.NET Rocks!

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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So how deep are you into Domain Driven Design? Carl and Richard talk to David Rael about his work applying DDD principles to the systems his customers develop. David focuses in on the idea of the ubiquitous language, something Eric Evans admits he wishes he'd put earlier in his seminal book on DDD. The ubiquitous language is the assembly of all the terms needed and agreed upon about the particular domain that the application has being built for. Most of what you need to know to build an application lives in that language, and most of what can go wrong goes wrong there. Great, focused conversation from someone living the DDD life!

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Microservices? Carl and Richard talk to Howard Dierking about his work building microservices starting with the name - Howard hates the term microservices. He prefers to call them focused services, which only makes sense. The goal is to write as little code as possible while delivering the capabilities needed, not all that different from most modern development approaches. The conversation turns to how we've twisted service design because deployment and versioning were so difficult. Today its better and we can take advantage of granularity to keep our services small, independently updated and flexible!

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Have you been building web apps with TypeScript? Carl and Richard talk to Steve Ognibene about his work with TypeScript projects. The discussion starts with dispelling myths about TypeScript - no, it doesn't exist just to make C# developers more comfortable in web development! Steve compares how development is different in the strongly typed world of C# where the compiler does a bunch of testing for you versus the dynamically typed space of JavaScript where you're responsible for managing type related errors - something that TypeScript can help with! In the end its all JavaScript, and that is evolving also - Steve talks about how ECMA 6 looks a lot more like C#... is there a middle point here we're all racing toward?

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What do developers like on their calendars? Carl and Richard talk to Steve Smith and Brendan Enrick about the making of the new 2016 developer calendar. They have been the team behind the NimblePros and later Telerik developer anti-pattern calendars for years. But there was no calendar in 2015 for a variety of reasons, leading to an outcry. In an effort to bring back the calendar, Steve and Brendan have launched a kickstarter campaign to raise enough funds to make the calendar, and a feathub site to take suggestions for the various pictures and ideas of each month. Check them out!

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Do you fear the CSS? You're not alone! Carl and Richard chat with Elijah Manor about his experiences becoming a "real" front end developer and embracing CSS development. Elijah talks about making the leap from hiding behind Twitter Bootstrap and actually starting to think about CSS as its own thing. The conversation turns quickly to tools - LOTS of tools. Elijah explains his CSS stack of Sass, CSSLint and AutoPrefixer. But many other tools get mentioned along the way for the variety of services they provide. The tooling is getting better, now is a great time to dig into CSS!

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Remember Orleans? Once an MSR project to scale Halo 4 multiplayer mode, it has grown into a full blown actor model implementation. Carl and Richard chat with Barry Briggs about bringing Orleans to your project. Barry talks through some great ideas on the actor model and it's focus on building distributed highly scalable applications. Orleans is now an open source project hosted on GitHub, and is worth a look - compare it to Akka.NET!

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