.NET Rocks!

What has Chris Sells been up to? Carl and Richard chat with Chris Sells, the guest on episode 10 back in 2002, about how his career continues to evolve. Chris talks about working at Google on Flutter, the mobile dev stack - before departing for Meta to work on the tooling for augmented reality. The conversation digs into how AR appears to be the logical evolution of mobile but has been completely overwhelmed by artificial intelligence. Chris has left Meta to work on AI technologies and sees huge potential in making better applications than ever before!

What has Chris Sells been up to? Carl and Richard chat with Chris Sells, the guest on episode 10 back in 2002, about how his career continues to evolve. Chris talks about working at Google on Flutter, the mobile dev stack - before departing for Meta to work on the tooling for augmented reality. The conversation digs into how AR appears to be the logical evolution of mobile but has been completely overwhelmed by artificial intelligence. Chris has left Meta to work on AI technologies and sees huge potential in making better applications than ever before!

How do you make your own copilot? Carl and Richard talk to Prashant Bhoyar about his work with Copilot Studio and Azure AI Studio. Prashant describes how Copilot Studio lives in the Power Platform space while Azure AI Studio is more related to Visual Studio, in that it is a tool for developers of AI technology. Anything built in Azure AI Studio can be surfaced in Copilot Studio - another kind of fusion development! Lots of conversation about what works well and what is difficult with these tools, and how to avoid some critical mistakes!

Ready for a chat with the creator of Node? Carl and Richard talk to Ryan Dahl about his work creating NodeJS in 2009 and how he moved on after a few years, leading to the creation of Deno, an opinionated approach to building web applications. Ryan talks about the challenges of simplifying web development by combining all the important things into a single set of tools—saving you the effort of assembling those things yourself. The conversation also digs into how web development has evolved and one of Ryan's current efforts - convincing Oracle to surrender the JavaScript trademark to the world!

Ready for a chat with the creator of Node? Carl and Richard talk to Ryan Dahl about his work creating NodeJS in 2009 and how he moved on after a few years, leading to the creation of Deno, an opinionated approach to building web applications. Ryan talks about the challenges of simplifying web development by combining all the important things into a single set of tools—saving you the effort of assembling those things yourself. The conversation also digs into how web development has evolved and one of Ryan's current efforts - convincing Oracle to surrender the JavaScript trademark to the world!

What's the latest with Playwright? Carl and Richard talk to Debbie O'Brien about her ongoing work with Playwright, Microsoft's open-source testing framework for web applications. While it is focused on web applications, you can write your tests in various languages, including .NET! Debbie talks about the new Playwright Testing service, which operates in Azure, so you don't have to stand up with your testing infrastructure - pay for what you use. The conversation ranges over the various features and challenges in testing that Playwright addresses. Now get out there and write some tests - your applications will be better for it!

How simple can you make software development? Carl and Richard talk to Mark Rendle about his focus on simplicity in building software - as simple as possible. Mark talks about the tendency of developers, sometimes through no fault of their own, to use what is new and cool in development, regardless of how practical or necessary it actually is. The conversation digs into the ongoing battle around cloud-native development using technologies like Kubernetes. You can be cloud native with more straightforward approaches! The same applies to web frameworks - there are lots of choices. Build as little as necessary!

How does good design pay off in software? Carl and Richard talk to Billy Hollis about his work designing software, both from a user interaction perspective and application architecture. Billy talks about saving time and money by working hard on design to get a clearer picture of what stakeholders want—because code rework is always more expensive! The conversation also digs into the institutional knowledge walking out of many companies through employees retiring—and how much work that is going to generate over the next few years to modernize!

Can you do mob programming remotely? Carl and Richard talk to Ulrika Malmgren about mob, or team programming - where three to five developers work together on the same problem, rotating keyboard control and collaborating to write the best possible code. Modern tools like Teams and Zoom make it easy to do the same programming style with everyone remotely! Ulrika talks about how team programming becomes the standard approach to development - as opposed to solo programming, where everyone works separately and then has to spend time sharing what they've done! Good team programming results in higher-quality code in less time - and more happiness!

What can machine learning do for geospatial data? Carl and Richard talk to Malte Loller-Anderson and Mathilde Ørstavik about their work at Norkart, using aerial imagery to build detailed maps around Norway. Mathilde dives into the critical role of machine learning - identifying buildings in images. Usually done by hand with each new image, Norkart has a machine learning model that automates the process trained on previous vector maps of buildings. But there are many things that look like buildings in Norway, including patches of snow, mountains, and even shapes under water. Malte also discusses how Norkart has decided to train in-house with nVidia L40 processors rather than in the cloud - the hardware is used 24 hours a day since some models can take weeks to train! There are many interesting ideas about geospatial data and machine learning from people who have been doing it for years.