.NET Rocks!

Scott Hunter is back and managing the whole .NET platform! While at DevIntersection in Orlando, Carl and Richard sat down with Scott to talk about his new role as director of the entire .NET platform. That includes all the open source goodness - and Scott digs into his team's efforts to make ASP.NET the fastest web development platform on the planet (they're almost there!) and what it takes to bring all the incarnations of .NET into a common standard, both for the old school close source editions as well as open source across the platforms. One .NET standard is coming to you soon!

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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!

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Universal Apps are becoming more universal - arriving on the XBox One! Carl and Richard talk to Chris Gomez about the announcements at the Microsoft Build event around building software for the XBox One. Now, any developer can write code using the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) approach, which means you can code in C#, Javascript... pretty much any language you want in the CLR space. Chris explains that while you have limited access to all the resources in the XBox One, the UWP approach is a starting point to building bigger things if that's what you want to do - the XBox team is watching!

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The Web is broken - time to fix it! While at DevIntersection in Orlando, Carl and Richard sat down with Douglas Crockford to talk about the problems the web has and what can be done about them. Doug rightfully focuses on how the web was never intended to do what its doing - it was meant for sharing academic papers, and has far outgrown that initial requirement. Security is the key, and security with the least amount of trust is best. How do we build something inherently secure and still easy to work with?

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What do developers need to know about information security? Carl and Richard talk to Kim Carter about his experiences helping developers secure their web sites. Kim has written a series of books on the subject to help get developers thinking about infosec as they develop, rather than try and cram security on at the end of a project. All kinds of great tools in the show links, including OWASP ZAP, which does fast penetration testing on your site - you can incorporate it into your build process so that your code is security tested as you're building it! InfoSec isn't optional, you need to make it part of your routine development process!

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Concorde is gone, what will replace it? Time for a Geek Out! Richard talks about the aeronautical evolution that led to supersonic airliners, Concorde being the big one that flew from 1976 to 2003. What went wrong? Why did it stop flying? Besides the technological challenges, it all comes down to the sonic boom and laws that make it illegal to fly a civilian aircraft above the speed of sound. Richard talks about how technology has advanced enough now that aircraft can mitigate their sonic boom with specific shapes and flying capabilities. However, in the end, supersonics only get you there faster, typically for more money. Would you pay for to go faster?

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How has hardware evolved when it comes to the Internet of Things? While at Build 2016 in San Francisco, Carl and Richard sat down with Jon Bruner from O'Reilly SOLID Con about his experience watching and working with the makers of hardware for IoT. Jon dug into the challenges of making production IoT stuff, especially going to China to get things made at scale. Automation is taking hold in that space, soon where it's done won't matter all that much. The conversation also explores additive and subtractive manufacturing with CNC milling machines, laser sintering and more. Lots of cool hardware ideas!

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How can the command line be cool? Carl and Richard talk to Richard Turner, freshly back into Microsoft, and working on the Bash on Windows project. So why would you want a Linux command line prompt? As Richard explains, there are cool bits of code you can create on your Windows box but don't really behave all that well - some Ruby Gems, etc. Having Linux, real Linux, running in Windows helps all that work better. And if you're headed toward the cross-platform world in the mobile space, or Linux on the backend, these tools can help you be more productive and less frustrated. It's early days yet, but there's lots to check out!

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Ready to code for XBox One? Carl and Richard talk to Tom Spilman about his efforts to bring MonoGame to the XBox One. When the XBox One came out a few years ago, it did not support Microsoft's Indie game platform, XNA. MonoGame has stepped up to fill that role. And as an extra perk, it runs on everything - iOS, Android, Mac, Playstation and Nintendo devices. And of course, everything is coded in C#. Tom talks about how more and more, performance in games is not an issue, and the price of coding in C++ is just too high, without significant advantage. You want to make games? Make them in C# - with MonoGame!

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Are there startups running .NET? Sure! Carl and Richard talk to Alec Lazarescu about his experience running LearnBop. The applications are built in .NET, but being a startup is about more than just programming languages. Alec talks about having the agility of a startup, being able to rapidly scale while tightly controlling costs - there's only so much money in a startup! To get startup dynamics, you need to look beyond just Microsoft tools - Alec's team uses tools like Chef, which comes from the Linux world. Blending the two communities together has its own challenges, but the results are worth it!

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