.NET Rocks!: Recent Episodes
Carl Franklin
Can tooling make implementing AI features in your applications easier? Steve Sanderson says yes! Carl and Richard talk to Steve about the Microsoft.Extensions.AI preview toolset for OpenAI and oLlama. Steve discusses ideas around useful places for AI technologies to appear in your application, not just chat. The conversation digs into more ambient ideas, like providing suggested cut-and-paste items when entering forms and even dynamic changes to UI based on how a user interacts with the application. Want to get started? Get the extensions on NuGet!
How are Azure Static Websites evolving? Carl and Richard talk to Stacy Cashmore about her work with Azure Static Websites, including an update to her book, which is coming soon! Stacy talks about adapting to the latest version of .NET, taking advantage of some of the new features in Blazor, and new Azure Static Website capabilities, including the new Data API Builder. The conversation also explores some of the gotchas, like challenges with SEO and dealing with authentication and authorization strategies.
How do you build cloud-native applications in Azure? Carl and Richard talk to Scott Hunter about how Microsoft tooling is evolving to develop cloud-native applications - starting with the vital idea that all cloud-native apps are multiple applications! Scott talks about how most development tools focus on individual applications and how dealing with multiple applications, including cloud apps, can be challenging. Cloud apps need telemetry, resiliency, and service discovery - which brings the conversation to tooling like .NET Aspire, designed to lead developers down the path to cloud-native applications with all these features and more. And this is only V1 - Scott discusses many more features that could make it easier and easier to make great cloud-native applications!
GitHub Copilot has been out for a few years now - how is it going? Carl and Richard talk to Michelle Duke about what's been happening with GitHub Copilot. Michelle discusses the new features in GitHub Copilot, including Chat, which gives you more of a ChatGPT-like interface while still being focused strictly on code, including your code! Then, the conversation digs into the broader ideas around large language models and the perception of artificial intelligence affecting the entire world. A lot is going on!
Are you ready for .NET Conf? Carl and Richard talk to Jeff Fritz about the latest version of .NET coming out - and the online event that celebrates it! Jeff talks about his top ten favorite sessions in the show, the ones you definitely don't want to miss. And if you have folks that are new to .NET, you want to check out the pre-event day that can help folks get started! See you online Nov 13-15!
How can OpenAI help you program faster? Carl and Richard talk to Mark Miller about his experiments with OpenAI and CodeRush. Mark talks about the power of building agents to analyze code to write comments and tests - in parallel so that multiple agents can run simultaneously. Then the conversation turns to the potential of a voice interface as an effective way to work with Visual Studio - you were talking anyway!
The power of .NET means PHP can run in the browser efficiently! Carl and Richard talk to Jakub Míšek about PeachPie using WASM. Jakub talks about how easy it was to deploy PeachPie, the .NET implementation of PHP, into WebAssembly, much like Blazor works. Then the tricky bit starts - PHP is a server-side technology, so many of the constructs are based on trips to a server. That doesn't mean there aren't solutions, but they need some thinking through. The question is, do we want to run WordPress in a browser?
What's next for C#? Carl and Richard talk to Mads Torgersen about what the team is working on for C# 12. Mads talks about how the language design team is organized to take ideas for C# and explore them, considering all aspects before implementation. The conversation digs into a few of the new features coming and some of the considerations, like breaking changes, that might be necessary to make a feature as good as possible. With C# nearly 25 years old, there is lots of legacy to deal with, but the future looks bright!
Why should .NET developers build Power Apps? Carl and Richard talk to April Dunnam about the latest in Microsoft's Power Platform and why .NET developers should get involved. April talks about the fusion development methodology, where domain experts use the Power Platform tools alongside .NET developers using Visual Studio to build line-of-business apps. There are many opportunities in the cycle of building Power Apps where your skills as a .NET developer can make the process go faster, more reliable, and with more features! Also, check out April's upcoming workshops on building Power Apps online at https://aka.ms/PowerDNR and at the DevIntersection conference in Las Vegas in December!
GitHub Copilot is here! Are we all going to lose our jobs? While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard talked to Michelle Mannering about how Copilot helps you write code - emphasis on help! Michelle explains that Copilot is able to take your explanations of what code needs to be written to find examples of that code for you to take advantage of. It's still up to you to break down the problem well enough, but you spend less time fussing with syntax. This is especially powerful when calling into unfamiliar APIs or coding in languages you have less experience with. The conversation dives into how the developer ecosystem continues to evolve with these new tools, so that we can do more faster!
What's wrong with microservices? Carl and Richard talk to Shawn Wildermuth about his rant about microservices. Shawn talks about the intent of microservices in the first place, to try and break down the giant service balls of goo that get built over time. But is it necessary? The conversation explores the optimization problem, where having services together is efficient right up until it isn't - when you have a service that changes more often than others or needs to scale more. Only then does it make sense to carve it out. Lots of fun conversation!
How does Power Platform fit into your application lifecycle management? Carl and Richard talk to Kartik Kanakasabesan about his work on Power Platform to treat it like every other development approach. Kartik talks about how PowerApps create straightforward forms-over-data solutions that work well on phones, tablets, and PCs. The conversation digs into how developers in the C# and Visual Studio space can work with Power Platform developers, including building back-end services, creating front-end components, and working with existing source code and deployment pipelines. The result is what Kartik calls fusion development, where everyone works together to build solutions effectively!
How do you modernize a .NET application? While at NDC Porto, Carl and Richard talked to Mark Rendle about his work on Visual Recode, a tool for migrating WCF apps to gRPC, and dug into the broader story of what a modern .NET application looks like. Mark talks about why you would bother to modernize at all - because the standard framework isn't going anywhere. But if you want to take advantage of the latest features of .NET and the performance available to you with .NET 6 and the cloud, modernization is the way to go!
How are extensions in Visual Studio changing? Carl and Richard talk to the extension master himself, Mads Kristensen. With over 150 extensions in the Marketplace, Mads has a lot of experience building tooling that can streamline your Studio experience. The conversation digs into why an extension makes sense rather than being built into Studio. Although in the case of the Markdown Editor, that does happen! Mads also as the VSIX Community space if you want to get into building your extensions, with libraries and tooling to guide you to the pit of success with your extension project. Check it out!
How do you debug asynchronous code? Carl and Richard talk to Isadora Rodopoulos about her debugging asynchronous code series of videos and the tools available today to help with debugging. Different people approach debugging in different ways - there's no one way to solve any given problem. But Isadora digs into the critical challenges of asynchronous code, not being sure of the order of execution, managing when messages get lost and detecting the transient problems that come from async code!
How do you build cross-platform UI? Carl and Richard talk to Dan Walmsley about Avalonia, a lightweight, cross-platform UI using XAML and C#. Dan talks about supporting an array of Linux GUIs, Windows, macOS, WebAssembly, Raspberry PI, iOS, and Android! Avalonia comes from the Linux and Mono world and now runs with .NET 6 - you should check it out!
Visual Studio turns 25! Carl and Richard talk to Julia Liuson, who has been working on Visual Studio since the beginning about her experiences building and leading the product. Julia talks about how Visual Studio got started, its evolution into .NET, with some great stories along the way. There's also Studio for the Mac and Visual Studio Code to talk about as well - all with different origin stories!
