.NET Rocks!

Why in the world would you want to build a compiler? While at NDC, Carl and Richard talked to Philip Laureano about why he makes compilers! Philip starts out talking how building compilers helps you think about parsers and how that can help your development in every day life. The conversation turns to building your own language, or your own interpretation of a language, such as LISP! Philip digs into understanding IL directly - using tools like ILDASM and PEVerify to manipulate the underlying code made by Visual Studio languages like C#. Get a deeper understanding of the tools you use!

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How do you estimate your projects? While at NDC, Carl and Richard talk to Woody Zuill about delivering software WITHOUT estimates. Woody starts out with a clarification - it's not zero estimates, just no estimates around particular features for an application. But how? Your customers want estimates, the trick is to deliver so quickly that there isn't time to estimate before you've delivered code. And does it have to be code? Isn't our goal to solve problems, and code is only one possible solution? Lots of great thinking about how you provide value to your customers!

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While at NDC, Carl and Richard talked to Chris McCord about Elixir - the friendly language on top of Erlang. Chris talks about his Phoenix framework which brings an MVC-style development approach to building web sites in Elixir. And because its the Erlang VM under the hood, it scales brilliantly! The efficiency of Erlang is remarkable as well, reducing the number of servers needed to provide a service, to the point where folks have been running a web site off of a Raspberry Pi 2! Phoenix is racing toward a version 1.0, and its a great time to get involved!

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While at NDC, Carl and Richard chat with Justin James about his deployment tool chain of NuGet, Chocolatey, Boxstarter and Vagrant. Each of these tools builds on the other, starting at the lowest level with specific libraries, working up through package managers, configuring operating systems, even provisioning cloud services. Justin talks about using the tools to get you to a configuration-as-code scenario, making installation not only reliable, but fast. There are lots of different ways to get to a reliable and efficient deployment solution - here's another one!

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While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard talk to Troy Hunt about all the scary stuff going on in security today. The conversation starts out recapping some discussion on passwords - how do we get past them? Troy also digs into the on-going issues of SQL Injection, still the number one security risk for web sites. You can still use Google to find vulnerable web sites, and there are great free tools out there to find and exploit insecure SQL databases - don't be one of them! The discussion turns to Strict Transport Security, making sure SSL is on all the time for a web site. Still gotta fix the basics, but new capabilities are coming!

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Where will .NET go next? Carl and Richard talk to Rocky Lhotka (who happily is still alive after having his entire aorta replaced) about the resurgence in .NET. Between the open sourcing of .NET creating a common codebase for Windows, OSX and Linux. But that codebase is server focused - what does it take to get to the client? And to that idea, should XAML be open sourced? Rocky drills into the challenges of making cross-platform mobile apps - it's still not simple enough yet. But things are looking up, and there is only going to be more choice. Rocky is optimistic!

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If it's on the cloud, it'll scale and perform, right? Carl and Richard talk to Christopher Bennage about his work at Patterns and Practices helping understand where performance can go wrong with Azure. It's on GitHub to provide code samples and analysis on the various problems you can find with scaling your Azure app. Christopher discusses eight different anti-patterns the PnP folks have found in their travels that can impair performance. Included in each are code samples and analysis of performance on Azure to show improvements - and you can run the code yourself on Azure to compare!

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Time for an Energy Storage Geek Out! The most requested Geek Out on FeatHub as Battery Technology, Carl and Richard discuss a wide range of aspects of energy storage. The conversation starts out on electrochemical batteries, which are only about 200 years old. Richard digs through the technical aspects of anode, cathode and electrolyte, dry cells, wet cells and polymer cells. And why do some batteries explode, anyway? Then the focus is on Tesla's new PowerWall battery products, what they're good for and what they aren't. And before the end, some other storage techniques like superconductors, ultracapacitors and flywheels!

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So how are you instrumenting your applications? Carl and Richard talk to Jason Taylor of Stackify and Michael Paterson of Carbonite about the power of great instrumentation to make awesome software. Stackify provides a set of free tools if you're working in Azure. And speaking of Azure, Carbonite lives on Azure and uses Stackify for instrumentation. Michael talks about how Stackify helped Carbonite understand performance problems and errors that were occurring in production that were very hard to see from logs or customer service requests - deeply instrumenting their application made all the difference!

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How do you extend C#? Carl and Richard talk to Simon Cropp about his open source project called Fody. Simon talks how Fody allows you do do "weaving" of .NET assemblies to add capabilities. Sounds simple, but it's not - it's hugely powerful and has to be handled carefully. To make it even more amazing, there are a ton of add-ins built for Fody to open the door to all sorts of aspect-oriented programming, simplifying testing, instrumentation and other sorts of coding extensions. So many possibilities, you should check it out!

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