.NET Rocks!

Carl and Richard chat with David Graham about what it takes to create a new developer. David starts out the conversation talking about the shortage of developers today, and how the shortage is getting worse, not better. This leads to a conversation about existing training approaches, such as a four-year computer science degree. While we all agree that the best way to learn to program is to actually program, what are the best tools to start out with? How do you get out into the industry and continue to grow?

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Carl and Richard talk to Jason and Brian Kriesel about their work building Amazon Fire Tablet applications. The conversation starts off talking about the differences between the Android world and the Amazon world - they aren't that far apart! The brothers Kriesel talk about what it takes to maintain an application that runs in regular Android tablets and phones as well as the Amazon Fire world - what features Amazon brings to the table and the strengths of their platform and app store. The discussion also digs into the new Amazon Fire Phone and the concerns around the FireFly SDK. There are pluses and minuses to all the platforms!

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Carl and Richard talk to Michelle Smith about building great development teams. Michelle talks about what a great team looks like, the differences in productivity and focus. This leads to a conversation about team building, creating trust within the team and dealing with remote workers - how do you create trust when you can't see each other. Then there's the process of recruiting and interviewing, where Michelle focuses on the interaction with the team even more than technical skills. Great teams don't just happen, but how much management does a great development team need?

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On the last day of the NDC 2014 Conference in Oslo, Carl and Richard assembled a panel of speakers: Robert Virding, Steve Sanderson, Venkat Subramaniam, and Anthony Eden. The discussion focused initially on the motivations around building software, but ultimately evolved into the best way to build sustainable software. Is the profit motive for software development a good one? What about open source? How do you know when your software is 'done?' How do you decide what features to add and what to leave out or even remove? Great thinking from a remarkable set of minds!

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Carl and Richard talk to Rob Eisenberg about the crazy changes going on in his life - starting with joining Google! Rob talks about meeting the AngularJS folks at the ng-conf conference and deciding that upcoming versions of DurandalJS and AngularJS are on a collision course. So why duplicate effort? Rob talks about the significant rethinking going on with AngularJS 2.0 to be more effective in mobile environments, dealing with rendering performance and connectivity issues. The whole process is taking place in public on GitHub. You should check it out!

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While at NDC, Carl and Richard chat with Troy Hunt about specific common web security breaches and things you can do about them. The conversation starts out with a continuation of an earlier show, talking about the vulnerabilities around open WiFi connections. From there, Troy talks about the most common breach of them all - SQL Injection. Yes, it's still a problem. Troy also digs into the importance of transport layer security, typically using SSL. There's a reason all the big web sites have switched to HTTPS all of the time. Maybe it's something you should consider also?

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While at NDC is Oslo, Carl and Richard talk to Martin Jul about the state of visual computing technology today. As Martin says, the future is very bright - amazing free libraries are now available that make it simple to do image and character recognition with all sorts of cameras, even one on the Raspberry PI! The conversation digs into a project that Martin built to identify when the pizza guy is at his front door, exploring what it takes to recognize a pizza box in video. There are digital cameras everywhere today, shouldn't we be building apps to take advantage of them?

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While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard talked to Nik Molnar and Anthony van der Hoorn about instrumenting web application. Of course the conversation starts out with a catch-up on Glimpse, the awesome session-based instrumentation tool for your web pages. Then the conversation moves to looking at instrumentation end-to-end on web applications, in the aggregate, so that you can see where your pain points are and where to focus your attention on tuning. Nik talks about starting at the high level view point so that you focus on the right things - it's not always about the code!

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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.

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While at the Norwegian Developers Conference in Oslo, Norway, Carl and Richard talk with Mark Seemann about his thinking around how developers 'get into the zone.' As Mark explains, this behavior isn't all that unusual - psychologists call it 'flow,' and it is a common state for athletes, musicians, writers and more. The conversation digs into the truth around flow, primarily that it doesn't guarantee productivity. Mark discusses techniques for getting into flow faster, so that you're less sensitive to interruption, and the conversation ultimately spins into thinking around how we can practice more effectively using flow and put in the hours it takes to become truly proficient in our area of focus. Throughout the conversation there are references to great books you should read - check the links!

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