.NET Rocks!

Why should form tags and submit events have all the fun? Carl and Richard talk to Carson Gross about htmx, a small Javascript library that extends HTML through attributes so that almost any element, on any event, can trigger a GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, or DELETE. Carson talks about building sophisticated web apps with HTML, rather than tons of JavaScript, and really getting into the original hypertext web metaphors - arguably the way Tim Berners Lee intended. With a simple learning curve, it doesn't take much effort to get started with htmx, just add a few attributes and start exploring what HTML really could be doing for your apps!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What if you could build a mixed reality app once, and run it on all kinds of different VR and AR headsets? Carl and Richard talk to Catherina Diaz about the Mixed Reality Toolkit (MRTK) on GitHub, which offers up a cross-platform deployment of VR/AR applications. Catherine talks about how MRTK abstracts the visualizations and interactions across different devices, including implementations for Hololens, Oculus, Vive, the Windows VR headsets, and even mobile devices! The conversation also dives into how VR and AR evolving, mapping existing user interface metaphors into the 3D realm, and also ideas on what pure VR/AR interfaces could be like!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How do you make APIs in Azure that work across a dozen languages? Carl and Richard talk to Jeffrey Richter about his role at Microsoft working on with a number of different groups that help keep Azure APIs consistent around key features like authentication, logging, and tracing. The conversation digs into managing and minimizing breaking changes in existing APIs, and keeping API implementations working well not just for C#, but also C, C++, Go, Java, JavaScript, Python, iOS, and Android!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

It's 2021 - how has NodeJS evolved? Carl and Richard talk to Rob Richardson about NodeJS and much more. Rob dives into the current evolutionary process of JavaScript with the ECMAScript standards and the impact of transpilers to allow developers to use the latest concepts of JavaScript while still remaining compatible with existing browsers. The conversation dives into the Node philosophy of minimal footprint and surface area and the great libraries that help you get going quickly. And then there's WebAssembly!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Do the SOLID principles still make sense? Carl and Richard talk to Dan North about SOLID, starting with a five-minute PubConf talk that Dan did about how SOLID was wrong. Meant to be humorous (it was PubConf after all), the SOLID fans took exception, and actually led to Dan exploring how SOLID could be reinterpreted... as CUPID. With a lot of back story and laughs, Dan digs into his thinking around making sustainable, quality software with the acronym CUPID.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Are you using open-source libraries in your enterprise applications or products? What are the consequences? Carl and Richard talk to Rocky Lhotka about his work with organizations coming to grips with the use of open-source code in their projects. What happens if the project goes away? What if there is malware added to the code intentionally or accidentally? What about plagiarism of code? Diligence around the origin of code is important, whether it is open-source or not - and should be part of your build process!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What is event sourcing, and why should you care? Carl and Richard talk to Jeremy Miller about the latest version of Marten, the Document store for PostgreSQL - and how there is an increased focus in this version of event sourcing. Jeremy talks about the patterns of development around event sourcing, separating how data is written to a system from reading it. One of the side effects is some latency, but the advantage is scalability and reliability. It takes some time to get used to the patterns around event sourcing, but for the right project, it can make all the difference!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Ransomware is serious - are you protected? Carl and Richard talk to Paula Januszkiewicz as part of the Techorama online event about her work fighting ransomware. Paula talks about how successful the bad guys have been these days - multi-million dollar ransoms are being paid. But sometimes, not all the data gets restored - you can't trust bad guys! There are a lot of approaches to resisting ransomware, and some great tools, but it does take time and effort. But if the alternative is being out of commission for days, costing huge amounts of money... isn't it worth it to get secure?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What's being announced at Build? Carl and Richard talk to Scott Hunter about the latest from the Virtual Build conference. With .NET 5 out last November, and .NET 6 coming next November, this is a time for interim features - including some huge performance improvements! Scott talks about being able to modify code while running to shorten your development cycle, and the latest version of Upgrade Assistant to help move your existing .NET applications to the latest version. Lots of great stuff!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Oracle for Startups? Carl and Richard talk to Jason Williamson about Oracle's programs to support startups using Oracle's Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Jason talks about how startups can get credit on OCI, migrate workloads from other locations, and even interoperate with other clouds - for redundancy, special services, or even to save money. The conversation also dives into what Oracle brings to the table - access to investors in the Silicon Valley, even to existing Oracle customers! If you'd like to take Oracle for Startups for a spin, go to https://www.oracle.com/startup/ and use the promo code NETROCKS for $2,500 USD in free cloud credits!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What's new in Visual Studio 2022? Carl and Richard talk to Simon Calvert, Anthony Cangialosi, and Andy Sterland about the upcoming version of Studio. First on the docket is 64-bit: While Studio has been able to build 64-bit applications for more than a decade, the devenv.exe itself has remained a 32-bit application. The team discusses why it makes sense to move to 64-bit and what that means for development going forward. But there's much more to Studio 2022, including improvement to debugging and diagnostics across platforms, being able to collaborate with developers in real-time using Live Share, and getting smarter about how you navigate and explore existing code. Cool new things are coming!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What happens when your company brings on investors? Carl and Richard talk to Paul Stovell about the recent investment made by Insight Partners into Octopus Deploy. Paul talks about how a great investment group brings important skills and insights to a company - not just money. The conversation also digs into deciding when to take investment, what new opportunities open up, and how the investment can affect the culture of the company - preferably for the better!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How do you do smarter testing? Carl and Richard talk to Simon Cropp about Verify, Simon's open source project to add snapshot testing capabilities to many of your favorite testing stacks. Simon talks about how snapshots can help you look at the output of code, rather than the code itself, to test its validity. And as code changes, the new snapshots reflect those changes - no need to rewrite the tests!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Xamarin Forms 5 is being replaced by .NET Maui - what's a mobile dev to do? Carl and Richard talk to Gerald Versluis about what to expect from .NET Maui and what to expect when migrating your Xamarin Forms apps. There are going to be some changes, and you can expect support for Xamarin Forms to end sometime in 2022. Gerald talks about how the skill sets are similar, so the move isn't too hard - and it's still worthwhile to learn and build in Xamarin Forms today!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How are you doing TDD today? Recorded online at NDC Manchester, Carl and Richard chat with Ian Cooper about his views on TDD, going back to his old talk on Where TDD Went Wrong. Ian talks about how folk struggled to understand TDD, focusing solely on writing tests, rather than understanding how people use their software. This leads to a conversation on how development approaches have evolved with the cloud and modern software - is it time for a new development methodology?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How do you test the security of your applications? Carl and Richard chat with Kim Carter about purpleteam, an open-source library for testing web applications as part of your CI/CD pipeline. Kim talks about OWASP in general and yes, SQL injection (and injection in general) is still the number one security risk - but there are plenty more. Don't be an easy victim, start making security testing part of your build and deployment process!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What is the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the environment? Carl and Richard talk to Amber McKenzie about her examination of resource consumption when creating machine learning models. As Amber explains, using ML models is not particularly resource-intensive, but creating them is - which leads to a discussion about using technologies like transfer learning to avoid making models unnecessarily. The conversation also digs into the broader thinking about resource consumption in computing - do you know how much power your apps use?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How is Visual Studio working for you? Carl and Richard chat with Mads Kristensen about his new role on the Visual Studio feedback team - not that he's ever far from VS extensions! With a dash of home automation thrown in, Mads talks about how you can provide feedback to the Visual Studio team, and how that feedback is part of the continuous development plans for improving Visual Studio!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Where would you like your Mongo? Carl and Richard chat with James Kovacs and Rachelle Palmer about the latest at MongoDB, the open-source document database. While MongoDB's origins are in open web projects, today it is very popular with the enterprise development crowd and so the libraries for Java and C# are excellent. The conversation also turns to MongoDB Atlas, which is the cloud offering that runs on AWS, Azure and GCP - so you can have MongoDB-as-a-Service in the cloud provider of your choice!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What's next for .NET? Carl and Richard chat with Dan Roth about all the good things coming this November for .NET. The conversation starts out with some discussion around Blazor, which is no longer an experimental project, but now a key part of .NET. Dan talks about the role of MAUI bringing together UI elements for smartphones, tablets, PCs, and more. There's a lot to look forward to by the end of 2021!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How can Elasticsearch help you? Carl and Richard talk to Steve Gordon, who recently moved to Elastic to work on the .NET clients. Steve talks about how Elasticsearch can act as a data store as well as work with existing databases and non-relational data to provide awesome search capabilities to your applications. And not just for search bars - there are many cases where having an ability to see across an organization's data can provide huge value. Check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Do you have apps that need to move to .NET 5? Carl and Richard talk to Mark Rendle about his work on Visual Recode, which started out as a migration tool for WCF to gRPC, but has evolved to deal with the migration to .NET 5 challenges. Mark talks about how older WCF apps can often move to gRPC pretty easily, but moving the app has other problems, like out-of-date libraries, build practices, tests, and so on. There's also the possibility of migrating WebAPI and even WebForms apps - lots of possibilities!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Teams is extensible - wanna write some code? Carl and Richard talk to Hilton Giesenow about his work building Teams extensions - and there are a lot of options! The conversation starts out focusing on what Teams can do for you, which is to be the portal into collaboration at work. Hilton talks about the huge array of extensibility options for Teams to put more of the work in the tabs of Teams - from bots to PowerApps, there are a lot of choices!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Can a chatbot make your team development process better? Carl and Richard talk to Phil Haack about his work building Ab.bot, a chatbot designed to work in Slack and Discord to help with building software - call it ChatOps - doing your development workflow with everyone able to see, sending commands through the bot. Phil talks about building add-ins to Ab.bot using C#, Python, and Javascript. ChatOps your way to an efficient team building great software!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What's a Blazor Static Web App, and why should you care? Carl and Richard talk to Jeff Fritz about how the new Azure Static Web App service can be combined with Blazor to do dynamic things on the client, without any client rendering on the server. The conversation ranges over a variety of web development technologies, including Web Forms, Angular, and more. Static doesn't mean boring!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What's new in Entity Framework Core 5? Carl and Richard chat with Julie Lerman about the latest in EF Core, stories from the trenches of data development and more! Julie talks about there not being an EF Core 4 (to avoid confusion), but that there will be an EF Core 6 which should align pretty nicely with EF 6, which is now in maintenance. Yes, there's more to do to make the ORM better, and parity is close between the versions!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How many ways can you run containers on Azure? Carl and Richard talk to Tom Kerkhove about his experiences working with Azure container solutions. The conversation starts out talking about Azure Functions, which under-the-hood are handled in containers - but you don't control those containers at all. You can run Web Apps in Containers or use the Azure Containers Instance. Azure Service Mesh also supports containers, and then there is the Azure Kubernetes Service. Tom helps sort these various options out - they each can help you in different ways!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Time for an Identity Server update! Carl and Richard talk to Dominick Baier and Brock Allen about Identity Server. The conversation starts out focused on the evolution of security over the internet in the first place, including an update to OAuth - version 2.1. Then the conversation turns to IdentityServer itself, and how to sustain and grow development on it. Dom and Brock talk about building open-source software for the long term. The answer for them is Duende Software, a company they have created to support IdentityServer into the future - check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How secure is your software? Carl and Richard talk to Maya Kaczorowski of GitHub about The State of the Octoverse Security Report - one of three annual reports coming from GitHub about how software is being built. Maya talks about how software vulnerabilities are found and fixed, including the amazing statistic that vulnerabilities on average exist in code for four years before being detected! Also, the criticality of the vulnerability doesn't seem to increase the speed to fix - what does make a difference is automation. Automated build and deployment pipelines, including security analysis early in the process - those are the things that make our software safer!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Happy New Year! To ring in the New Year, Carl and Richard talk Geek Out for a couple of hours! Topics include the Pandemic, Renewable Energy, the latest in Space and Electric Cars. Yeah, that's right, all the hits in one show! Richard talks about how our understanding of COVID-19 has evolved, and the impact of genetic technology and new vaccine concepts are advancing our response. On the power side, the growth in wind and solar, the state of fusion power, and a look at modular nuclear reactors. And then SPACE - it's been a good year for SpaceX, flying astronauts to the space station, launching lots of Starlink satellites, and the development of Starship. But also China on the Moon, Japan on an Asteroid, and Perseverance on the way to Mars! Finally, a dig into the state of electric cars - they're coming of age and here to stay. Yeah, it's a long one, but a great listen while you recover from New Years... here's to a great 2021!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

.NET 5 is shipped! What happens now? As part of the .BLD() Tech Talks XXL event in the Netherlands, Carl and Richard streamed interviewing Scott Hunter about .NET 5. The conversation turns to how the scope of .NET 5 focused in on how to help projects move from the standard framework onto .NET 5. Scott also dives into the ever-improving performance of .NET, the latest version of Blazor, and the adoption of WinForms in .NET 5 - and what's coming for .NET 6!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What does it take to make a flight simulator in C#? On a smartphone? Carl and Richard talk to Laura Laban about her experiences building Infinite Flight - starting with the Windows Phone in 2011! The conversation follows the history of using C# in smartphones, from WinPhone 7 through to MonoTouch, MonoGame, and Xamarin! Laura discusses the challenges of tooling getting deprecated, platforms going away, and the vagaries of app stores!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What can you use Blazor for? Carl and Richard talk to Georgia Nelson about GifBot, a Twitch bot Georgia has built using a variety of tools and languages (including Java) and today is C# and Blazor. Georgia talks about evolving the bot from version to version, looking for ways to make it easier for Twitch streamers to use. From WinForms to WPF to Blazor, the UI has taken a few turns, but Blazor works great in the role of user interface!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

With a new version of .NET out, it's time for a new version of Nuke! Carl and Richard talk to Matthias Koch about Nuke V5 - synchronizing the version number of Nuke with the version of .NET. Matthias talks about the philosophy of Nuke, focusing on creating builds using C# with package references and class inheritance. This leads to a conversation around build maintainability - making sure every developer on the team can contribute to the build, and that certain build classes can be used in multiple build projects!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Ever pivoted halfway through a software project? It happens in filmmaking too! Carl and Richard talk to Shawn Wildermuth about his experience making Hello World the Film. Shawn talks about starting out wanting to make a love story about being a programmer - and how anyone could be one. Until he discovered that it wasn't true: That getting into software development does require a certain amount of privilege. The conversation then dives into how the film explores the problems in diversity in software and the things we can do to get better. Go see it!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Can you make open source projects in the Microsoft ecosystem and live to tell the tale? Carl and Richard talk to Aaron Stannard about his view of the Microsoft open-source ecosystem, including the challenges of building and maintaining Akka.NET. Aaron talks about Microsoft being good producers of open source but not good consumers of open source - they still have that not-invented-here viewpoint on things. The conversation turns to either making an open-source project that is popular but ultimately consumed by Microsoft, or profitable because it lives in the long tail that Microsoft won't explore. But could there be a better way?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Good user interface design makes your company money! Carl and Richard talk to Billy Hollis about his latest work around understanding the return on investment that exists with user interface design. Billy talks about a spreadsheet he's been using in presentations to actually look at the cost associated with bad UI designs, that require more keystrokes, more searching, more time and more frustration. Great UX design leads to users that work faster, consume less resources for each task and a happier work environment. Good UX is worth it!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Cake is shipping! Carl and Richard talk to Mattias Karlsson about Cake, aka C# Make. First on the show in 2016, Cake has been through a lot - all the twists and turns of .NET Core, becoming a cross-platform product - it's not easy to be a good build system! But things are stable now and version 1 is released. Mattias talks about how Cake fits into your build pipeline, working with many other components as needed. The conversation also turns to extensibility and the awesome community that has grown around it - have a slice!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Everyone wants AI - but where's the business value? Carl and Richard talk to Joel Hulen and Kyle Bunting about building machine learning models and what they can do for business. The conversation starts out with the typical AI-destroys-the-world debate, recognizing that these tools are just that, tools. Using them responsibly is important, but so is focusing on business value. What can this technology help with? Usually, the first goal is not the goal delivered!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

A new .NET Foundation board is elected - what does it mean for you? Carl and Richard talk to Layla Porter about her new role on the .NET Foundation board and the goals of the foundation to grow its membership, bring more open source projects into the fold, support the maintainers of those projects and to broaden the reach of .NET everywhere. Layla talks about finding new ways to connect with folks in the .NET community and the challenge of evolving a young foundation.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

The pandemic is sending a lot of work to the cloud - are you ready to move? Carl and Richard talk to Mike Richter about his work helping companies move .NET applications into the cloud. Mike starts out with the hard truth, that moving your virtual machines into the cloud can get expensive. Better to take advantage of the Azure platform, starting with AppService. There's a lot you can do with existing software, and even more if you're willing to recompile. Check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Can a development environment be online? Carl and Richard talk to Anthony van der Hoorn about GitHub Codespaces - the consolidation of a number of online development solutions from Microsoft including Visual Studio Online. Anthony talks about unifying the online dev environment for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code - recognizing that the two tools are very different! And there is the option to explore code directly in the browser as well. You have more choices than ever for writing code!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What happens when an open-source experiment becomes software people care about? Carl and Richard talk to Jamie Rees about his experiences creating Ombi - an open-source project that helps people managing Plex servers to handle requests from friends and family for more content. Jamie talks about creating Ombi as an experiment with NancyFX that soon evolved into something lots of folks needed and wanted. The conversation dives into the challenges of managing a popular open-source project, both from a technical, personal, and professional perspective.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Build better distributed apps with Dapr! Carl and Richard talk to Haishi Bai about his work on Dapr, the open-source framework for building microservices with an event-driven, portable runtime. Haishi talks about the challenges of building modern distributed apps, with elements running in the cloud, on PCs, mobile, and IoT devices. There's also a variety of languages, platforms, and patterns as well. Dapr sits in the middle, abstracting away specific services so that you can keep your app running where ever it needs to be. Check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Machine Learning has been around for years, what does it look like today? Carl and Richard chat with Zoiner Tejada about how he approaches machine learning today, starting with a focus on data. The bulk of the work for using machine learning is focused on sources, quality and bias in data. Zoiner talks about using data lakes to organize data simply, and be able to filter it for processing quickly. Often, it makes sense to duplicate data for processing efficiency! The conversation then dives into the role of algorithms, training and testing, and what it means to be a data scientist.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What do you do when COVID-19 cancels your internship? Write an app! Carl and Richard talk to Theodora Tataru about her experience creating an application using Xamarin to help with tracker her college grades. Theodora talks about learning the tools, the libraries, and the various techniques to making a Xamarin app - including asking for help! College Diary is just starting to arrive in the app stores - and Theodora is starting her career as a developer!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What are the Microsoft 365 APIs and what can you do with them? Carl and Richard chat with Glenn Block about his new role at Microsoft, working with Graph. Glenn talks about how Graph actually serves are a part of a larger "intelligent substrate" that covers all of Microsoft 365 and more. In the end, the substrate is a set of APIs that are used by Microsoft product teams and third-party developers alike. More to come!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

F# turns five - not five years old (it's more than ten years old!) - but version five! Carl and Richard talk to Phillip Carter from the F# team about what's coming in F# 5. Phillip talks about the past few years of F# being focused on getting fully onboard with .NET Core - and now is the time to go further. The conversation dives into adding capabilities to interactive mode of F# including working easily in Jupyter Notebooks. More ability to manipulate data means more power for all of us, check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Sure you can build .NET apps on Azure - but what about Amazon AWS? Carl and Richard talk to Robb Schiefer about his work building .NET Apps on AWS. Robb digs into the various reasons you might use AWS, while admitting that the two clouds are pretty comparable. But like Azure, AWS has good integration into Visual Studio, supports lots of versions of .NET and offers other cloud-based services that you need. AWS is an excellent option for .NET apps!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

It's Show 1700! For a bit of fun, Carl and Richard invited the six most frequent guests on .NET Rocks over the past eighteen years - Michele Bustamante, Rocky Lhotka, Billy Hollis, Kathleen Dollard, Tim Huckaby, and Phil Haack. The conversation digs into memorable moments on the show for each of the guests, plus lots of commentary about making shows, the state of the industry, and favorite funny (if maybe a bit off-color) story. From the first show in August of 2002 to now... thanks for being with us for eighteen years. We are grateful.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations