.NET Rocks!

So where is Azure at today? Carl and Richard talk to Michele Leroux Bustamante about her work with a number of customers utilizing Microsoft Azure. The conversation digs into what Michele considers new Azure vs. old Azure. She still has customers depending on web and worker roles, while many have moved purely over to WebSites. And the evolution continues, with better analytics, the beginnings of container technology taking over from regular VMs... we're still at the beginning of the cloud revolution, and it's only getting more interesting!

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How do you test your mobile applications? James Montemagno talk to Carl and Richard about various testing approaches for mobile apps. James talks about the Xamarin Test Cloud with thousands of different devices you can test against... for a fee of course. This leads to a conversation about automating UI testing, testing against local devices and only going to the cloud when you're ready to test on a larger diversity of phones. James also talks about the broadening range of devices out there, not just phones but tablets, wearables and IoT. Everything needs testing, and there are tools to make it easier!

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How do you test your cross platform applications? Carl and Richard talk to Paul Mooney about building software in .NET and Java and wanting to use a common set of testing protocols. Tricky, but possible! The conversation focuses in on abstractions, which are key to creating sufficient separation of functionality to allow you to insert testing code regardless of what language you work in. And it turns out you can write tests for multiple languages if you're careful. Java and .NET are more similar than we care to admit, and it opens the door to other approaches to testing. TDD is not platform specific!

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So how do you build your cross-platform mobile apps? Carl and Richard talk to Troy Miles about his experiences building mobile apps with the Ionic Framework. Built over top of Adobe Cordova, Ionic takes over a lot of the plumbing code that you find yourself building in every mobile app. Ionic brings controls to the table in two forms - pure CSS components and CSS/JavaScript. You could write the CSS yourself (or maybe you couldn't), but why would you? Troy talks about some of the applications out in the marketplace built with Ionic and how well they look and act like native apps, without having to write the app from scratch multiple times. Check it out!

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Jez Humble is back and building a lean enterprise! Carl and Richard talk to Jez about continuous delivery and all that amazing DevOps stuff - but then we get to the serious bit, which is really about how DevOps is a manifestation of organizational change. You need buy-in from the top to make it happen, but it can't happen all at once. How do you make gradual improvements to present the power of a better culture with deeper understanding? Jez talks about the importance of metrics and measuring the performance of your software. And in the end, the best metrics are the ones that relate to the business - which is a great way to talk to management!

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Well, there goes another milestone - show 1100! Since Richard actually joined as co-host starting with show 100, that makes ONE THOUSAND .NET Rocks episodes together. Sure, there's 130 Tablet Shows, but who's counting? The conversation digs into a bunch of the gear used to make .NET Rocks and all the PWOP podcasts. We may not take ourselves too seriously, but we sure do take podcasting seriously. You wanna know how it's done? Have a listen!

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Are you ready for ECMAScript 6? Carl and Richard talk to Jafar Husain about some of the great new features coming in ECMAScript 6 - the next version of JavaScript, at least for now. Jafar talks about the fun and challenges of participating in the TC39 committee that developed the ES6 standard which is now being implemented by browser developers. Jafar digs into Promises, Yields, Proxies and more - lots of discussion about features you've come to love in languages like C# appearing in JavaScript! And the process isn't done, the JavaScript 7 spec is already being developed!

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Are you ready for C# 6? Carl and Richard talk to Bill Wagner about the latest changes to C# 6, with some features being dropped (perhaps to appear in a later version), some syntax changes, and digging deeper on some of the more complex features available. Now that everything around C# is open source, you can see the process of developing new features going on, and even participate in it! Bill and Richard also talk about Humanitarian Toolbox, their ongoing effort to build open source software for disaster relief organizations. And even a little discussion about C# 7!

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So what comes after Durandal? Rob Eisenberg talks to Carl and Richard about Aurelia! The conversation starts out focused on AngularJS and Rob's role with the open source project and ultimate departure. But that was back in November 2014 - what happens next? Aurelia is Rob's vision of what web developers need to build effective browser-based client applications. Rob talks about implementing Aurelia to utilize ECMAScript 6 and 7 while still polyfilling back to ES5 - the Javascript you recognize. This leads to a whole discussion on transpiling and how its possible to move a language forward without breaking backward compatibility, even a language as diverse as Javascript!

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Are you ready to build web pages with web components? Cory House is! Carl and Richard talk to Cory House about the web component specification and what that will look like in your modern web development. As Cory explains, the key idea behind web components is to provide a framework for Javascript library extensibility that doesn't force you to own the library yourself. While the standard is still being discussed, Cory mentions some libraries that have already gone ahead and implemented a variation of this extensibility, such as Steve Sanderson's amazing KnockoutJS. Web components make Javascript that much better to use!

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