.NET Rocks!

Time for a new version of CSLA! Carl and Richard talk to Rocky Lhotka about the latest incarnation of the venerable business object framework that started all the way back at Visual Basic 5! CSLA has always been about keeping business logic out of your user interfaces and databases - keep it in the middle where it belongs. And today that is clearly wise architectural design: The diversity on the client side means you have a lot more devices accessing your application, and CSLA supports most of them in one form or another. The same is true on the back end, it's not all about SQL Server anymore, and CSLA stays out of your way when it comes to data storage. The framework is open source and on GitHub, check it out!

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Virtual Reality is here, and there are choices! Carl and Richard talk to Jason Weimann about the HTC Vive, the competitor to the Oculus Rift. Jason talks about how the two devices are similar and how they are different. And one place they are similar is the programming model - it's all about Unity3D. The conversation focuses in on what it takes to really learn Unity - you're working in Visual Studio with C#, but the platform and tooling are quite a bit different. And don't worry too much about 3D art, there are tons of free assets! VR is here, are you ready?

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Do you know how people are actually using your mobile apps? Carl and Richard chat with Greg Shackles about his work instrumenting mobile apps in production. The low hanging fruit is actually gathering data about every crash or error that occurs in the field. Getting that information back to your dev team can make the application better, but what if operations were able to respond to the failure? What if you could turn a crash into a moment of delight for the user? The conversation then dives into deeper instrumentation - what can we learn about how people use the app, what is hard and easy, and what we could add to make the app more awesome. Lots of great thinking on taking mobile apps to the next level!


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Is DevOps dead, or just a fad? Carl and Richard talk to Wes Higbee about his experiences building great software. As Wes says, don't let any methodology stop you from doing the right thing. The conversation digs into the challenges that come around the term DevOps, much the same way they impact the term Agile. It's very easy to start using terminology to define practices rather than focus on the common goal of building great software. Do the labels developer, tester and IT separate us or unify us? Shouldn't everyone talk to the customer and be sure they're working on the right thing? Time to think beyond DevOps!


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How can competition teach machine learning? Carl and Richard talk to Anthony Goldbloom of Kaggle about competitive machine learning. Kaggle hosts competitions provided by industry and academia to find machine learning solutions on different data sets. While the competitive aspects tend toward only particular types of data sets, Anthony talks about how two very different machine learning algorithms - Gradient Boosting Machine and Deep Recurrent Neural Networks - have risen to the top. Want to learn machine learning in a hurry? Join a competition!

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Here comes Windows Containers! While at Techorama in Belgium, Carl and Richard talk to Els Putzeys about the current technical preview of Windows Containers on Windows Server 2016. Els discusses how the Windows Containers can be built using templates so that you have a configuration-as-code capability, making repeated creation fast and easy. Now your documentation for building a system is code that actually creates it! We're still a few months away from Server 2016 being released, but it looks to be an important version of server for development!

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How do you do continuous deployment? While at Techorama in Belgium, Carl and Richard sat down with Marcel de Vries and Rene van Osnabrugge to talk about their efforts working with various customers trying to help them get further down the DevOps line of productivity. The conversation digs into the various elements that go into getting to continuous delivery, including a lot of conversation about automating testing - if you're going to build fast, you need to test fast too! Marcel also talks about feature toggling, giving operations the ability to turn features off and on to understand how they behave and improve software quality in the process. Lots to deploy!

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Ready to think differently about programming? While at Techorama in Belgium, Carl and Richard chatted with Mark Seemann about his experiences with Haskell, helping him to be the best functional programmer he can be. Mark talks about the battle of developing in F#, and how it's easy to fall into object-centric development methods, even when F# strongly encourages function-centric coding. By spending time in a pure functional language like Haskell, you strengthen those functional reflexes! The language has been around for a long time and runs on all sorts of platforms including Windows. It's a great tool to make you a better developer!

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Even more new stuff from Xamarin! While at Techorama in Mechelen, Belgium, Carl and Richard sat down with James Montemagno to talk about all the goodness that came out of the Evolve conference. The conversation focuses first on the new edition of Xamarin Forms, building UI abstracts for your mobile apps to increase your code sharing across platforms. James also talks about data pages as a way to present data on your mobile apps, with some great styling options. Xamarin is continuing to build awesome things!

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How do you manage your non-relational data? While at Techorama in Belgium, Carl and Richard talk to Oren Eini about his work with RavenDB and getting companies to really think about organizing non-relational data in a sensible way. The conversation focuses on how much relational database methodology (like normalization) has permeated thinking in development, so that we tend toward similar behavior when working on a non-relational data store. Store the objects as objects, it's going to be okay!


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