.NET Rocks!

Carl and Richard talk to Chris Jackson of Microsoft about all the tricks and techniques he uses to make applications compatible from one version of Windows to another, or one version of Internet Explorer to another. Chris digs into the mistakes that developers make, such as checking what version of an operating system or browser a user has. He also points out the cool tools built into Windows to lie to applications to overcome these problems. The conversation also digs into moving your application to Windows 8 and Internet Explorer 10. A must if you're ready to upgrade!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Sahil Malik about the upcoming 2013 edition of SharePoint. Sahil digs into the new features in 2013, including better workflows, content management and performance - document updates send only the deltas to SQL Server! The conversation turns to the new app model in SharePoint 2013, its power and potential for exploitation. Sahil finishes up talking about the cloud, search and mobile features. Sharepoint 2013 is a great step forward!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Microsoft tech fellow Brian Harry about Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2012 and Team Foundation Server. Brian digs into the thinking around the latest version of Microsoft's ALM offering, including the new tools for gathering requirements using storyboards, video, audio and annotations around applications. The conversation also digs into the core 'lather-rinse-repeat' cycle of developers getting work assignments, building and checking in their code. Then onto the amazing new features in testing and providing early look versions of applications for gathering feedback. Finally Brian talks about Team Foundation Services, TFS-in-the-Cloud so to speak, which while not directly tied to Studio 2012, does point to Microsoft's future focus for ALM. A great conversation with a guy at the center of everything ALM at Microsoft!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Microsoft VP Jason Zander about the release of Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5. Jason addresses many of the key points around building Studio 2012 - the deep integration with Windows 8, how the teams worked together to allow the C++/XAML, C#/XAML and HTML5/WinJS development approaches... even why the Studio 2012 UI looks the way it does! The conversation then jumps to developing for ARM, some time talking about cloud development, even a mention of Sharepoint and Office tools. Great insight from a guy who has been part of .NET since the beginning!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard chat with Julie Lerman about Entity Framework 5. EF5 ships with .NET 4.5 - yep, they broke the number synchronization this time around. Julie explains that the big number change is for a good reason - this is a big update to Entity Framework. The conversation digs into the new features, including performance improvements, enumerations and spatial datatype support. Julie also talks about a huge number of little things that are added to make EF a much more useable project. Has the magic version three happened again at Microsoft?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Jay Schmelzer and Chris Finlan about LightSwitch. Jay is one of the leaders of LightSwitch at Microsoft and talks about some of the new features coming in LightSwitch including HTML 5 clients. Chris works for SAP and builds line-of-business applications there, including building in LightSwitch.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Andrew Arnott about DotNetOpenAuth. DotNetOpenAuth is an implementation of OAuth, OpenID and InfoCard technologies is an easy-to-use-package for .NET developers. Andrew talks about the evolution, features and challenges of each of the respective technologies. DotNetOpenAuth is available today and will be bundled with Visual Studio 2012. Get on the identification and authentication bandwagon today!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Darth Vader, a.k.a. Jon McCoy who shows developers how to hack .NET apps in memory and on disk. This turns into a pretty dark discussion about how challenging it is to secure in depth - infiltration and exfiltration vectors, how protection tools (like anti-virus) are great mechanisms for spreading malware. And according to Jon, .NET is a great tool for hiding malicious code. He talks about how he can modify a .NET application while it is running and use it to manipulate and steal information. Not a happy show!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Michael Heydt about the Task Parallel Library Dataflows feature added in .NET 4.5. Moving beyond the basics of the TPL, Michael digs into how the various pattern blocks of TDF help you build real-world parallel executing applications. There's a lot to learn, but TDF makes building parallel applications far more management. Get away from parallel plumbing and into what matters!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

At NDC, Carl and Richard talk to Bruce Lawson about responsive web design. Responsive web design from Bruce's point of view is web pages that are able to adjust to the browser and device that they are being viewed on. From the huge displays on desktop PCs to the tiny screens of smartphones, you can make your web pages work effectively! Bruce talks about some of the tools and libraries available to simplify responsive web design, so check out the links from the show!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

At NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard talk to Lucian Wischik about using Async and Await in .NET 4 and 4.5. Lucian talks through some great scenarios of how you can use Async and Await effectively, as well as the mistakes developers can make. Method blocking and Async don't get along! The conversation also explores the differences between asynchronicity and parallelism, they aren't the same thing at all. Get ready for some awesomely lucid thinking about Async and parallelism!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Bob Martin about where object orientation is going. Bob starts out talking about the fundamentals of where object orientation came from and how it has progressed over the years. The conversation then digs into how hardware has changed - the CPU manufacturers have stopped making faster processors and switched to making more processors. The impact of this change means developers have to write parallel executing code, something that object orientation makes difficult. Bob talks about the resurgence of functional programming as a reaction to the need for parallelism. Has object orientation run its course?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at NDC is Oslo, Norway, Carl and Richard talk to Hadi Hariri about MVC. Hadi talks about his experiences building MVC applications, starting with where WebForms taught some bad habits in web application construction, how some of the new Javascript libraries (like jQuery) made MVC more palatable and the performance advantages of well designed MVC. The conversation also digs into some of the mistakes novice MVC developers make, like putting far too much (and repeating) code in the controller. There's also a discussion about different data storage options as well as Hadi's position on utilizing REST.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at the Norwegian Developers Conference in Oslo, Carl and Richard talk to an actual Norwegian! Sondre Bjellås sits down with the boys to talk about building applications in Facebook. The conversation starts off with discussion about oAuth, specifically authenticating with Facebook. Sondre talks about how Facebook provides information back to you as the developer about the users that log into your web site or application - provided the user gives permission. The conversation continues into the different species of Facebook applications you can build, running inside Facebook, separately and using the social graph. A great starting point for getting into Facebook programming!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at NDC, Carl and Richard talk to Remy Sharp about HTML 5. Remy discusses the state of things, how the diversity of browsers is as much a strength as a problem. He digs into the idea that you need to build your web app for the audience you have - perhaps it needs more support for older browsers, or focus on the latest features for the newest browsers. Check out the great collection of links to different services and sites that Remy mentions in the discussion!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at DevTeach, Carl and Richard hosted a panel discussion on development methodology. Panelists James Kovacs, Mario Cardinal, Charles Max Wood and Rob Daigneau explored the state of development methodology today. The discussion roamed over Waterfall, Agile, XP, Lean, Scrum But, Scrum And... and more.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to J Sawyer about StreamInsight. Part of the SQL Server platform, StreamInsight is a stand-alone install that allows you to do complex event processing (CEP) applications. Complex Event Processing is a pattern of dealing highly parallel, high velocity data streams to do real-time analysis. J talks about how StreamInsight simplifies CEP handling all the parallelism and memory management for you. The conversation also digs into the relationship between Reactive Extensions and StreamInsight - they compliment each other. This is about taking logging to a whole new level!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Paul Betts and Tim Clem of Git about the new GitHub for Windows. GitHub has always been accessible by Windows, but far more Linux friendly. GitHub for Windows addresses this with a standalone client for GitHub. No Visual Studio required!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

At NDC Carl and Richard talk to Venkat Subramaniam about functional programming. Venkat digs into the idea that functional programming is less about language and more about practice, exploring how C# can build functional code just as well as F#. The conversation also drills into the advantages of functional programming for parallelism and the specific types of business applications that can benefit from this style of programming. Venkat's enthusiasm makes it hard to resist writing everything functional!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at the Norwegian Developers Conference in Oslo, Norway, Carl and Richard moderated a panel of luminaries from the agile world about the state of the agile today.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Stephen Toub about how the beta of Studio 11 has impacted parallelism. The conversation starts with a solid discussion about the difference between asynchronous, concurrency and parallelism. From there, Stephen talks about how Studio 11 has matured async and await, largely under the hood, to take advantage of more hardware and better concurrency with no additional code. He mentions the ASync Targeting Pack bringing async and await to Silverlight 5. Finally Stephen talks about some of the new instrumentation in Studio 11 to understand how parallelism is working in your application to assist with debugging and performance. Parallelism is moving forward in Studio 11!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Stephen Bohlen about architecture. The conversation starts with Stephen's work on spring.net and the relationship between Java and .NET. Then Stephen digs into the evolution of architecture, comparing his experience as a 'real' architect designing buildings to building software. He discusses how using the term software engineer is part of what led to the waterfall approach of software development and how agile is fighting back against the term and behavior.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard start out talking to Scott Hunter about what's coming up in ASP.NET - but then he goes beyond! The conversation starts out talking about where the .NET Framework as a whole is going - Scott reveals some of the internal discussions they're having about how to evolve the .NET Framework. Scott also talks about Single Page Applications (SPA), which are part of the beta of ASP.NET 4.5 but will not be making the shipping version. SPA will be back in an update to ASP.NET after the Studio 11 ship date. The conversation then goes into some of the features coming in ASP.NET 4.5, including performance features for JavaScript and CSS, as well as implementing OpenAuth.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard catch up with Dominick Baier to talk about the changes to identity in the 4.5 Framework, Windows 8 and Server 2012. Dominick lets us know that claims-based security is everywhere in 4.5 - built right into the System libraries. No more separate WIF to install! The conversation also digs into the fact that Windows 8 and Server 2012 are rolling claims-based security into Active Directory, making implementation even simpler. Role-based security continues to function, but everything under the hood is a claim.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Joel Semeniuk about various styles of agile development. The conversation starts with addressing a comment from a listener on dealing with decomposition of user stories so that they fit into sprints and how to manage research spikes. Joel talks about splitting time in sprints between feature building, bug fixing and research. Next the topics of lean and Kanban and how they connect together with agile development. A great refresher on agile practices!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard are back in space! With the SpaceX launch to the International Space Station, the boys decide they have to talk about space again. A big chunk of the conversation focuses on how a billionaire boys club has grown up around space - folks like Elon Musk who made their money in technology are now spending it to expand mankind's reach into space, and perhaps make a buck or two along the way. Beyond SpaceX there is Planetary Resources, a gathering of a bunch of internet billionaries to mine asteroids. Is this how mankind will expand into space?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Beth Massi about the latest incarnation of LightSwitch. In 2011 LightSwitch shipped as a separate install, but the upcoming version of LightSwitch is part of every SKU of Studio 11. Beth talks about how LightSwitch has evolved to be an awesome consumer and creator of data, making it simple to create oData interfaces over anything. The conversation also digs into the role of Silverlight, the evolution of the client and how LightSwitch makes apps in the cloud much simpler.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

