.NET Rocks!

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

Carl and Richard host a now-rare telephone-based conference call (remember when these were cool?) with Glenn Block, Henrik Nielsen and Darrel Miller about Web API. But first the conversation has to deal with the reality of having Henrik Nielsen on the call - a former graduate student of Tim Berners Lee and a guy who worked on the very beginnings of the World Wide Web! But the main topic is Web API and the reasons, strengths and approaches to using Web API.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard revisit nuclear power with Rod Adams, who has spent most of his career working in nuclear power. Rod talks about his experiences running nuclear reactors in US Navy submarines and then digs into nuclear power generations world wide. The discussion digs into the differences between light water and heavy water reactors, the role of breeder reactors and the reality that nuclear waste isn't waste at all - its carefully stored and contained for eventual reuse in more modern reactor designs. Rod also shares his thoughts on up-and-coming nuclear technologies including thorium, pebble bed and travelling wave.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Demis Bellot about ServiceStack, a set of tools for building web services and MVC web sites with incredible performance. Demis talks about his thinking behind ServiceStack, its support for a diverse set of protocols and how it compares to WCF and WebAPI. The conversation also dives into Google's Protocol Buffers, an extremely lean protocol even faster than JSON for web services as well as Dart, Google's optionally typed, higher-level language that transpiles to Javascript. Awesome conversation with a hugely smart guy!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Martin Woodward about Microsoft's announcement of integrating Git into Visual Studio and TFS. Martin talks about Microsoft's thinking about why and how to add Git support to Visual Studio and TFS. Then the conversation digs into the different configuration options - the Git tools work even in Visual Studio Express! Martin compares the differences of using Git directly from Studio as well as via TFS. It's a cool time to be a Studio programmer!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Jamie Wright about what .NET Developers can learn about Rails.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at CodeMash, Carl and Richard collected some great stories. First up is Evan Hauck, who digs into CUDAfy, a library on Codeplex that allows you to run C# code (any IL code actually) on your GPU. The second story is about Jessie Shternshus and her company The Improv Effect. Jessie talks about how she uses improv to help teams work together more effectively. Another awesome CodeMash!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Andrew Brust about Big Data. Andrew starts off connecting together the definitions of business intelligence, data analytics, OLAP, data warehousing and big data. They're all related, even though they've come at the problem of understanding data from different directions. The conversation digs deeply into Hadoop, the Linux-centric MapReduce technology that has come to define the idea of Big Data, as well as Microsoft's implementation once called Project Isotope and now known as HDInsight. How big is Big Data? That's up to you!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at CodeMash in Sandusky Ohio, Carl and Richard moderated a panel discussion on the death of agile. The panel quickly agrees that agile isn't dead at all - it's become so mainstream that it is discussed less and less. A bigger discussion is what exactly agile is - a topic addressed by audience member Jon Kern, who was part of the group that developed the agile manifesto.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Richard Astbury about migrating applications to Azure. The conversation starts out dealing with the basic idea of why you would migrate to the cloud - typically right before you have to buy more hardware to scale up or replace existing equipment. Richard then walks through the various challenges of migration, including migrating data, determining the particular style of cloud you want to use, maximizing advantages while minimizing cost. He talks about the fact that Java applications can be easier to migrate into Azure worker roles, since they tend to live in a sandbox and not touch the restricted elements of Windows inside the Azure world. Richard also digs into bootstrapping, providing links to tools to facilitate getting a worker role instance up and running with all the bits you need. Finally, the conversation digs into taking advantage of Azure - optimizing designs to reduce cost as well as utilizing the resources of Azure including Azure Fabric, Service Bus, diagnostics, etc.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Rob Reynolds about Chocolatey - a global PowerShell execution engine. But first, the conversation digs into the Chuck Norris Framework! Yes, that's right, a framework based on violent karate moves, Rob talks about Roundhouse, a migration and source management tool for SQL, as well as DropKick, a deployment framework and UpperCut, a template build manager. There's more to Chuck Norris than just these bits, check it out in the show notes! Finally the conversation comes around the Chocolatey, aka apt-get for Windows. Rob talks about how ChocolateySupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Thiago Silva and Jeff Hewitt about building applications in Azure. The good? Scaling, deployment and costs. More good - great tools and information from Patterns and Practices. The bad? Getting coherent monitoring together. The conversation digs deep into Azure level monitoring, web level monitoring and application level monitoring. How do you relate the data together? What measurements matter? How do you get to the point where you have a dashboard that shows you the health of your application? Finally, there is the ugly - and it's called licensing. Thiago and Jeff talk about how some license models (like per-machine licensing) just don't work in Azure. Good stuff for getting serious about Azure!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

The first geek out of 2013, Carl and Richard talk about nuclear power. Much feared and maligned, Richard walks through the principles of atomic theory, how neutrons are the key to the whole process and why Uranium-235 is so much more important than Uranium-238. The conversation also dives into some alternative nuclear power concepts including Traveling Wave Reactors, Pebble Bed Reactors and Thorium Salt Reactors. But they steer clear of fusion - that's another show!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

At the inaugural DevIntersection conference in Las Vegas, Carl and Richard hosted a panel to discuss what developers should care about in 2013. The panel of Scott Allen, Kate Gregory, Michele Leroux Bustamante and Woody Pewitt covered a huge spectrum of topics, including web development, client development on multiple platforms, cloud technologies and mobile development. Did we cover everything? Write comments below!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

At the San Francisco stop of the .NET Rocks! Visual Studio 2012 Road Trip, Carl and Richard sat down with Ward Bell in the GitHub offices to talk about his experiences creating breeze.js. Breeze.js focuses on the plumbing needed to make Single Page Applications (SPA) on the web work well. Ward talks about key pieces of Breeze including caching, validation, automated object mapping and more. He admits his inspiration is Silverlight and how it handled this plumbing so well. Now it's available in Javascript as well!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at the Los Angeles stop of the .NET Rocks! Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Carl and Richard sat down with Phil Haack to talk about Git and GitHub. The conversation starts out with a primer on Git itself and its origins as a distributed source control for Linux. Then Phil discusses how GitHub created a more social environment for Git with pull requests and dialog around code. Phil also talks about how GitHub itself operates as a non-hierarchical business and what that means to his work day, his career and his prospects for a raise. A little NuGet sneaks in there too!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at the Irvine stop of the .NET Rocks! Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Carl and Richard chatted with Brian Randell about the DevOps movement and it's application in the Microsoft world. DevOps focuses on the concept of bringing developers and operations together to iterate software more quickly, so that your applications are continuously delivered with continuous feedback and continuous quality. That's a lot of continuity!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at the Houston stop of the .NET Rocks! Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Carl and Richard sat down with Venkat Subramaniam to talk about development in the modern era.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at the Orlando stop of the .NET Rocks! Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Carl and Richard stopped at the Better Software conference to have some conversations about fast development cycles. The first conversation is with Jesse Dowdle, who has a web app shipping new versions several times a day, with great visibility into the production environment to get feedback rapidly to developers. The second conversation is with Mathew Bissett, working for the UK Government, who participated in bringing an application that shipped a version every nine months down to 22 weeks, then to 6 weeks, and now daily and looking to go even faster! How fast can development cycles go, and what does it take to speed them up?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at the Bentonville stop of the .NET Rocks! Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Carl and Richard sat down with Matt Nunn to talk about his vision around Modern Apps and the Modern App Lifecycle.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While in Orlando for the .NET Rocks! Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Carl and Richard stopped in at the Better Software conference to talk to Ken Pugh about Acceptance Test Driven Design. Ken describes the core concept of involving the 'triad' of business stakeholder, developer and tester when writing user stories and capturing tests at the same time - tests that are described to the satisifaction of all three parties.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

At the Jacksonville stop of the .NET Rocks! Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Carl and Richard sat down with former co-host of .NET Rocks! Mark Dunn to talk about his experiences with MVC. The conversation starts out talking about the old days - when Carl and Mark both taught .NET. Mark has continued to train, but these days focuses on MVC. He compares the modern web application approach of MVC with the old days, talks about strengths and weakenesses and how you can get the most out of your web application.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While on the .NET Rocks! Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip stop in Orlando Florida, Carl and Richard stopped into the Better Software conference and interviewed Scott Ambler about his work helping companies implement agile development practices. The conversation starts out talking about the scalability of agile practices, how waterfall is hard to get rid of, and common mistakes that organizations make implementing agile. Scott also digs into the DevOps movement, talking about how all stakeholders in an application, including operations and tech support, need to be part of the process.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at the Orlando stop of the .NET Rocks! Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Carl and Richard talk to Steve Evans about his work instrumenting applications in production. Steve talks about how to understand the log files coming out of Internet Information Server, and how you can analyze the log files to improve the performance of your site.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at the Better Software show in Orlando during the Road Trip, Carl and Richard talked to Dan North about how development teams can manage uncertainty. Dan talks about how software planning can change to being more discovery based, knowing what is unknown. That process gets people talking and learning from each other and ultimately creates excellent plans.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at the Tampa stop of the .NET Rocks! Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Carl and Richard talked to John Papa about building Single Page Applications (SPAs).Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

At the Tallahassee Code Camp stop of the .NET Rocks! Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Carl and Richard chatted with Udi Dahan about development practices, architecture and methodology.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations