.NET Rocks!

Carl and Richard chat with Richard Astbury about the Microsoft Research project known as Orleans. Orleans brings the Actor model of development to C# - the Actor model is typically found in functional languages, but you can write functional C#, so why not? Richard talks about Orleans being used to run Halo 4, where hundreds of thousands of players connected with each other between hundreds of Azure instances. Orleans was officially released into the wild at Microsoft Build. Looking at scalable software strategies? Take a look at Orleans!

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Carl and Richard go back to space with Uncle Bob! What started at NDC last Fall finishes today! But first, a quick conversation about an episode with Alan Stevens around the software craftsmanship movement, which Uncle Bob is a key part of. Then off to interstellar space! Bob pulls no punches, jumping straight into why nuclear technologies are key to significant space travel. Lots of history in this show too, talking about NERVA engines, Project Orion, Bussard Ram Engines and more! No warp drives or wormholes, what could we build today to go to another star?

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Carl and Richard talk to John Papa about the current state of Single Page Application development. John digs into his latest focus on libraries, the constant evolution in the Javascript world, and how AngularJS is still a big pile of awesome. The conversation also turns a bit philosophical, with a discussion of Javascript being the assembly language of the web, and how languages like Dart, CoffeeScript and TypeScript create abstractions over assembly language to make web applications more maintainable.

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Carl and Richard chat with Nicholas Blumhardt about his work on Serilog, a structured logging tool. But first, the conversation dives a bit into Octopus Deploy, an awesome tool for helping you manage your application packages and help deploy them to testing, pre-production, production, and so on. Then on to the main event - Nicholas' amazing Serilog product. Logging is a pain, and Serilog makes it as painless as possible - one line per log entry, and configuration to write your log anywhere: text files, other logging products, even Event Tracing for Windows!

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Carl and Richard talk to Hugh Jones about EU Data Protection laws. But first, a long discussion about the NSA revelations and the surveillance culture we're living in today. Hugh talks about the evolving perceptions around privacy and how data needs to be better protected. From there, Hugh dives into the EU Data Protection laws, which apply not only to companies doing business in the EU, but companies outside of the EU that are handling EU citizen data. The focus is on personally identifiable information - what is it, how do you handle it, how do you protect it, when does it become too risky to keep. Good thinking around data protection!

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The first of the new Tablet Shows as .NET Rocks episodes, Carl and Richard talk to Scott Allen about the continued evolution of JavaScript. The conversation starts out with a comment from a listener about a past show with Scott on Modernizr, and Scott talks about how things have changed since then - the focus on newer browsers (if IE9 counts as new) means that the tool needs change. Scott also talks about what new features are moving into the browser, reducing the library load your web page needs. Is the browser becoming a smart client platform?

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A flash from the past! Carl and Richard chat with Robert Scoble! Carl and Robert go back to the VBits days and the beginning of the public internet, the first blogs and Robert's time at Microsoft. Then the conversation turns briefly to Robert's work at Rackspace and their attempt to make the cloud even better. Robert also talks about his book the Age of Context, the stories they collected to create the book and a vision of the future!

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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!

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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!

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Well, you knew this was coming - a geek out on the not-fun topic of nuclear accidents. Richard runs down the fundamentals of nuclear accidents, with some story telling around what happened at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Then on to the main event - Fukushima. The situation is serious, but progress is being made and the Japanese remain committed to fully cleaning up the mess made there. So is nuclear power worth the risk? Be part of this conversation; it's certainly not done yet!

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