How do you test .NET applications written for different browsers, different servers, and different platforms? Carl and Richard talk to Kendra Havens about the recent release of .NET 6, Visual Studio 2022, and all the great tools to make testing and debugging cross-platform .NET applications easier. Kendra digs into tools like Test Explorer, the Remote Debugger, and Hot Reload - all tooling to make your testing life easier, no matter where your code is running!
How much more productive can Visual Studio get? Carl and Richard talk to Mika Dumont about some of the new features coming in Visual Studio 2022 to help shorten your development inner loop. Mika talks about some of the new code analyzer capabilities working within the Roslyn service that you can customize - and create your own! The conversation explores how these tools can add code automatically to save you typing, like adding using constructs on paste. It's a challenge to get the balance right between helping and interrupting, but the team works hard on it - and listens to your feedback to make it better. Take the VS2022 Preview out for a spin and help make it even better!
How do you speed up your development loop? Carl and Richard talk to Dmitry Lyalin about Hot Reload in Visual Studio 2022. Dmitry talks about how Hot Reload goes beyond Edit and Continue, where you can make changes in code without a breakpoint, and Hot Reload will insert it into the running code, wherever possible. It doesn't work in every scenario, but it does work for many, and across platforms and tools! Get more productive by being able to change code and see the results immediately!
What's new in Visual Studio 2022? Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell 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!
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!
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!
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!
How do you do static testing in your applications? Carl and Richard talk to Patrick Smacchia of nDepend - one of the original testing products for .NET, stretching back to the very beginning! Patrick talks about how nDepend has grown over the years to provide a variety of tools for helping you to visualize the quality of your code, and to detect code smells - that is, aspects of code that may indicate a problem. The conversation dives into building out rules in projects to do static evaluation as code is created so you can catch problems early, to determine when its time to refactor older code!
What if Visual Studio could help you write better code? Carl and Richard talk to Danny Simmons and Gustavo Soares about Program Synthesis Using Examples - aka, PROSE. PROSE uses machine learning to understand how you are changing your code and finds ways to help with those changes. Originally a part of Microsoft Research, PROSE has moved to the developer division at Microsoft and is part of the Intellicode extensions in Visual Studio. There are also examples and code on GitHub - check it out!
What if your development environment was in the cloud? Carl and Richard talk to Nik Molnar about Visual Studio Online - literally a version of Visual Studio running on Azure. Nik talks about the time it takes to set up each development environment for each development project you have, and what you could do to make that less painful. The conversation also dives into the differences between personal configuration options and project options - you can have a dark theme if you want! And even more interestingly - you can do remote development on your own dev machine at work while traveling through VS Online. Lots of cool possibilities!
How do you write XAML? Carl and Richard chat with Dmitry Lyalin about Microsoft's on-going efforts to make coding in XAML faster, easier and more reliable. Dmitry starts out talking about how there are different dialects of XAML, including WPF, UWP, Xamarin Forms and more - although there are concerted efforts to keep them more in sync. And that helps with tooling also! Dmitry dives into Blend, XAML Designer and the power of coding XAML directly with IntelliCode, hot-reload and more!
How can you be more productive with Visual Studio? Carl and Richard talk to Kendra Havens about all the built-in productivity gadgets in Studio - plus the ones you can build yourself! Kendra talks about putting those red and green squiggles, lightbulbs and screwdrivers to work communicating with developers about standards of development within your organization using Roslyn Analyzers, as well as taking advantage of the huge number of productivity features including regex completion, type recognition and many more!
What does client-side development look like today? Carl and Richard talk to Tim Corey about WinForms, WPF and other ways to build applications that live on a client. The conversation digs into the fear that client-side developers have around WinForms going away - which does not appear to be happening with a new version appearing in .NET Core 3. But Tim does dive into how you can spend time organizing your application in a way that tolerates changes to UI... but what to change to?
Blazor is coming on strong - should you migrate to it? Carl and Richard talk to Jeff Fritz about what's happening with Blazor and how server-side Blazor is going to ship with .NET Core 3. But what about moving existing web forms apps to Blazor? The developer ecosystem seems to be building controls for Blazor, so perhaps there are options there, but first, make sure your web forms apps are using the latest .NET bits - then you'll have a better grasp of what's possible and where to go!
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!
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!
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!
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!
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.
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!
How do you read other people's code? While at NDC Sydney, Carl and Richard talked to Patricia Aas about the fine art of studying code you haven't written - and even more challenging, understanding it! Code doesn't read like a novel, there really is no beginning or end, it's always an exploration. The conversation also turns to being respectful of existing code, recognizing that it is as good as it could be at the time and that there are always ways to make it better. And when you're writing code, the challenge is to write it so that it can be read and understood by others!
Time to rub a little DevOps on it! Carl and Richard talk to Donovan Brown about the state of DevOps at Microsoft - including some important changes! The conversation starts out talking about the latest tooling making it easier than ever to get a great automated pipeline of continuous delivery. But that's not enough, there's a cultural shift that has to happen also. Donovan talks about how IT folks can resist the changes that come with rapid deployment, and Richard argues back about how IT roles struggle - the solution is to create common goals around value to the customer. Meantime, there's big news at Microsoft - Visual Studio Team Services is becoming Azure DevOps, and opening the door to a more diverse way to rub more DevOps on everything you do!
How do you protect the source code you ship in your applications? Carl and Richard talk to Gabriel Torok, who has led PreEmptive Software for years and has provided code obsfuscation for .NET since the very beginning - for free! Today it's not enough to conceal your code, as Gabe says, it's about tamper-proofing. Not just to keep your code from being stolen, but to stop hackers from stealing data and exploiting your applications. With GDPR and other regulations, your responsibilities to protect your applications are growing - so check it out!
How should developers get started with Azure? Carl and Richard talk to Adam Cogan about his nine knights of Azure - in order, a set of services in Azure that developers should start with. Right off the bat, Adam suggests staying clear of the fancy cloud techs like containers and serverless. Start simple with Azure Web Apps, then start working on continuous integration and deployment. There are a ton of moving parts in Azure, and Adam has a great plan for getting your application and your skills gradually up to speed so that you can take them all on!
How are applications being built for Hololens? While on the Modern Web Tour in Munich, Richard chatted with Jimmy Engstrom about his work building software for Hololens. The conversation starts out with the frustration over the lack of new hardware on the Hololens front - but with hope for something new soon! Jimmy runs down a variety of different programming methods for Hololens, the most popular of which is Unity - and not just for writing games!
Back at the beginning of WPF, before Silverlight, there was MVVM Light. While on the Modern Web Tour in Zurich, Richard sat down with Laurent Bugnion to talk about his work creating the open source toolkit that helped developers build cross-platform applications using the Model View View-Model pattern. Laurent's story crosses much of the story of XAML itself, from WPF to Silverlight to Windows Phone and Xamarin Forms!
Want to extend Visual Studio? Carl and Richard talk to Mads Kristensen about what its like to build Visual Studio extensions - and how he's now responsible for helping others build extensions too! Mads is the person behind Web Essentials, which used to be a big stand-alone download. Today it's a bunch of Visual Studio extensions. Today Mads is a program manager for Visual Studio extensions, and wants to help YOU be successful at building them too!
Microsoft acquires GitHub! What does this mean? Carl and Richard talk to Phil Haack about what's going to change and what isn't - starting with, at least for the foreseeable future, Phil is not a Microsoft employee! GitHub is going to be a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft, operated independently. But having Microsoft resources available does open some interesting doors - Phil talks about the vast amount of resources that Microsoft has to move quickly on cool features and projects around the open source world!
Azure is good - but tooling makes it great! While at Build in Seattle, Carl and Richard talked to Paul Yuknewicz and Andrew Hall about the latest tools available in Visual Studio for developers wanting to get the most out of Azure. The conversation starts out with a response to a listener about debugging services in Azure - the challenge of following an execution path through your software and the various service offerings of Azure that your application might depend on to understand where problems lie. Then a dive into the new bits - new container support, tooling around Kubernetes and more!
More news from Build - the release of Visual Studio for the Mac 7.5! Carl and Richard talk to Mikayla Hutchinson about the latest features coming for the former Xamarin product. The biggest news is support for Razor, JavaScript and TypeScript intellisense, which sounds simple, but involves a ton of changes and makes VS for Mac more than just that mobile development tool. There's plenty of improvements in the mobile dev space too, and the first steps to integrating with VSTS!
MFractor grows up! Carl and Richard talk to Matthew Robbins about the progress he's made over the past 18 months (since his last show) on MFractor - now an extension for Visual Studio for the Mac to make building mobile applications with Xamarin easier. Matt talks about improving the mobile development cycle - the time it takes from writing code on your PC to it running on your smartphone, and recognizing that it's not just about compile and transfer times. It's also image sizing and copying, catching errors early and more - things that can be done while writing code!
How do you do desktop deployment? Carl and Richard talk to Paul Betts about the open source project called Squirrel, which is all about making desktop deployment less painful. As Paul says, like ClickOnce, only doesn't suck! This leads to a discussion about the various installation tools out there and what they focus on. Paul talks about what makes Squirrel different - providing the tooling to make it easier for a developer to provide unobtrusive updating of applications - as in, not when they start up!
How productive are you with Visual Studio? Carl and Richard chat with Kasey Uhlenhuth about her work making Visual Studio even more productive for developers. The conversation focuses on the huge array of features that Visual Studio has, to support all sorts of different styles of programming. Kasey talks about balancing the needs of developers - some want lots of support and hints from Visual Studio, and some want it to just get out of the way while they program. There are a ton of options, you just have to discover them. Kasey points out a productivity guide that she has helped create to help you take advantage of the power of Visual Studio - check out the link in the show notes!
What is coming up for .NET Core? Carl and Richard talk to Scott Hunter, who leads all of .NET at Microsoft, about the road ahead for .NET Core. But first, a quick look back at where .NET has come from, including a discussion around performance and the impact of the Meltdown and Spectre CPU security flaws impacting performance across the board. Then into a huge raft of features coming up in the next year in .NET Core, including compilation and performance enhancements, as well as some old favorites like lazy loading in EF Core and SignalR!
Mobile development continues to evolve in the Xamarin world! Carl and Richard talk to James Montemagno about the latest features coming out of the Xamarin team to make developing cross-platform native applications faster and easier. James digs into the new Xamarin Live tools that show your Xamarin app on your device with edit-and-continue capabilities. As you modify your Xamarin Forms code, the changes are immediately reflected in the device. This shortens the code-deploy-debug cycle so you can get more done in less time. The conversation also turns to XAML Standard and the challenges around bringing UWP, WPF and Xamarin Forms teams together to a common specification. James wraps up with a discussion on .NET embedding, letting you put your favorite .NET code into libraries that can be consumed by Objective-C, Swift and Java codebases!
Last show before Christmas - time for some rants! Carl and Richard talk to Billy Hollis about his frustrations around UX design. And Billy starts out talking about the complete lack of UX design he finds in many applications. The conversation digs into the differences between visual design and interactive design, where the interactive part is harder, but ultimately more valuable. Billy also discusses the costs around poor design and ultimately, poor quality software. Cloud and internet have made it easy to update software, but pushing bad software on your customers is never a good idea. Can you see the impact? Lots of great thinking as usual from Billy!
The new version of DotVMM is imminent! Carl and Richard talk to Tomáš Herceg about his on-going effort to build a great framework for creating web applications and migration paths away from web forms and other web pages bound to the .NET Framework over to .NET Core. Tomáš discusses the new features coming in the latest version and his solutions to various problems around building web pages where the JavaScript is taken care of. And everything is open source - you have the code, modify it as you will! There are commercial versions available as well if you want to support this great set of tools!
Developing in Salesforce? What's that about? Carl and Richard talk to Jay Janarthanan about the kinds of software being built today against the Force infrastructure that runs the Salesforce CRM SaaS product - and so much more! Jay talks about why you would want to do extensions to Salesforce, and how in the past few years enterprises have been building entire applications with the Force tools and infrastructure. The language of Force is Apex, and Jay is building an open source project called ApexSharp to let C# programmers use their favorite tools to build Salesforce applications. Check it out!
What does it take to implement a DevOps practice at Microsoft? While at Connect in New York, Carl and Richard talked to Lori Lamkin about the efforts of the VSTS team to deliver more value to customers faster. Lori talks about changing the tempo of deployment for TFS from 24 months to three weeks and the re-organization of the teams so that developers are responsible for features from conception to operations. The role of operations also evolves to one that focuses on monitoring, rather than deployment - it's a lot of change, but worth it!
Show 1500! What better to celebrate another aught-aught milestone of .NET Rocks than a look back. Richard has been working on writing a book on the History of .NET (maybe Christmas 2018?) but to celebrate a milestone show, he dives into the topic with Carl. .NET has had a lot of twists and turns through the years and .NET Rocks has been there the whole time - throughout the conversation, there are opportunities to point to specific shows that represent part of that history. Here's to another 1500 show and 15 years of .NET!
Ready for some AI tooling? While at Connect in New York, Carl and Richard sat down with Paige Bailey and Seth Juarez to talk about the newly announced Visual Studio Tools for AI. The conversation starts out talking about what we really mean by Artificial Intelligence, focusing on machine learning and deep learning. There are a variety of tools out there to make building the models of AI easier, and the Visual Studio Tools for AI bring all those tools together into one working environment. Tons of cool links below, check them out!
Where has Visual Studio come from and where is it going? While at Connect in New York, Carl and Richard sat down with Connect owner/organizer Mitra Azizirad to talk about her show and long career at Microsoft. Mitra comes from a technical world but moved into developer marketing - and she's a huge fan of developers! Lots of interesting historical references about Visual Studio and more!
Visual Studio Team Services continues to evolve! While at Connect in New York, Carl and Richard chatted with Brian Harry about the latest set of features coming out of the VSTS team. Brian talks about how Microsoft has been eating its own dog food and using VSTS everywhere, even with the development of Windows. Discussions also dig into the challenges of moving so fast with so many developers, managing testing at speed and more!
Ready to experiment with containers? Carl and Richard talk to Kendra Havens about the on-going integration of container technology into Windows, Visual Studio and .NET. Kendra talks about moving existing applications into Docker containers, and how even when the underlying operating system is large (say, Windows), you only need to download it once to use it across any number of container instances. There's great tooling for Docker support in Visual Studio and VS Code, so you can use Docker the way you want to. And Microsoft uses containers extensively internally as well, so the tooling just keeps getting better!
How does Microsoft make Visual Studio Team Services? With Visual Studio Team Services! While at Ignite in Orlando, Carl and Richard sat down with Dan Hellem and Rogan Ferguson to talk about their work in the VSTS team building and deploying features on a three-week cycle. The discussion dives into the agile practices that the different teams use and how they come together to get new versions out on a regular basis as part of the Software-as-a-Service offering of VSTS. Great conversation about keeping developers productive!
Git for everyone! While at Ignite in Orlando, Carl and Richard talked to Ed Thomson and Dmitry Lyalin about the latest updates to Visual Studio Team Services that includes deep integration with Git - not just GitHub, but Git the repository technology. The conversation digs into the commitment Microsoft has to contributing to open source projects including Git itself - including moving Windows into the world's largest Git repository, a whole 300GB of source code! Git has penetrated deeply into Microsoft, is it the right choice for your projects?
Why should open source developers consider the Microsoft stack? While at ProgNet in London, Carl and Richard sat down with Dylan Beattie to talk about his experiences working with developers that have written lots of code, but not in the Microsoft world. The conversation starts out focused more on the ongoing evolution of the Microsoft Stack with the recent release of Core 2 and the evolving ability to do mobile development. Dylan talks about .NET no longer being about Windows, but rather available to whatever platform you care about: OS/X, Linux, iOS, Android... what matters to you?
MS Build is cooler than you think! While at NDC Oslo, Carl and Richard sat down with Daniel Plaisted to talk about the latest version of MS Build. But first, a quick conversation about the situation around the reversion back from project files using JSON rather than the traditional XML-driven MS Build files. The good news is that more of what made the JSON project files great is showing up in the MS Build files! The conversation also digs into building complex pipelines for MS Build and more importantly - how to debug them! Structured logging to the rescue!
How are containers coming along in the Windows world? Carl and Richard talk to Steve Lasker about his work making containers easy to use from within Visual Studio. Most work on containers has been around Linux, but when Windows Server 2016 shipped, Windows containers became real. Should you be using containers in your all-Windows world? Steve talks about the advantages and challenges, it's not all simple, but it is very powerful and worth a look!
More analysis from Build - during Build! While at Build in Seattle, Carl and Richard talked to Holger Mueller about his impressions of the show, shortly after the first keynote. Holger runs the gamut, talking about .NET Core, Visual Studio 2017, Azure, DevOps, Containers and more. A lot happened at Build, here's a view from the early point in the event itself!
What can Azure functions do for you? Carl and Richard talk to Yochay Kiriaty about his work creating Azure Functions as part of the App Service Platform for Azure. Azure Functions get you focused on just building code, there is no virtual machine, no operating system and a minimal hosting environment. But that doesn't mean that they're simple. Yochay talks about the need to architect effectively for Azure Functions - you can get yourself in a corner where Azure Functions can't save you. But if you keep your Azure Functions lean and stateless, this is the most dynamic, fastest scaling cloud service you can imagine!
Azure with no servers? Carl and Richard talk to Jeff Hollan about Azure's Serverless offerings. The idea is to stop worrying about virtual machines and operating systems and focus on the stuff you really need. Jeff talks about Logic Apps, which provide workflow and connectors between your code and a ton of other services, some coming from Azure and many coming from other service providers. Credentials for the services are kept in the Azure Key Vault rather than your code (or in the heads of your users), and there's some great instrumentation to understand what's going on. Is Serverless the future of the Cloud?
C# 7 and Visual Studio 2017 are shipped - now what? Carl and Richard talk to Kathleen Dollard about her experiences working with folks that are trying to dig into the latest version of Microsoft development tools. Kathleen talks about the various approaches she's taken to teaching both C# and effective use of Visual Studio, there are so many little things to know, it's hard to take it all in. The conversation dives deep into understanding async and await so that you actually get real benefit from them - it's not a simple thing to do right!
The whirlwind of DevOps is back! Carl and Richard talk to Donovan Brown about his on-going mission to get everyone into a DevOps practice - in fact, he talks about getting to a place where continuous delivery and monitoring are just the way you make software. Donovan talks about a session he has been giving where he creates four different delivery pipelines in an hour, with different programming languages, platforms, testing and deployment tools. And if he can make four in an hour, there's really no reason anyone can't build one pipeline in an afternoon. The conversation ranges over a spectrum of DevOps topics, including testing and monitoring - it's easier than ever to rub some DevOps on it!
Scripting with C++? Of course! Carl and Richard talk to Jason Turner about ChaiScript, his open source project that simplifies adding C++ as a scripting language to any application, but especially other C++ applications. The conversation turns to how C++ has evolved and some amazing tools available today to help you understand what C++ is doing, right down to the CPU level! Check out the links in the show notes for some of the cool tools that Jason and his associates have built!
Visual Studio 2017 ships! Carl and Richard talk to Tim Sneath about his role in this version of Studio. Tim talks about speeding installation of Visual Studio by modularizing the various elements so you don't install things you don't need - but it's always easier to add more in! The conversation also digs into the extensibility model that makes it easier to build new features into Studio, and a great marketplace to share and sell them. Studio continues to evolve, the 2017 edition is awesome!
Visual Studio is twenty years old! Carl and Richard chat with Julia Liuson, who has been involved with Visual Studio since its very earliest days in the 90s. Julia talks about how Microsoft decided to build a unified IDE for all its various development products including Visual Basic, C++, FoxPro and their new web development tool, Visual InterDev. But following quickly on from the 1997 edition was .NET and the complete change that it created for Visual Studio. Lots of great stories from someone that has been involved since the beginning - here's to another twenty years of Visual Studio!
Mixed reality is coming! While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard sat down with Jessica Engstrom to talk about her work with virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality. And yes, they are all different, with the conversation starting off with definitions of each. Jessica talks about some of the projects she's done using the mapping capabilities of the HoloLens to re-create 3D spaces. There's a new diversity of hardware in the space coming as well, with more vendors making augmented reality solutions and Microsoft opening up the Holographic OS for other vendors to make hardware with. The VR/AR/MR space continues to evolve!
What's the right way to make a Xamarin app? While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard sat down with Gill Cleeren to talk about using the MVVM pattern as part of an overall mobile development stack. As Gill describes, MVVM brings consistency to the plumbing of the mobile app so that you can focus on the important (hard) stuff, getting the UI right, and trying to get as much common code as possible. In the end, the views end up being more device/OS specific, while the model and view-model can be shared. The tooling is complicated, but it is possible to get going fast with mobile development!