On Sunday, May 6th, Carl went to Washington, DC for a Fly-In at the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) for the purpose of talking to Senators and Representatives about issues around technology. He also talked to many of the developers and IT people who were attending these meetings, some of whom are regulars on .NET Rocks! This is a very special .NET Rocks! We hope you enjoy it.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Micheal Learned about the new ALM features coming in Visual Studio 11.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to the one-and-only Rob Conery about CoffeeScript. Why would you use a language to generate Javascript? Rob talks about how CoffeeScript is designed to be human readable while JavaScript is much more machine-readable. Indents matter! No curly braces! Dogs and cats living together! It's chaos! But it's a happy chaos. Check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Brian Noyes about the Single Page Application (SPA) feature coming in MVC 4. Brian talks about the similarities of the design patterns for SPA to the more classical Silverlight or WPF application with RIA or WCF services on the back end. While hardly new to the web space (SPAs can be traced back to Outlook Web Access circa 2002), SPAs are going to be part of Studio 11. Brian talks through the strengths and weaknesses of the approach.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard catch up with Ted Neward - it had been too long since he was on! The conversation starts off talking about the maturity of .NET and how unimpressed Ted is with Async and Await. Ted also talks about Javascript and Ruby and the evolution of languages as a whole. Finally, NoSQL makes an appearance with a discussion around the issues of ORM. Has Ted Neward become a grumpy old man?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Glenn Block about node.js on Azure. Glenn digs into how node.js has grown in popularity, and points to the Cloud9 IDE as a development environment in the Cloud as an example of a node.js application - which happens to be able to build node.js applications. And Cloud 9 can deploy node.js to Azure. The conversation digs into the Azure stack and the diversity of technologies (including node.js) that run great in the cloud.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard continue the Geek Out series on alternative energy with wind power. The conversation starts with the admission that as much as has been done with wind power so far, it's just a tiny drop in the bucket of total power consumption - less than 1% of US power comes from wind. Then the boys dig into the different types of wind power generation, the challenges that the power grid has incorporating wind power into the grid, and the kinds of problems that home owners have with wind power also. Wind has potential, but also problems. But long term it's part of the solution.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Jeroen Hulscher about web accessibility. Accessibility challenges come in lots of different forms, and the way we build web pages can make it impossible for some to use your site. Jeroen talks about the tools and techniques to help developers understand what you need to do to make your site easy to use no matter what challenges you might have. As Jeroen says, at some point all of us are going to have some accessibility issues - the web site you make accessible may one day help you!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard have a discussion with a vegetable. Yeah, that's right, we interviewed a leek named Ricky Leeks. Beyond all the endless puns, is a great conversation about memory management in .NET. Ricky also lets us know about a free e-book on .NET Memory Management you can download from the links in the show. Check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to John Bennett and Colin Hicks from MSNBC along with Oren Eini about the role RavenDB has played in building applications. John talks about how MSNBC was using SQL Server essentially as a blob store, storing stories as XML documents inside of the database. The conversation digs into the challenges of running a web site with well over a billion page views a month, the impact of breaking news on traffic, and how RavenDB solves the document storage problem effectively for MSNBC.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Another panel discussion from DevConnections, this one focused on how cloud computing is impacting developers. No holds are barred as the panel digs into virtualization, infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and more.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

A panel discussion at DevConnections in Las Vegas digs into different styles of web application development in 2012 - comparing web forms to MVC to the up-and-coming Single-Page style of web app. Carl handles questions from the audience while Richard causes trouble on the panel.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Bart de Smet about the beta of Reactive Extensions (Rx) Version 2. Currently in beta when the show was recorded, Rx 2.0 works with .NET 4.5, both for desktop and metro, as well as Silverlight 5 and Windows Phone 7.1. Bart talks about how Rx lets you write LINQ expressions over top of events, completely changing the way you think about responding to events. If you're tired of cluttering up your UI code with event handlers or you've got a back end process that needs to deal with millions of incoming events, you owe it to yourself to look at Rx!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Bill Wilder about Hadoop on Azure. Hadoop is a technology for analyzing massive (petabytes) amount of data efficiently. Originally developed by Yahoo, it was given to the Apache Foundation as an open source project. Google, Facebook and others have all contributed to the project. Microsoft has come late to the game, but with a very compelling offering - you can run Hadoop on Azure and use Visual Studio to work with it. There's lots to learn about Hadoop, this show is just the starting point!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

The first of many alternative energy geek outs, Carl and Richard talk about solar power. The boys talk about using solar in the home in the form of thermal as well as photovoltaic, at utility scale with solar thermal, even space-based power. The conversation explores the huge diversity of photovoltaics, including concentrators and quantum dot technologies, the advantages and disadvantages involved. There's also a brief discussion on battery technologies, since solar power doesn't work all that well at night. In the end there aren't easy answers, but things are advancing forward - the amount of solar power being generated these days is increasing!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Bryan Hunter and OJ Reeves about programming in Erlang. Erlang is a language built by the telecommunications industry for maximizing concurrency, distribution and reliability. If you're looking to develop applications that take advantage of parallelism, you owe it to yourself to look at Erlang!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at the Prairie DevCon in Calgary, Carl and Richard moderated a panel discussion on the future of the web with panelists James Kovacs, Andrew Nurse, Bil Simser and James Chambers. The conversation ranged over the quality of web content today and a general push to try and improve it, discussions around monetization, the fragmentation of HTML 5, the role of mobile and some of the cool new technologies coming down the pipe to make the web an even more amazing place to build applications for.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Mike Diehl about Data Quality Services (DQS) in SQL Server 2012. DQS is a new tool for SQL Server, as Mike points out, Microsoft acquired it. It adds into the suite of tools in SQL Server including Integration Services (SSIS), and Master Data Services. Mike talks about how DQS improves the quality of data by cleansing and de-duplication. Not a typical developer tool, but something any developer working with data needs to know about!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

While at the Prairie DevCon in Calgary, Carl and Richard chatted with Steve Rogalsky about User Story Mapping. Steve explains how User Story Mapping helps with visualizing beyond a serial list of features into categories of features in the product. The conversation also explores how Kanban, Scrum and other techniques work with User Story Mapping, as well as the struggles of using Microsoft Project.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Phil Haack about his life after Microsoft. Phil talks about his viewpoint on open source, both software and projects (not the same!). The conversation also digs into how NuGet works in the open source world and Phil's on-going role with it. Finally, Phil talks about his work at GitHub - he's all about making GitHub more appealing to .NET developers.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Tim Huckaby about his work with the latest version of Kinect, Kinect for Windows. Tim talks about his work building interactive kiosk applications for hotels, airports and the like. Gesture is a huge part of the interactive kiosk applications - and Kinect is at the front. The conversation digs into how Kinect for Windows changes the API dramatically, but opens the door to cool new features like facial and finger recognition.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Rob Mensching about the WiX Toolset, a popular Open Source project for all your software installation needs. How good is WiX Toolset? Visual Studio uses it for installation of itself! Rob talks about different installation solutions and how he eventually came to develop the WiX Toolset as an XML-centric 'set of sets' hierarchy for managing installations. As Rob says, setup development is development!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Juan Campa about developing software using XNA. Juan discusses the challenges of building XNA games and shows how his product Gearset makes things simpler. Gearset is available as a Lite edition for free or the Pro edition for $35 USD. The discussion continues into building XNA applications for Windows Phone 7 and what the impact of Windows 8 will be for XNA developers.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations