.NET Rocks!

Carl and Richard talk to Dan Wahlin about his experiences building web pages from a Silverlight perspective. The conversation starts out talking about how XAML isn't going away - there's lots of WPF development going on out there today. And Silverlight too! Microsoft has finally published some guidance around all of these technologies, check the links for the white paper. Dan also digs into how skills and expectations like data binding from technologies like Silverlight have changed web development - just look at the proliferation of libraries!

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Carl and Richard talk to G. Andrew Duthie about his work with .NET Gadgeteer. The whole concept of .NET Gadgeteer is to make it easy to build small electronic devices without needing to solder anything together AND be able to program in .NET! Andrew talks about his projects, including a hand-controlled helicopter, and his experience building custom modules for .NET Gadgeteer. The conversation explores a bunch of projects, availability of hardware and the vast array of community built hardware available. You need to try this!

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Well, you knew it was coming - a geek out on whiskey. Carl and Richard talk about all kinds of whiskey, starting with Scotch whiskey as the foundation for how whiskey is made, and then digging into the differences in Irish whiskey and bourbon. The different grains, maltings, fermentation, barreling and post-processing techniques are all discussed. Making whiskey is an amazing and ancient art, and the boys have been studying it for awhile... perhaps a bit too closely!

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Carl and Richard talk to Kit Eason about how you can get your organization using F#. Kit talks about his work using F# and how he retrained himself to use the language effectively. It only takes a few days! He makes some awesome suggestions for approaches to learning the language effectively and the advantages that it brings. We're living in a polyglot world where the best language is used in its best role... and F# has a role!

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While at the Norwegian Developers Conference (NDC) in Oslo last week, Carl and Richard moderated a panel talking about the state of functional programming in mainstream development. The discussion reached back in time to languages like Haskell and Erlang, and looked forward at JavaScript and it's vector to seemingly take over the world. Even if you're not well versed in functional languages, this was a great discussion.

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While at NDC, Carl and Richard talk to Jez Humble about Continuous Delivery. Jez discusses the difference between continuous integration and continuous delivery and how nothing matters until your code actually gets to the customer. So no shipping parties until it does! The conversation digs into the overall story of DevOps, how development and operations need to work closer together to continuously deliver value to the customer - which is more about culture and process than it is about tools.

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While at NDC, Carl and Richard talked to Scott Guthrie about the latest Azure features including the announcements from TechEd. Scott talks about new support for developers in Azure, including monthly Azure credit for all MSDN subscriptions and per minute billing for developer testing on Azure instances. Even if your app isn't running in the cloud, you can use the cloud to do your testing. The conversation digs into continuous delivery in the cloud - Scott mentions New Relic as an instrumentation package for your production applications to gain deep insight into how your cloud applications are actually being used.

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While at the Norwegian Developers Conference, Carl and Richard chatted with Jon Skeet about Async and Parallelism. The conversation starts out with a BKaF on parallel exception handling and a reader comment about F# and parallelism. Jon chimes in on both these subjects, talking about all the challenges around error handling, parallel or otherwise, and he knows (and doesn't know) about F#. Throughout the conversation there are short discussions on his effort to teach his sons programming as well. Great insights from Mr. Skeet!

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Carl and Richard talk about space telescopes - but first, a comment about Thorium Molten Salt Reactors and a Kickstarter for a Thorium documentary called The Good Reactor. Also on Kickstarter is Arkyd, the space telescope that anyone can use - get a picture of yourself in space! The conversation then digs into space observatories, there are literally dozens up there today. Everyone knows about Hubble, but what about Compton, or Spitzer or Chandra? There are different observatories for different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Richard brings up Kepler, the little telescope that has detected hundreds of earth-sized planets around other stars. And don't forget about the upcoming replacement for Hubble, the James Webb Telescope!

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At DevTeach, Carl and Richard talk to Kate Gregory about smart clients. As Kate says, quoting Don Box, 'they're not dead, they're done.' The conversation digs into WinForms, Silverlight and WPF. They aren't changing much, but they definitely work. Kate talks about the various projects she's working on that depend on smart clients - accessing different processes, specific hardware requirements, etc. It's old developer day!

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