.NET Rocks!

One girl shy of a Mondays - Carl and Richard try and stay on topic with Mark Miller while they explore the science of great design. The truth is that Mark has been working for decades to build software that is truly intuitive to use, and the talks about all the subtle, but broadly applicable details that can make an application truly a pleasure to use. As is typical of Mark, this is nothing vague, but concrete, detailed and repeatable steps for making better designed software. You need to check out his amazing videos on the subject, it can make your software better!

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And he's back! Carl and Richard talk to Shawn Wildermuth about his year-long journey around the world, part honeymoon, part working trip. The tour ended abruptly when an accident broke Shawn's arm, but he's home now and on the mend. The conversation digs into the huge array of developers and cultures that Shawn spent time with in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Shawn also talks about some ideas around building VR apps - is there something beyond games worth making? Is this technology going to take off this time around? Always fun to catch up with a very productive member of the community!

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So what does it take to make scalable, resilient services in the cloud? Carl and Richard talk to Mark Fussell about Azure Service Fabric, the underlying infrastructure inside Azure to provide these capabilities. And the Azure Service Fabric doesn't only run on Azure - it runs on Windows Server too! Mark talks about creating your application in a way that allows it to scale into the cloud, whether its running there or not. In theory the fabric is just plumbing, but its the kind of plumbing that's hard to do right, and easy to mess up - and you don't want to find out you got it wrong when your customers are growing and demanding more!

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You write a lot of code, but how often do you read it? And how do you read it? Carl and Richard talk to Tudor Girba about getting better at reading code by using tools that help you organize it. The conversation starts out with a simple idea - how do you get to understand the codebase of an existing application? Do you really just open a code window and start reading? Couldn't you use some tools that would help organize the code into some sort of summary that could get you moving faster? Tudor talks about Moose, a platform for doing software analysis. This leads to an idea called humane assessment, making it far easier to understand code - even your own!

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So what's happened with Glimpse? Carl and Richard talk to Anthony van der Hoorn and Nik Molnar about the latest developments with their web instrumentation library Glimpse. First news - Anthony and Nik have joined Microsoft's cross platform team! The conversation digs into the history of Glimpse, its support by the community and Red Gate, and how it has progressed to live as an open source project with Microsoft. If you haven't worked with Glimpse, you're missing out on a great way to understand what's happening with your web site. And it continues to evolve - check it out!

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How much of a language is essential? Carl and Richard chat with Mark Seemann about what features are critical to a language, and which ones are redundant. Who would put redundant features in a language? Mark talks about how languages evolve, and how more advanced features can supercede older features, but the old features can never be removed without breaking existing code. And worst still, when building a language is your business, you'll add features whether they are needed or not - you need something new to sell! The conversation also digs into understanding languages more deeply - do you really need that if statement? Just because a feature exists doesn't mean you need to use it!

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So what is the state of Artificial Intelligence today? Carl and Richard geek out about what AI means today. The conversation starts out as usual with a bit of a history lesson - many things that were once called AI are now common, reliable technology like speech synthesis, natural language recognition, even vision systems. Once they work, they aren't AI any more. But the idea of an Artificial General Intelligence is much more challenging - and potentially risky. Richard digs through the key elements of AGI, the concept of the Singularity, comparing modern computers to the human brain and how close we may well be to making an AGI. But should we?

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Peer-to-Peer is more than BitTorrent! Carl and Richard talk to Matthew Podwysocki about the Thali Project, using peer-to-peer technology to put more power in the hands of the users. Matthew talks about being able to communicate between your various devices using WiFi and Bluetooth while maintaining privacy and not bouncing off a cloud server. The cornerstone is security, using TLS to encrypt all traffic in and out of your device. Messaging strategy, data synchronization and more are all part of the Thali Project, making this great technology all open source for anyone to use!

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What's your DevOps plan? Carl and Richard talk to Vishwas Lele about taking a comprehensive, model-driven approach to DevOps. What does it mean to be model-driven? Working with a strategic approach that is agnostic to any given technology or platform - but in the end, the tools do matter! Vishwas talks about common elements like a single repository for all assets, repeatable deployment processes, instrumentation and feedback mechanisms that enable the entire team to see how the software is being used and improved. He also talks about the Azure templates for getting infrastructure up and running quickly - and the on-going evolution to let this model work anywhere, not just in the cloud!

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How do the SOLID principles apply to .NET? Carl and Richard talk to Chris Klug about his experiences using SOLID to build reliable, maintainable and scalable project. The conversation walks through the five principles of SOLID with an eye to practical applications in .NET - what does a well implemented single responsibility look like? How does it work with patterns like MVVM? Chris shares his thoughts and coding approaches on a great debate about practical vs ideal implementations in SOLID.

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