The Chuck Norris of C# is back! While at NDC London, Carl and Richard sit down with the indomitable (and always humble) Jon Skeet to talk about what he's been working on in the past year. First up is nodatime, an open source library for doing date, time and timezones correctly. Why is time so hard? Because politics and science! Jon talks about crazy time zone challenges, solutions for leap seconds and more. Next up is Google Cloud Platform which has gone all C# friendly! Jon talks about building C# friendly APIs for various Google services to make it easy as possible for your .NET application to work in Google's cloud. Check it out!
With the release of Visual Studio 2017 Release Candidate, the truth is out - no more web essentials! Carl and Richard talk to Mads Kristensen about his decision to stop making Web Essentials, but not to stop making all the Web Essentials goodness! Rather than make one big bundle of tools for web developers, Mads has broken down the package into individual add-ins that you can download separately and install. It all comes down to manageability - not everyone wants everything, so now you can pick and choose. Key to managing the add-ins is the Web Extension Pack, that will help you install the components you need. Web Essentials lives on!
How many different decisions do you need to make before starting web development? Carl and Richard talk to Cory House about picking out a JavaScript development environment. Cory talks about his own experiences getting into the groove with the React stack, but that is certainly not the only way to build a web application. When you think more broadly about building web apps, the number of decisions can be daunting, and hence the increase in starter kits and other tools like the JavaScript Services toolkit for making it easier to get all your tools together. Lots of great links in the show notes for different tools you can use!
.NET used to be all about Windows - but it's not anymore! How do you market something so diverse? Carl and Richard talk to Beth Massi about her new role as the Marketing Manager for .NET. Today .NET runs on all sorts of platforms, and you can develop .NET code on multiple platforms as well. Beth talks about reaching out to the new audiences that may have never considered .NET before because of it's former focus on Windows. Now .NET runs everywhere, on all sorts of devices, and into even more operating systems. Where would you like your code to run?
Functional programming for mobile development? Carl and Richard talk to Scott Nimrod about his experiences building mobile apps with Xamarin using F# as the primary programming language. Does functional make sense for mobile development? Sure, but F# can handle OOP problems too. Scott calls it "functional first". The conversation digs into the power of staying within Visual Studio - tools that you know and understand! But there are also features in Visual Studio that don't necessarily work well (or the same) with F#, so it does take time to learn your way around your new language. But worth it!
Installation is in chaos! Carl and Richard talk to Rob Mensching about the crazy amount of change that has come to distributing and installing software. The conversation references a comment from a listener about the diversity of server installation solutions including MSDeploy. But what about the desktop? As Rob says, things have been pretty stable for a long time with the MSI - and Rob led the WiX Toolset project to make MSIs. But with AppStores, MSIs are looking long in the tooth. What does the new desktop installation look like?
How can you be successful with a product without good documentation? You can't! Carl and Richard talk to Ward Bell, who is serving as editor in chief for Angular docs. After complaining about the quality problems with the Angular documentation, Ward found himself in charge of the problem - and has taken it on in a big way. The docs themselves are developed in GitHub, so anyone can contribute. The challenge is making sure they're good - everything is driven by coding samples that are as simple as they need to be and follow strict standards. The result is docs you can trust - first and foremost they are correct, and hopefully effective at getting you productive with Angular!
Has voice control come of age? Carl and Richard talk to Austin Dimmer about his efforts to build a great voice control system - including for Visual Studio! The conversation digs into the complexity of recognizing a diversity of voices and being fast enough to get the words right. Then the hard stuff: How to keep words in context so that you can derive enough meaning from them to be useful. This isn't just about transcription, it's about control. Austin also talks about all the different voice-related products that Microsoft makes, it can be a confusing landscape. Is it time for voice to be part of your application?
Compiled PHP on .NET! Carl and Richard talk to Benjamin Fistein and Jakub Míšek about Peachpie, and open source project to implement PHP on the .NET Core. While the project isn't complete yet (you can help - it's open source!), the potential power is huge - taking existing PHP code and being able to compile it down to the CLR. Ben and Jakub talk about the challenge of mapping functionality across the languages, and the huge performance boost that compiled CLR code gets. How fast could WordPress be? The goal is to make PeachPie run on the .NET Core as well, so it can work on any platform you want. Check it out!
How does Microsoft maintain mature applications? Carl and Richard talk to Dustin Metzgar about his work at Microsoft maintaining applications and libraries like Windows Workflow, older versions of ASP.NET and Entity Framework and more. These products are maintained for a long time, typically without adding features, but rather to make sure new operating systems still work with them, security is maintained and bugs are fixed. There's a ton of cool stories in this space, it's the ultimate brownfield project challenge - rarely, if ever, do folks who created a product continue with it throughout it's life time!
Ready to move to .NET Core? Carl and Richard talk to Stackify's Matt Watson about their efforts to migrate their applications to the RTM editions of the .NET Core and ASP.NET Core. For better or worse, there have been a number of major changes between the two RCs and the RTM. But this is the version to stick to, so if you haven't started to move, now is a great time. Matt also talks about the challenges of losing certain libraries - projects that haven't been migrated to the Core editions yet.
How do you manage the building, monitoring and maintenance of mobile apps? Carl and Richard talk to Donovan Brown about how all the pieces have come together in the Microsoft stack to make creating, testing, deploying, maintaining and monitoring of mobile apps better. Donovan talks about all the good stuff from Build in mobile, including Xamarin being part of the toolset, but also tools like HockeyApp and Release Management. While Microsoft provides a ton of tools, you can bring your own as well - everything is optional and changeable. Ultimately, it's the synthesis of all the parts into a whole that provides the greater value. Check it out!
MSDeploy can do it! Carl and Richard talk to Robert Schiefer about his experiences using MSDeploy to automate complex deployment solutions throughout the enterprise. Robert talks about the fact that MSDeploy is part of WebDeploy and includes a ton of features that are not always obvious - doing far more than just installing software, it can also modify security settings, update registry keys, even handle the deployment of databases using DACPAC. The documentation isn't great, but if you dig around, there's lots of capability there. If you're looking to save money, spend a little time understanding MSDeploy better!
How is C# 7 coming along? Carl and Richard talk to Kathleen Dollard about her involvement in the very public process that is the open source development of the next C#. Kathleen talks about how there are issues in the GitHub repository for Roslyn that are actually design notes - summaries of the current thinking on the new features coming. Where things get really exciting is the comments on those notes. If you're interested in being part of what goes into C# 7, that's where decisions are being made. Kathleen digs into some of the new features coming, including local functions, sophisticated pattern matching and more... be part of the discussion!
How do you manage your software releases? Carl and Richard talk to Kevin Mack and Brandon Rohrer about the various tools that come together to help automate software releases. The focus on this approach is a product formerly known as InRelease by InCycle, which was acquired by Microsoft back in 2013. Now it's known as Release Management Services for VSTS and deeply integrated with the Studio toolset. The conversation also dives into the challenges around databases when it comes to release management - how do you get your database to be part of your release? Lots to think about here to up your VSTS game!
Do you have a DevOps stack? Carl and Richard talk to Brian Randell about his experiences implementing tooling for DevOps practices using Visual Studio and other Microsoft tools. The conversation runs the gambit of elements in the DevOps stack, including continuous deployment, package management, configuration-as-a-code and instrumentation in production. The more automation the better when it comes to moving fast and reliably. While DevOps often focuses on the culture and process that goes into building software, great tools can make all of those things happen much more easily - you just have to figure out what stack is right for you!
So how many shortcuts do you know in Visual Studio 2015? Carl and Richard talk to Joseph Woodward about his conscious efforts to learn more shortcuts and speed his development pace. Every time you take your hand off the keyboard, you slow yourself down, and more importantly, interrupt your flow! But not all shortcuts are created equal - the discussion focuses first on navigation shortcuts to move around your code more efficiently, and then into block editing and moving. Of course there are tools to take it further like Code Rush and Resharper - which ones are your favorites?
How does the .NET Foundation change the way you build software? While at the MVP Summit, Carl and Richard met with Martin Woodward and Beth Massi to talk about how the .NET Foundation was created and is evolving to carry .NET open source software forward. As Martin explains, even though key platform tools like the .NET Core, ASP.NET and MVC are all part of the foundation, Microsoft still makes a retail build of the products - so if you don't want to use open source, you don't have to! But if you and your organization are looking at open source, the .NET Foundation provides a certain level of coherence and structure to open source projects so that you can be sure the code will be there when you need it. Check it out!
Have you taken Visual Studio Code out for a spin yet? While at the MVP Summit, Carl and Richard talk to Sean McBreen about his work building Visual Studio Code. VSCode was released back in the Build time frame of April 2015, and has put out a major update almost every month since. Sean hints about some major announcements coming for Visual Studio Code coming at the Microsoft Connect() event in New York November 18 2015. The conversation also digs into the choices you can make in your development platform with a mix of VSCode, Visual Studio Online and all sorts of other tools.
There's more great stuff in Studio than you realize! Carl and Richard talk to Charles Sterling about the web performance testing tools built into Visual Studio 2015. Actually, the testing tools have been there since 2008, but only in the test edition, and after that they were moved to the Ultimate Edition - they were part of what made that product so expensive! But as of 2015, the testing tools are available as part of Visual Studio Online, which means they're free for teams of five or fewer as well as all MSDN subscribers! Chuck talks about what it takes to build really great load tests - the kinds of questions you can answer, and how to build those tests into your continuous deployment system. Check it out!
If you've been listening to the latest episodes, you've heard Omnisharp mentioned - time for a show on it! Carl and Richard talk to David Driscoll about his efforts contributing to Omnisharp. Omnisharp is a set of tools to bring .NET development to all sorts of different development environments, including Visual Studio Code. David discusses the impact that working on a dev tools project like Omnisharp has had on his own career, changing the way he thinks about development - for the better! If you're digging into open source web development in the new Microsoft stack, you really should know about Omnisharp!
Web development is moving fast, and John Papa is in the race! Carl and Richard talk to John about his current views on Angular and other SPA frameworks - coming to Anglebrackets this fall! The conversation dives into the inevitable comparisons between Angular, Aurelia and others - but there is no one right way. Then John talks about the new Visual Studio Code, which really hasn't got much to do with Visual Studio at all - it's an editor, rather than an IDE. This leads to a conversation about development work styles in general - do you like having everything all in one place in the form of Visual Studio, or happier with a more roll-your-own solution with separate editors, debuggers, etc. So many choices for development today!
Have you been building web apps with TypeScript? Carl and Richard talk to Steve Ognibene about his work with TypeScript projects. The discussion starts with dispelling myths about TypeScript - no, it doesn't exist just to make C# developers more comfortable in web development! Steve compares how development is different in the strongly typed world of C# where the compiler does a bunch of testing for you versus the dynamically typed space of JavaScript where you're responsible for managing type related errors - something that TypeScript can help with! In the end its all JavaScript, and that is evolving also - Steve talks about how ECMA 6 looks a lot more like C#... is there a middle point here we're all racing toward?
So what has happened with the .NET Core? Carl and Richard talk to Jay Schmelzer about his involvement from the very beginning of the .NET Core infrastructure and the interesting future it has as an open source project. But first a call back to a project that Jay led for years - LightSwitch. So where has it gone and where is it going? Then the conversation turns to the .NET Core. Jay talks about how the development team at Microsoft is starting to do their development in public on the open source project that is now the .NET Core. And then there's OS/X and Linux! How do you separate off capabilities of .NET that are actually part of the operating system, rather than the .NET codebase? Lots of complexity to support cross platform like this, but it opens the door to .NET being everywhere!
At the Nebraska Code Camp, Carl and Richard moderated a panel discussion with Mads Kristensen, Lee Brandt, Josh Broton, and Robert Boedigheimer exploring the state of web development on the Microsoft stack. Of course, the first topic is the upcoming ASP.NET vNext and its switch over to open source, along the way letting go of some legacy features including Web Forms. The panel also discussed various JavaScript libraries, when they should be used and when plain old VanillaJS is a better way to go. Conversation also explored design tooling and whether we all should be running Visual Studio or stick with dedicated design tools and editors. Lots of viewpoints from a great panel!
Programming in Swift? Want to build Android apps too? Carl and Richard talk to Marc Hoffman of RemObjects about his Silver project - using Swift to program for Android. Swift is Apple's cool new language for developing iOS apps, making life easier than Objective C. Don't use Swift? No problem, how about Pascal - because RemObjects has Oxygene, which is a moderized version of Pascal. That doesn't work for you? Then how about C#? Because this tool set lets you write C# across all the platforms too. And you can use it in the development environment of your choice, including Visual Studio. Mind blown? Ours too!
So when do IT Pros become developers? Carl and Richard talk to Steve Evans about his operations folks writing code and dealing with all the challenges that everyone finds when they write, own and operate code. The code in question is primarily PowerShell, used to automate deployment. It needs testing, source control and everything else that code requires. Steve talks about how his operations folks have come to learn the same things that all developers need to learn, and for the most part, end up using the same tools. PowerShell may have its own IDE, but more than ever the IT Pros want to use Visual Studio for its richness of tools and integration with resources that they realize they need. Now all we have to do is convince Microsoft that just because you operate systems doesn't mean you don't program!
ASP.NET continues to evolve! Carl and Richard talk to Mads Kristensen about the many amazing things he's working on in the web space, starting with Web Essentials! Mads explains how Web Essentials is a way to experiment with new features for ASP.NET, and that success comes when the feature is pulled into Visual Studio itself - and you get to be part of that process, it's all open source! The conversation turns to Visual Studio embracing the web development ecosystem to use the best tools for the job, whether that is browser and performance testing, package management and workflow. Use whatever tools you want from whomever, and Visual Studio will work with them - 2015 is shaping up to be an amazing version!
Julie is back and all about the latest version of Entity Framework - version 7! The conversation starts out with a bit of a state of the union, with Julie describing how moving Entity Framework to GitHub has opened up an amazing level of communication between the EF team and regular developers. Which leads to the scarier part of the discussion: The breaking changes coming to EF7 from EF6. Like ASP.NET vNext, EF7 represents a substantial break. But Julie says you shouldn't worry, there are lots of solutions. Oh, and did she mention that they are planning on including support for non-relational (NoSQL) data stores? Really!
Carl and Richard talk to Rocky Lhotka about where universal apps in Visual Studio are really going. But first, a bit of a landscape discussion, especially a laugh about the "comeback" of .NET and C#. Did Xamarin save the day? Rocky talks about how universal apps aren't all that universal, but with Xamarin in the mix, you start to look at a common code base for desktop, laptop, tablet and mobile development. Almost. Maybe. It's always more complicated than you think! But Rocky is optimistic that things are going the right way, so that everyone can start building cross-platform applications for their customers really soon.
While at the MVP Summit, Carl and Richard sat down with Pratap Lakshman, Peli de Halleux and Nikolai Tillman to talk about automating unit testing in .NET. Originally a Microsoft Research Project, PEX is now part of Visual Studio 2015, and digs deep into the IL of your application to generate a huge variety of unit tests. The team also talks about some of the other cool projects they've built using the PEX engine, including CodeHunt, a tool using testing to teach you to program. Check out PEX on Microsoft Research, and get ready for Studio 2015!
Carl and Richard talk to Brian Randell about the latest on Visual Studio Online (VSO). As Brian explains, this isn't about putting Visual Studio itself into the cloud, but rather surrounding your copy of Visual Studio with services in the cloud that make development easier. The conversation goes down the list, starting with source control in general and TFS specifically. One huge advantage of VSO - you don't have to deploy TFS yourself! Beyond source control and task management there are deployment tools and testing, all of which can be run in the cloud, where you're only billed for what you use. This is modern development at it's finest!
Fresh from the keynote at Tech Ed Europe in Barcelona, Jeremy Thake talks to Carl and Richard about the latest announcements around Office 365. The development story in the cloud continues to evolve, and Jeremy talks about the Office 365 APIs going into general availability, along with an Android SDK. The iOS SDK is right behind it, currently in preview and ready for you to start building apps for iPhone and iPad that work with Office 365. The story is huge - new programming models for Exchange and Sharepoint in the cloud mean its easier than ever to create automation and make your company's Office experience even better!
Carl and Richard chat with Paul Stovell, one of the principals behind Octopus Deploy. Octopus Deploy is all about getting your organization to continuous delivery - by automating every step. Paul talks about how the product came to be, from the frustrations he was having with deployment using Word documents and remote desktop. Octopus Deploy is free to download and use for small projects. Once you're addicted to one-button deployment, you can pay for larger projects and teams. And under the hood, it's technologies like PowerSshell that make it all work. This is a great addition to your DevOps toolkit.
Carl and Richard talk to Marcel de Vries about CodedUI - the test functionality built into Visual Studio that nobody knows about. CodedUI tests are tests built to automatically operate your UI so that you can test your application top-to-bottom, no short cuts. Marcel talks about how CodedUI tests are actually built using a test recorder and then tweaking the tests to increase coverage. You can build tables of data to use for entry to challenge boundary testing, add additional assertions and validations - it's very clever! If you own Visual Studio 2013, you need to check this out!
Carl and Richard chat with Micheal Learned about modern release management with Visual Studio. The conversation starts like many do when it comes to ALM: what's hard, and what's easy. And let's face it - releasing software properly is often hard! Micheal talks about the various pitfalls that folks fall into around releasing software and how today's environment just won't tolerate those mistakes any more. This leads to a discussion about release pipelines (check out the great doc in the show notes) and Microsoft's acquisition of InRelease by InCycle Software. If you've got an MSDN license, you have to take a look at Release Management! And if you don't, take the trial out for a spin, it's worth it!
While at the ModernApps2013 event in Mountain View, California, Carl and Richard got a chance to sit down with David Chappell and get his views on the changing landscape of software and software development. David talks about how applications have evolved into a devices+services model, where parts of the application live in the cloud, and the rest live in the various form factor devices that we all now use. Later the conversation turns to the evolution of Application Lifecycle Management, with concepts like Continuous Delivery and DevOps becoming essential skills for the modern developer. Great thoughts from an awesome thinker in our industry!
Carl and Richard talk to Michael Kennedy about using Python with .NET. Michael talks about the nature of Python and what makes it great (like whitespace counting). The conversation digs into the many forms of Python, some Windows friendly, some not so much, and many with specializations. Don't miss the discussion about the Zen of Python, and check out the huge collection of links for various Python bits!
While at Øredev in Malmö, Sweden, Carl and Richard talk to Mads Kristensen about the amazing set of features that have been added for web development in Visual Studio 2013. First up is browser link, a method to automate the connection between your development environment and various browsers being used to test your app while you code. Auto-refresh and more! Mads also talks about Web Essentials and SideWaffle - tools and templates for helping you to build web applications the right way. Visual Studio 2013 is a must have for the web developer!
While at Øredev in Malmö, Sweden, Carl and Richard talk to Patroklos Papapetrou about Sonar. Sonar is an open source project for instrumenting your code quality, looking for various 'deadly sins' of programming, such as duplication, lack of documentation, etc. Patroklos talks about each of the 'deadly sins' and how Sonar can help you make better quality code.
While at the Belfast stop of the .NET Rocks Ireland Road Trip, Carl and Richard talked to the one-and-only Martin Woodward! Martin discusses the state of Team Foundation Server today and source control in general. The conversation ranges over the evolution of source control, the effects of the internet on creating distributed version control and how Git, SVC, HG and many other version control systems all get along. Great thinking from a guy who's spent years deeply immersed in source control!
Carl and Richard talk to Todd Anglin from Telerik about cross-platform development for mobile. The conversation focuses on Telerik's Icenium hybrid mobile development solution. Todd announces that Icenium now has a Visual Studio plug-in so that you can do your development in the environment of your choice. This leads to interesting possibilities with KendoUI, another library from Telerik that lets you build mobile web apps with native look-and-feel on different phone platforms - now you can turn them into hybrid apps!
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!
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!
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!
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.
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!
Carl and Richard talk to Martin Woodward about Microsoft's announcement of integrating Git into Visual Studio and TFS. Martin talks about Microsoft's thinking about why and how to add Git support to Visual Studio and TFS. Then the conversation digs into the different configuration options - the Git tools work even in Visual Studio Express! Martin compares the differences of using Git directly from Studio as well as via TFS. It's a cool time to be a Studio programmer!
While at the Bentonville stop of the .NET Rocks! Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Carl and Richard sat down with Matt Nunn to talk about his vision around Modern Apps and the Modern App Lifecycle.
Carl and Richard talk to Dr. Yngve Falck-Ytter about his efforts to understand programming. Yngve talks about the limitations of the software in the medical industry and how he's learned to work around it with some of his own programming. Ultimately the conversation digs into the idea that good software can make treatments more effective and less expensive and, in the end, save more lives.
Carl and Richard talk to Chris Patterson about MassTransit, an open source enterprise service bus. The conversation starts out talking about service bus in general, how the patterns around a service bus make it easier to build large, multiversion applications with the fewest dependencies possible. Chris sets MassTransit in context with large, expensive service buses like Biztalk. He also digs into some of the other projects he's worked on, including TopShelf (for building Windows services) and Magnum (the mother of all toolkits). The boys also ask Chris about his focus on open source, the advantages and disadvantages around licensing, pricing and support. Amazing smart guy with some awesome code!
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!
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!
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?
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!
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!
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.
Carl and Richard talk to Micheal Learned about the new ALM features coming in Visual Studio 11.
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!
Part of a group of shows recorded at DevConnections in November 2011, Carl and Richard talk to Scott Willeke about reporting technologies. The conversation explores the challenges of a widening set of data sources for reporting, including NoSQL. Scott then digs into the issues around embedding reporting solutions into your applications as opposed to web-based reporting. Reporting - love it or hate it, it never goes away!
Carl and Richard talk to Jay Schmelzer about LightSwitch. Jay talks about the launch of LightSwitch back on July 26 2011, and the new set of extensions available to help Visual Studio Pro developers support LightSwitch applications. He also reminds us that if you own Visual Studio 2010, you own LightSwitch, so take it out for a spin!
Ignoring the unusual show number, Steve Smith talks to Carl and Richard about his experiences tuning ASP.NET for better performance. Steve tells three different stories from different eras of web development, also digging into situations where he's made mistakes, where he's found mistakes, and when he wished he'd called Microsoft tech support sooner. Don't let the number scare you, this is a great show!
Recorded in front of the DevConnection audience in Orlando, Carl and Richard talk to Brian Randell about virtualization. Brian also digs into Virtual Lab Manager, the extensions to Visual Studio 2010 that help testers capture tests that fail and communicate them effectively to developers.
Carl and Richard talk to Scott Millett about SpecFlow, a free tool to help you implement Behaviour Driven Design. SpecFlow lets you build plain text requirements that actually connect with code and tests to help reinforce acceptance testing. The conversation also wanders over design patterns in general and ASP.NET specifically. Scott also talks through the various free tools he uses together to build better software.
Carl and Richard talk to Mark Miller and Seth Juarez about their crazy experiments with Kinect. The boys discuss how they are building an interface with Kinect to do programming with Visual Studio 2010. A large part of this conversation ends up diving deep into the relative merits of machine learning in systems. Are we crossing the streams? You bet!
Carl and Richard talk to Josh Holmes about Microsoft's Web Matrix! Josh keynoted the launch of WebMatrix at CodeMash in January 2011. Web Matrix brings together great installer technologies with some of the latest Microsoft web application technologies to make it dirt simple to deploy and maintain web sites. The tool is free and the projects you make can be maintained with Studio Express or full blown Visual Studio. Enter the WebMatrix! You'll be glad you did.
Carl and Richard talk to Stephen Toub from Microsoft about parallel development. Stephen digs into the Async-CTP, released in October 2010, to provide asynchronous keywords Async and Await. The conversation also digs into what's coming next in the parallel space from the team.
Carl and Richard talk to Joel Semeniuk about the state of Team Foundation Server (TFS) today. Joel digs into how TFS has moved into the cloud and is reaching a larger span of developers. The conversation digs into how to split the work of development up between cloud and premise - source code on the cloud, builds locally, etc.
Carl, Richard and Mark Miller chat about events that occurred in 2010 that affect the .NET world. From C# to F#, Studio to Lightswitch, Windows Phone 7 to Kinect. What a great year!
Carl and Richard talk to Jon Skeet and Bill Wagner about C#. Both Jon and Bill have published books on C# and have reach each other's work. But C# is such a vast language, there are plenty of things that are subject to interpretation. We could have called this show a C# Smackdown, but these guys are too nice for such a thing!
Rocky and Jay talk with Carl and Richard about the Visual Studio designer experience: XAML vs Cider, as well as ruminations on Silverlight and WPF.
Carl and Richard talk to Dan Fernandez about Channel 9, online community, Visual Studio Express, and more on the second stop of our Road Trip!
Phil Haack was our guest on the first Road Trip show! We talked about shipping VS2010, ASP.NET MVC, and Phil told us how he got into the business.
Lino Tadros of Borland and Falafel Software fame takes us back to when he worked for Anders Hejlsberg at Borland. Good stories from an old-school geek!
Carl and Richard talk to Gabriel Torok and Joe Kuemerle about what it takes to really know what's going on in your enterprise in real time.
Carl and Richard talk to Daniel Norwood and Daniel Wood (I know) from Quest Software, makers of Toad - data tools for Oracle. Now providing Toad Extention for Visual Studio .NET, bringing all of the Datadude features of Visual Studio to Oracle developers.
Carl and Richard talk to Dave Mendlen and Sam Gazitt from Microsoft about the launch event April 12-14, 2010 at the Bellagio in Las Vegas where .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 will be officially launched.
Richard and Carl talk to Kent Brown and Ed Pinto about the new features of WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) 4.0, which will be released April 12, 2010.
What's new in the CLR? Jason Olson goes through some of the most important new features.
Carl and Richard catch up with Chris Sells at DevReach in Sofia, Bulgaria a couple weeks ago. Chris is all about Data Dude, the Visual Studio edition for Database Professionals. Great show on all counts.
Doug Seven talks to the boys about Visual Studio 2010. In particular, pricing, features, and the launch.
Francesco Balena talks about his groundbreaking work in migrating VB6 applications to VB.NET
Mark Miller and Billy Hollis go head to head on User Interface. The conversation ranges from WPF and Silverlight to Visual Studio and Blend to whatever else they felt like talking about...
Steven Borg talks about his experiences delivering solutions with Microsoft Team System, with a special focus on automated builds.
Peter Vogel talks about code generation pros, cons, technologies, and strategies from Visual Studio to T4
Carl and Richard talk with Kathleen Dollard about MEF, the future of development, and more.
Mark Dunn joins Carl and Richard to review some of the interviews he did at TechEd EMEA in Barcelona, Spain in November, 2008. On board are Bob Beauchemin, John Flanders, Pat Helland, Richard Pawson, and Jay Roxe.
Anthony Cangialosi and Rico Mariani talk with Richard and Carl about Visual Studio Extensibility and the VS Ecosystem, and a little bit about IdeaBlade.
Carl and Richard talk to Tomas Petricek about Phalanger, a managed code PHP language compiler, as well as his thoughts on F# Web Tools, a toolkit which lets you write both client-side and server-side code at the same time, and the client gets converted to JavaScript.
Carl and Richard talk to Windows veterans Tim Sneath and Ian Ellison-Taylor about the olden days of Windows, how it has evolved, and how it may look in the future from a developer perspective.
In the last of the content from TechEd 2007 Carl and Richard host a panel on Identity issues with Ani Babaian, Michele Leroux Bustamante, Scott Golightly, and Richard Turner.
Carl and Mark talk to Robert about the new Visual Studio Tools for Office, VBA, XML, Office and DataSets, Scripting, and using Word and Excel as the User Interface layer for your .NET framework applications.
Robert also talks about some features of up-coming versions of these tools in the Whidbey timeframe. This is great stuff!