.NET Rocks!

Server-Side Blazor is poised to ship at the end of September 2019 - are you ready? Carl and Richard talk to Shaun Walker, formerly of DotNetNuke fame, about server-side Blazor - starting with, how does server-side Blazor even make sense? Blazor has been a client-side technology using web assembly since Steve Sanderson showed off the prototype in 2017. But as the product matured, a server-side model from the Razor world emerged as a hugely powerful way to build forms-over-data web applications - and the component vendors have jumped on-board! Shaun talks about his new open-source project called Oqtane which promises to make building Blazor apps even easier!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How do you integrate accessibility into your applications? Carl and Richard chat with Elle Waters about her on-going work helping educate developers and organizations to include accessibility features as part of their user experience design. Elle digs into how accessibility should become part of your workflow - it takes time to learn, but once understood, it doesn't cost much in terms of routine work. The same applies to client-side and mobile tech. In the end, accessibility *is* user experience - you gotta do it!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What is Rust and why would you use it with C#? While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard chatted with Ashley Mannix about he and the team at Datalust build Seq, a structured log server, using Rust on the back end and C# on the front. Rust looks a lot like C++, but with a great type safety system and a smart compiler that can help catch memory leaks before they happen. Rust is a modern language with modern capabilities and well worth the look!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Artificial Intelligence is happening - are we using it correctly? While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard talked to Amber McKenzie about the challenges of building AI applications that are ethical and unbiased. Doc Am discusses how the AI term is over-used, and how often there are simpler technologies that can solve business problems. But where AI is applied, it comes with some ethical needs about how it is used, and an understanding that there is always bias in the data that trains AI . Tread carefully!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Can software summarize documents? While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard talked to Masa Nekic about automated text summarization. Masa walks through a few cases where text summarization is valuable, such as search optimization. There are a variety of strategies to automate text summarization, and there are plenty of 'it depends' cases, but it's a cool tech to explore!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

WCF isn't coming to .NET Core 3 - what to do? While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard chatted with Mark Rendle about his new project called Recode. Mark talks about how Microsoft came to the decision that they could not migrate WCF to the open-source, cross-platform .NET Core and what that means going forward. Mark's solution is a tool called Recode that can convert WCF code to gRPC - check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How does UX work in your organization? While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard talked to Debbie Levitt about how UX can help make software better and the development process less difficult. Debbie talks about UX being part of the initial requirements gathering process, talking to users and looking through how business processes actually work. UX can help you build the right thing!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What can HashiCorp's Packer do for you? Carl and Richard talk to Jamie Phillips about how Packer helps to make golden images of hypervisor machines - that would be Hyper-V, VMWare or any of the container solutions so that you can ship them out to whoever needs them. The images can be used as part of your pipeline to push cloud products into a store, or for developers to work from production-configured images, and so on. Packer is a powerful open source solution that can be part of your CI/CD pipeline!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What's your authentication solution? Carl and Richard talk to Vittorio Bertocci, now an architect at Auth0, about building pure identity solutions that work for all platforms and languages. Vittorio digs into why you want an authentication solution that stands independent of any given cloud vendor, and what capabilities you need to get authentication right!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How do you use messaging? Carl and Richard talk to Jimmy Bogard about his work developing messaging architecture for applications. Jimmy talks about the mistakes he's made along the way, starting with not using formal messaging systems - yes, you can use a text file or a database table as a queue, but should you? And when you do embrace messaging, there is an overhead of code and effort to work with queues properly. Is it worth it? The answer is always, it depends!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

It's 2019, how smart is your home? Time for a Geek Out! Carl and Richard chat with Mads Kristensen about how he's adding automation to his home - and in a way that is tolerable for his significant other and young children. Mads talks about his kids being small enough that they can't reach the light switch - so automation to turn lights on is hugely empowering for them! But how do you make your home automation not so annoying? That's a bit trickier, and a great conversation!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Why should you build your website with Gatsby? Carl and Richard chat with Jason Lengstorf about the Javascript library built on top of ReactJS to automate the generation of static web pages from a variety of data sources with a focus on blogs and CMS sites. The conversation dives into this idea of higher layer abstractions making building multi-format web pages easier and highly performant by generating to static content. This lets you push your content closer to the customer on a CDN - the web development world continues to evolve.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Ready to move your applications into containers? Carl and Richard chat with Rob Richardson about his work migrating existing applications running in virtual machines over to containers using Kubernetes as the orchestration engine and Istio as the traffic manager. Why add Istio to the mix? It makes it easier to have a mixture of containers, services running in VMs and more. The conversation digs into the expanding tribe of services that work in containers together to give you great options for analytics, security and more.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Have you heard of Rockstar? Carl and Richard talk to Dylan Beattie about a joke that may have gone too far - or perhaps not far enough? Dylan talks about the origins of Rockstar, the idea that recruiters like to use the term rockstar to identify a certain class of developer that is far from realistic. But what if rockstar was a language? Then anyone who programmed in it would be a rockstar developer... right? What started as a gag specification is now a language - the code looks like 80s rock lyrics, but it compiles!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How do you secure microservices? Carl and Richard chat with Sam Newman about the complexity that comes with containerization and microservices, and how that impacts your security plans. Often security has been based on a monolithic single-point-of-access model. But when applications are broken down into microservices, there are a whole bunch of new points of contact to be secured. The good news is, there is plenty of technology out there to help, including password vaults, mutual TLS and more - you just need to learn about it!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Build is over - what did we learn? Carl and Richard talk to Scott Hunter about the various announcements at Build connection with .NET - including the delivery date of .NET Core 3 and what happens beyond! The conversation digs into switching to a routine delivery model for .NET, so that you can anticipate when you'll need to implement the new version of the framework. Scott also talks about new features coming in C# 8, including the fact that C# 8 is only for .NET Core 3 and above... things are changing, and it seems for the better!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What's the latest for Identity Server? While at NDC in Porto, Carl and Richard chatted with Dominick Baier and Brock Allen about their latest work on Identity Server. The conversation goes through the various current generations of attacks on web pages, how Single Page Apps behave differently, and more! Great conversation about the current state of web-based security and how you can do more.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Back in February, the fascinating David Frangioni made a trek up to Pwop Studios to geek out with Carl and Richard about music technology. Oh, the stories! What a gas.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What does it take to be a modern developer? While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard talked with Dan North about how being a developer has evolved. The conversation starts out discussing the transformation of Microsoft itself and how it has helped throw the definition of developer out the window - so what happens now? Dan digs into looking at developers as more than an array of technical skills, but also how they work in teams and in the organization. Great thinking!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Templates can make your life better! While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard chatted with Layla Porter about the power of Visual Studio Templates. Layla talks about trying to avoid repeating herself in code, and trying to document or remember best practices for the various projects she works on. The answer is templates - so that you can File-New a project with all that thinking already built in. And not just for new projects - you can template Visual Studio configurations as well!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Impostor Syndrome is real and pervasive in the development industry - what can you do about it? While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talk to Rob Conery about the second edition of The Impostor's Handbook. Rob talks about how most software developers don't actually have an education in computing science, but that doesn't mean you can't learn - he talks about key bits of education you can add to your repertoire to help resist feeling like an impostor - you can do it!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What can Azure Functions do for you? While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard talked to Simona Cotin about Azure Functions. You can code Azure Functions in C#, Java, Python and JavaScript - but Simona prefers JavaScript. Use the language you're most comfortable with. Programming Azure Functions in JavaScript means using the NodeJS frameworks, building small chunks of code that do exactly what you want them to do without a lot of plumbing!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How do you measure the success of a feature in your application? While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard talked to Christine Yen about her experiences building instrumentation systems for applications both to diagnose problems and to understand how to make software better. The conversation digs into the scientific method of hypothesizing a potential feature, exploring different ways to build it and deciding on measurements of success - know when something works!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Build your web site in F#! While in London at the NDC, Carl and Richard talked to Anthony Brown about the SAFE Stack - a complete set of tooling for building back-end and front-end parts of your website in F#! Anthony talks about the various pieces needed to work together, how debugging works, and his preferred tooling, including VSCode as the editor and some great plug-ins that make F# coding easy!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Are you adding security to your application at the end of a development cycle? While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard talk to Victoria Almazova about how she encourages developers to include security planning as early as possible - it costs less and is more effective! The new tooling available today for security makes it easier to do the right thing, you just have to include it as part of the process.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Have you heard of CSS Grid? While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard talk to Amy Kapernick about one of the new features in CSS introduced in 2017 on all major browsers. CSS Grid is not tables - and tables aren't inherently evil, they can just be used badly. With Grid, you can define flexible layouts and formatting for a variety of elements. And there's nothing you're doing that can't be tweaked effectively by designers when the time comes - check 'em out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Have you got a home assistant device? While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard talk to Sarah Withee about her experience with Mycroft, the open source home assistant device. As an open source project you can run Mycroft on your PC, or even a Raspberry Pi. The conversation turns to the concerns about constantly listening speakers and how having an open source project that lets you see what its listening to make that whole experience less concerning. And there's custom hardware too!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What's up with Blazor? While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard chatted with Steve Sanderson and Daniel Roth about the latest efforts around running C# in the browser with Web Assembly. Since its first demo back in 2017 by Steve, Blazor has grown up a lot - part of ASP.NET Core but still nominally an experimental project, parts of Blazor are now appearing in the preview editions of .NET Core 3 as Razor Components. 2019 looks to be a big year for Blazor!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How do developers learn? While at NDC, Carl and Richard talk to Clare Sudbery about her experiences helping developers learn. The conversation digs into various learning models, the challenges of coming up with standards for education in software and what we can do to get better. Clare talks about how organizations need to create a culture that allow their people to not know things so that there is room to learn - once that culture is in place, things get much simpler!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How do you migrate your .NET application to current standards? Carl and Richard talk to Rocky Lhotka about his approach to migrating existing .NET applications to .NET Standard. Rocky explains that many folks ask him about moving to .NET Core, but getting to .NET Standard is an easier move (but likely not easy) and offers more options in the long run, including .NET Core. The process starts with getting your .NET application upgraded to at least .NET 4.6.1, but it goes on from there - many organizations have a huge portfolio of older .NET applications - Rocky offers a plan to modernize!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Should developers care about search engine optimization (SEO)? Chris Love says yes! Carl and Richard talk with Chris about how SEO impacts consumer-facing websites and what developers can do to include SEO in their development process. The good news is, many of the things we do routinely in web development help with SEO, including mobile-first development, using HTTPS and focusing on performance. But there's more to be done, and Chris digs into important bits - check out the tools in the show notes for more ideas on how to make your website more SEO friendly!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

User Experience Design is on the rise! Carl and Richard talk to Billy Hollis about his latest thoughts and efforts around getting developers to design UX as part of their development process. The conversation dives into the change of thinking it takes to really understand how users work with your software and the interfaces change as you think about what someone needs to see and when. Billy also brings up the advantage of great UX - happier users, more users and more profitability. Software is also cheaper to maintain and educate on as well! Whether its mobile, web or desktop, you need great UX!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How do you get into test automation? Carl and Richard talk to Arnon Axelrod about his new book on Test Automation and the concept of the Test Automation Maturity Model - the steps you take along the way to getting testing to be a key part of making quality software. Arnon digs into building the right kinds of tests, what tools help you move in that direction, and where skills need to be grown to make better tests and automate them in a way that they are part of every build, whether you ship the software at that time or not. Test automation is not just for SaaS apps - everyone can benefit!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

It's 2019, do you know where your containers are? Carl and Richard talk to Jessica Deen about her work with containers and how Kubernetes has come to dominate the container space, especially in the Microsoft arena. Kubernetes is a container orchestration engine that runs on-premises and all the major cloud vendors - but it is so much more than that, with an ecosystem growing up around it providing an array of tools that can handle your CI/CD pipeline and a huge array of elements for deploying applications. Check out the extensive set of links in the show notes!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How do you make .NET Core go even faster? System.Memory! While at the Update Conference in Prague, Carl and Richard sat down with .NET Core team member Adam Sitnik to talk about his work on Span of T and System.Memory. Adam talks about .NET Core 2.1 and C# 7.2 giving access to unmanaged heap and stack memory. Used right, you can get huge performance boosts and decreased memory footprints for certain classes of work - at the risk of a stack overflow! Great conversation about when and where you should take advantage of these new features!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What does it mean to be cloud native? Carl and Richard talk to Vishwas Lele of Applied Information Sciences about his on-going evolution to be a cloud-native, and what means in 2019. Vishwas talks about the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, an organization independent of the major cloud vendors that helps with identifying and managing tools that make cloud native applications work! Vishwas digs into a variety of tools, starting with Kubernetes and with many more tools coming! The cloud is only getting more amazing!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How do you debug? Carl and Richard talk to Omer Raviv about OzCode Debugging, including its ability to do 'time travel' or 'reverse' debugging - rather than stepping through code forward line-by-line, you can go any direction you want with any rules that you need. Omer talks about the years of work in OzCode and the array of features including understanding what your LINQ queries are doing in detail, writing conditional breakpoints and more.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Ready to add blockchain to your repertoire? Carl and Richard talk to Marc Mercuri about the Azure Blockchain Development Kit. Blockchain is full of hype, especially in relationship to cryptocurrency, but there are so many other possibilities. The idea of a distributed ledger of transactions has huge potential for reducing costs of transactions and allowing the sharing of information about those transactions up and down the chain. But how to make it work? That's where Microsoft comes in with some great tooling - have a listen!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

The .NET Foundation is changing! Carl and Richard talk to Jon Galloway and Beth Massi about the changes in the .NET Foundation and what it means to the average .NET developer. The first announcement is that the .NET Foundation is moving to an open membership model - if you have made a contribution to .NET in any way, be it code, documentation or other, you can apply for membership and expect to be accepted. Next up, the expansion of the .NET Foundation board to seven directors and open elections for those board seats - any .NET Foundation member can be a director! Nominations are happening in January 2019, so get on board today!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What can you do with the Bot Framework? How about make old-school 8-bit adventure games? While at UpdateConf in Prague, Carl and Richard chatted with Edwin van Wijk and Sander Molenkamp about the GameATron4000 open source project that ties the Bot Framework together with Phaser.io graphics to make simple, funny adventure games. The conversation explores how the Bot Framework simplifies the whole command engine of the game, being able to deal with the variations in language to still get to the intent commands of the game. Add other Cognitive Services to take it even further! The project is open source and looking for contributors - bring your humor and learn what the Bot Framework can do!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Merry Christmas! For your Christmas listening pleasure, Carl and Richard chat with former .NET Rocks co-host Rory Blyth. Rory chats a bit about what has happened to him lately, and how he's gotten more engaged with the community after a long break. Lots of conversation about the past and a little bit about some of the new things that he's playing with, Rory is always a fun and freewheeling conversation. NOTE - this show is PG-13 and there are a few bleeps, but nothing too awful. It's just like Christmas with that one uncle that everyone has!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What's new in Node development? While at DevReach in Bulgaria, Richard moderated a panel of David Neal, Brandon Satrom and Tara Manicsic about their experiences with Node. There's a huge array of application types that make sense for Node, starting with IoT solutions, but also exploring the more traditional web applications. Node works great in the serverless role as well, it's low-ceremony approach works great with Azure Functions and AWS Lambdas. The continuing improvements to Javascript help also, and since you control the runtime environment, you get to use those language improvements in production!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What can you do wrong with Azure security-wise? Lots! While at Update Conference in Prague, Carl and Richard talked to Karl Ots about all the things that can go wrong with security in Azure. Karl starts at the top with one of the main reasons you should consider Azure - physical security. Those data centers are safe! From there, the conversation dives into choices you make when setting up Azure that can cause trouble - what email addresses to use, what privileges each account requires, and so on. It makes perfect sense to give minimum privileges to users and applications, but do you do it? Have a listen!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

How do you build a mobile app in 2018? Or should you? Richard moderates a panel from DevReach in Bulgaria with Sam Basu, Jen Looper and Jo Franchetti about their experiences with different tools building mobile apps. The conversation ranges over Xamarin, Cordova, NativeScript and good ol' fashion mobile web. Is the Progressive Web App good enough now to skip going to the app store? Or do you want your PWA to appear in the app store? How awful are app stores? Great thoughts around testing, accessibility and more!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What can edge computing do for you? While at the Update Conference in Prague, Carl and Richard chatted with Jared Rhodes about his work building Internet of Things solutions with a variety of hardware and software. Jared talks about building reliable IoT solutions that are simple of customers to interact with - or work without any interaction at all. There are a lot of different choices in the IoT space right now, and no one right way - it is worth experimenting!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Windows represents the single largest Git source control library in the world at 300GB - but what does it take to work on it? Carl and Richard talk to Ed Thomson and Jill Campbell about how Azure DevOps (formerly known as VSTS) functions under the load of 33,000 people working on the Windows project with 11 million work items. There are many things in Azure DevOps that can cope with that scale, but some aspects don't make sense to add directly, like moving millions of work items. For that, the team has built extensions available in the Visual Studio marketplace - check them out, maybe they can help you!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

What's your dependency injection solution? Carl and Richard talk to Steven van Deursen about his work building SimpleInjector and why there seem to be so many different dependency solution options out there. Steven talks about how he came to build SimpleInjector and what makes different DI solutions valuable - including when the .NET Core team tried to build an abstraction over dependency injection that resulted in an anti-pattern! Dependency injection helps you code in a maintainable way, but the tooling you use affects everything. It takes time to make the right fit for you application.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Is there a morality to software development? Carl and Richard talk to Microsoft Principal Researcher Bill Buxton about his thoughts on what software can do and what our responsibility as software creators is. Bill talks about Melvin Kranzberg's Laws of Technology, starting with the idea that technology is neither good nor evil, nor is it neutral. Ultimately software is a tool, and people decide how that tool is going to be used. We shape tools, but tools ultimately shape us as well. It's always wise to check in on what your shape is. Lots of great thinking!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

You need more actors in your life! Carl and Richard talk to Aaron Stannard about the latest around Akka.NET, an open source actor model framework that has been evolving and growing for a number of years. Aaron talks about how his company Petabridge is providing professional services around Akka.NET including some custom tooling like a CLI tool called CMD. The conversation also dives into utilizing actors outside of just the server - actors make sense in mobile devices and IoT to name two! It's a different way to think, but actors can help you work concurrently and asynchronously - and who doesn't want to do that?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk about the latest science in superconductivitySupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations