.NET Rocks!

Michele Bustamante Starts Up a Startup

dotnetrocks@franklins.net (Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell) — Thu, 23 May 2013 00:00:00 EDT

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

Derik Whittaker Migrates from XAML to HTML

dotnetrocks@franklins.net (Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell) — Tue, 21 May 2013 00:00:00 EDT

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

Tim Huckaby Brings Us Up to Date on Gesture

dotnetrocks@franklins.net (Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell) — Thu, 16 May 2013 00:00:00 EDT

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

Marc Mercuri and Mark Simms Build Resilient Cloud Applications

dotnetrocks@franklins.net (Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell) — Tue, 14 May 2013 00:00:00 EDT

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

Geeking Out on Nanotechnology

dotnetrocks@franklins.net (Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell) — Thu, 09 May 2013 00:00:00 EDT

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

Pablo Santos Does DVCS with PlasticSCM

dotnetrocks@franklins.net (Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell) — Tue, 07 May 2013 00:00:00 EDT

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!

Lynn and Llewellyn Help Developers Teach Their Kids to Program

dotnetrocks@franklins.net (Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell) — Thu, 02 May 2013 00:00:00 EDT

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!

Mårten Rånge Takes Advantage of Templates

dotnetrocks@franklins.net (Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell) — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 00:00:00 EDT

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!

State of the Cloud at DevIntersection

dotnetrocks@franklins.net (Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell) — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 00:00:00 EDT

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.

Hendrik Lösch Helps us Test with Visual Studio 2012

dotnetrocks@franklins.net (Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell) — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:00:00 EDT

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.

Geeking Out on Thorium

dotnetrocks@franklins.net (Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell) — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 00:00:00 EDT

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!

Dominick Baier Updates Our Security in .NET 4.5

dotnetrocks@franklins.net (Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell) — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:00:00 EDT

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!

Anthony van der Hoorn and Nik Molnar Take a Glimpse

dotnetrocks@franklins.net (Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell) — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 00:00:00 EDT

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.

Justin Beckwith Releases WebMatrix 3

dotnetrocks@franklins.net (Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell) — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 00:00:00 EDT

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!

David Pitcher Instruments Applications Internally at Microsoft

dotnetrocks@franklins.net (Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell) — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 00:00:00 EDT

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!

Amir Rajan Does Frictionless Development with Oak

dotnetrocks@franklins.net (Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell) — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 00:00:00 EDT

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!

Carl and Richard Geek Out on GeoThermal Power

dotnetrocks@franklins.net (Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell) — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 00:00:00 EDT

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.

Hakansson and Robbins Talk NancyFX

dotnetrocks@franklins.net (Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell) — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 00:00:00 EDT

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!

Columbia Sportswear Connects Development Teams with TFS

dotnetrocks@franklins.net (Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell) — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 00:00:00 EDT

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.

Jeff Fritz Knows One ASP.NET

dotnetrocks@franklins.net (Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell) — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 00:00:00 EDT

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!