Server makes from your queries. Check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to John Papa about Single Page Applications (SPA) - building web applications that operate on a single page for the duration of execution. John talks about the evolution of web design that has led to the SPA concept - the pros and cons of the approach as well. From there the conversation digs into the sets of open source libraries for making SPA easier to build and maintain. There is no one right way and lots of choice out there, check out the links below!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Michele Leroux Bustamante about her experiences creating startup companies. Michele talks about getting started with a new company, deciding whether or not to take external funding from investors or just bootstrapping the company yourself, and how cloud technologies like Azure and programs like BizSpark have lowered the cost of infrastructure so that the main expense of a startup is wages. The conversation also digs into all the important things that developers don't know about being successful with a startup - it's not just about software! And don't forget about the dirty jokes at the end of the show!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Derik Whittaker about his experiences migrating from being a XAML developer to being an HTML developer. The conversation starts out talking about the death of Silverlight - or at least the severe neglect! From there, Derik describes the group of tools he uses to bring MVVM design patterns to HTML development. Along with some weird digressions on WinForms, this is a fun show and a great starting point for anyone ready to leave Silverlight behind!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Tim Huckaby about the latest developments around gesture computing. The conversation covers the latest version of the Kinect SDK (with grip!), as well as SoftKinetic, Panasonic D-IMager and Leap Motion. Tim also speculates on some of the new things coming from Microsoft with Xbox and Kinect (leaked specs in the links below), and how gesture is here to stay. It's everywhere already!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Marc Mercuri and Mark Simms about resilient cloud architecture. The conversation starts out focused on the white paper called 'FailSafe' and the guidance it provides for building resilient cloud applications - but the information is applicable to any large scale system running on any sort of infrastructure. While the topic area is huge, Marc and Mark break down the concepts into understanding your application, finding failure points, planning for failure (it's going to happen!) effective instrumentation and more. Lots of great thinking on how to build apps that can survive the huge tsunami of success.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard geek out on nanotechnology - and it's a huge subject! The conversation starts out with a proper definition of nanotechnology, as well as the original thinker in the space: Richard Feynman. Nanotechnology is far more than the original science fiction ideas of tiny robots and 'grey goo', it has expanded into super strong materials, particles that transport medicine and amazing two-dimensional crystals with remarkable properties, like graphene. We're only scratching the surface of nanotech with this show, write us a comment if you want to hear more!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Pablo Santos about Plastic SCM. Plastic SCM is a free ALM tool for managing source and tracking for up to 15 developers - after that you have to pay. The conversation starts out with the concept of task-driven development, letting many developers work simultaneously on a project while each focusing on individual tasks. The challenge is excessive forking of the code - how do you get everything merged together again? Pablo talks about the powerful merge system of PlasticSCM to help identify identical code by functionality, not just syntax. Other strengths include great cross-platform support, integration with multiple IDEs, and support for lots of third party tools. Well worth checking out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Lynn Langit and Llewellyn Falco about how developers can teach their kids to program. While Lynn and Llewellyn have been teaching all sorts of kids how to program (check out the links below), they've recently published a Pluralsight course specifically for developers to teach their own kids how to program. The course is completely free - you don't need to sign up for anything! And the course lets you as a developer work with your children step by step to learn how to develop in Visual Studio - yes, with your own tools. Want to show your children what you do for a living? Take it out for a spin!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Mårten Rånge about Microsoft's Text Template Transformation Toolkit (T4). Don't call it code generation - Mårten talks about how T4 takes away code repetition and keeps you focused on the important stuff. The challenge is learning to build your own maintainable templates. The conversation explores a variety of examples of using T4 effectively for SQL, XAML as well as C# and C++. Mårten has a project on GitHub called T4Include to help you utilize them more effectively. The tooling isn't perfect, but there are alternatives - check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at DevIntersection, Carl and Richard host a panel discussion on the state of cloud development. No clouds were harmed in the making of this podcast.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Hendrik Lösch about his experiences doing testing with Visual Studio 2012. Henrik starts out talking about unit testing, the different approaches with various tools, including mocking, moles and fakes. He talks about how MSTest has substantially improved in Studio 2012, but still needs help in the form of NUnit and/or xUnit.net. The conversation also digs into new generation tools like NCrunch and SpecFlow, rationalizing BDD, TDD and ATDD and ultimately dealing with the social challenges of making testing and quality a core part of your development experience.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Donald Larson, a combination technology and nuclear scientist, about power from thorium. The conversation begins with thorium, a low-level radioactive metal that is three times more abundant than uranium and available all over the world, often found as a byproduct of other mining efforts. Don talks about the advantages of the thorium fuel cycle, how it cannot be used to make weapons-grade radioactives and doesn't require expensive pre-processing to be usable for power. From there the topic of molten salt reactors (MSR) is explored. MSRs can use radioactive materials besides thorium and have a number of safety advantages, not the least of which is being able to continuously refuel, have passive safety systems and an ability to utilize radioactive fuel more efficiently. The future of power is thorium!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Dominick Baier returns to talk to Carl and Richard about the current state of security in .NET 4.5. Dom starts out talking about how WebAPI has impacted the development of web services without much in the way of new security features - so he built some for everyone to use (check the links below). The conversation then digs into the challenges around OAuth 2 and the challenges of building specifications by committee when you're dealing with security. Also listen for a great dig into the real goals of identity technologies that largely haven't come to pass yet - there's still a ways to go!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Anthony van der Hoorn and Nik Molnar about their open source project called Glimpse. Glimpse provides instrumentation for the server and client side components of your web app, displaying it in a tabular format at the bottom of your browser. Anthony and Nik discuss the extensiblity model allowing additional components to be instrumented with Glimpse - and how they've only built five of the thirty packages available today! This is open source at its best, and an awesome way to understand what is happening in your web application.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Justin Beckwith about the recently released WebMatrix 3. Justin talks about the vision of keeping web development simple while still having access to all the latest features of the Web. And yes, sites built with WebMatrix can be worked on with Visual Studio as well! The conversation also digs into building mobile web sites and the various modules you can add into WebMatrix to extend functionality including Git integration, LessCSS and more... lots of links!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to David Pitcher, part of Microsoft's internal IT team, about his experiences instrumenting applications. The conversation digs into the application in question, a Windows Phone app for allowing tech support personnel manage tech support problems on the go. Then David discusses the impact of instrumentation on the application in the form of PreEmptive Analytics, a free version of which is included with Visual Studio 2012. David describes how instrumentation has changed the way the team does error handling in general, prioritized features and bug fixes, and in some cases created whole other features to be designed! Instrumentation is a key part of the DevOps movement and it makes software better!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Amir Rajan about his Oak project on GitHub. Amir discusses his approach to building Single Page Applications (SPA) using an array of open source tools including Rake (from the Ruby stack), nSpec, Canopy, Growl and more. The conversation digs into how C# fits into the equation and how Oak provides the dynamic typing that C# needs to work well in the JavaScript driven world of SPA. Amir also talks about how this development stack works well with different editors since it is file focused for compilation, testing and deployment. There's a little taste of DevOps in this great conversation on modern web development!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard are geeking out again, this time about geothermal energy. The conversation starts out focusing on household geothermal heating, which is really a form of heat pump technology. After that, the boys dig into the hard stuff - geothermal energy. After talking through the various techniques of generating power from the ground, the focus goes to the key to all power systems: water.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Andreas Hakansson and Steve Robbins about NancyFX. NancyFX is an open source project to provide a lightweight framework for building web applications. Andreas and Steve talk about NancyFX focusing on the Super-Duper-Happy-Path of web development. The conversation also digs into the diversity that NancyFX supports, running in IIS, with ASP.NET (or not), WCF, Azure, OWIN, Umbraco, even Nginx on Ubuntu! Andreas and Steve also dig into how NancyFX handles testing, different view engines, authentication and cryptography. If you're considering WebAPI, you should look at NancyFX also!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Brian Summers and Dave Harrison of Columbia Sportswear about their work with Team Foundation Server. Brian and Dave discuss how TFS has allowed them to build a common work planning environment for almost all of the developers at Columbia, including .NET, Java and ABAP (SAP) programmers. The conversation dives into how the different teams are able to collaborate, how they've built a service bus based on Biztalk and the future of even more rapid application development with TFS 2012.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Jeff Fritz about how ASP.NET has evolved over the years. Jeff talks about the continued dominance of Web Forms in relation to MVC and how the different libraries can be used together. In fact, there's ONE ASP.NET, and everything - Web Forms, MVC, Web API, SignalR - all work together. It's a web stack of love!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Mark Heath about audio in Windows. Mark is the leader on the nAudio codeplex project that is a .NET audio and MIDI library. The conversation digs into the fundamentals of digital audio as well as many of the codex and APIs associated with audio - it can be confusing! Mark also talks a bit about the history of audio gear around AdLib, Soundblaster, Voyetra and the like. Mark has some other open source projects involving audio including a Skype voice changer and MP3 decoder in managed code. Check 'em out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Glenn Block about his open source project called ScriptCS. Glenn talks about his inspiration for the project, taking the principles of node.js and applying it to C#, using the RoslynCTP. The conversation digs into the speed at which ScriptCS has taken off - at the time of the recording it had only been around for a week and there were 18 contributors on GitHub! This is the non-subdued version of Glenn Block we all know and love!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Kord Davis about the ethics of Big Data. As developers we tend to focus on the technology, rather than the impact it has - and big data gets into some serious moral hazards. Kord talks about some of the issues that companies have gotten into around Big Data, deriving facts about individuals that they have intended to keep private. Legislation is coming around Big Data - be part of that conversation.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Tomas Petricek about functional programming and F# in particular. The conversation starts out talking about type providers, one of the newest features of F#. Tomas digs into other aspects of F#, comparing it to C#, and talks about the functional programming mind set and how it changes the way you think about coding. Check out all the links below for F# resources and community!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

At the MVP Summit, Carl and Richard talk to Steve Smith about the Software Craftmanship calendar. While filled with good messages like Separating Concerns and YAGNI, it also has hilarious images of why you should follow these principles. The conversation digs into each of the topics with different ideas and approaches to being successful. A fun Thursday show!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

At the MVP Summit, Carl and Richard sit down with Vishwas Lele to talk about the new app development models available in Sharepoint 2013. Vishwas talks through different scenarios and approaches to building these modern apps, utilizing Javascript libraries to access SharePoint as well as web services, Azure and more. Building SharePoint applications has transformed into SharePoint apps, check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Mike Hadlow about EasyNetQ, a simple API for .NET developers to communicate with RabbitMQ. The conversation starts out dealing with the fundamentals of queuing, it's advantages (and disadvantages) and how it impacts your architecture. Mike also digs into Microsoft Message Queue (MSMQ) and how it differs from RabbitMQ. From there Mike digs into the role of EasyNetQ and how it relates to products like MassTransit and nServiceBus. Whether you're new to queuing, just digging into MSMQ or keen to go deep on queuing, this show is for you!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Brian Noyes about Microsoft's Patterns and Practices Kona Guidance for developing Windows Store Line of Business Apps. The conversation digs into the evolution of 'Prism for WinRT' into Kona and how they are substantially different because Windows Stores are substantially different. Brian digs into specifics about Windows Store apps, like Suspend, Terminate and Resume and its impact on guidance. If you're interested in Windows 8 development, check out The Tablet Show, especially the shows in the links below!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Yan Cui about his experience building games with F#. Yan talks about his experiences working with games through Facebook, the client side being predominantly Flash, but the back end systems being initially Java, then converted to C#, and now to F#. As Yan explains, F# is faster, smaller, easier to maintain and to read. The conversation spans over dealing with parallelism, massive scale, cloud implementation and data analytics as well - lots of cool stuff!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations