.NET Rocks!

While at the NSBCon in Brooklyn, New York, Carl and Richard talk to Udi Dahan about CQRS. CQRS is the acronym for Command and Query Responsibility Segregation. Udi begins the conversation talking a bit about the history of CQRS and how it derived from Bertrand Meyer's work on CQS back in the 80s. The cornerstone of CQRS is a separation between commands (insert/update/delete) and querying in databases - not just relational databases, of course, but certainly the focus is there. The power of the pattern is its ability to handle huge volumes of data in both directions, simplifying application design as the load increases. Great thinking from Udi as usual!

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Carl and Richard talk to Steve DelBianco about taxation and software development - including the new Marketplace Fairness Act. But first the focus is on the history of sales tax, which as Steve explains, is focused on physical goods transacted in person. The first crisis of sales tax came in the 30s when catalog sales became popular and more consumers starting buying products from other states. This presents the idea of Use Tax, effective a self-declared sales tax collection process for good you buy out-of-state. Yeah, that's right, you're suppose to assess sales tax on yourself! Steve has been involved for more than a decade in the effort to modernize sales taxes to handle internet sales, which leads to the current situation around the Marketplace Fairness Act - which is not at all what the name should be. The states are trying to garner the right to collect taxes and demand from anyone in any state - and this law might actually pass! Check out the links below for ways to make your voice heard.

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Carl and Richard talk to Lino Tadros about his viewpoint on doing mobile development using the plethora of cross-platform development tools available today. First up - Xamarin's tools for building iOS and Android apps. Windows Phone also makes an appearance, especially with Xamarin Forms. The Xamarin stack continues to evolve and improve, and Lino is pretty impressed. Then it's over to the HTML/JavaScript world of Adobe Cordova, with implementations in Visual Studio as well as the Telerik Platform. Lino talks about its strengths around working beyond even the three top mobile platforms for when you really want to deal with the long tail, but the implementations vary a bit, leading to the ecosystem of plugins to fill in the gaps. Both these approaches work, Lino focuses in on the skillsets needed, and reminds of the reality - there is no cross-platform solution out there that doesn't demand you understand the platforms you're working with.

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Carl and Richard talk to Ben Watson about his work around writing high performance .NET code. Ben talks about how the Bing team decided to use .NET code internally, which seems like an obvious choice for a Microsoft group, but it isn't really - when milliseconds count, does .NET makes sense? Ben says it does, and he's done the work to prove it. Ben's book "Writing High Performance .NET Code" focuses not only on coding techniques, but also the larger practice of having a deep understanding of how .NET works, and the processes that take place to turn .NET code into machine code. The conversation also digs deeply into the need for performance measurement, especially Event Tracing for Windows. .NET can be fast when you do it right!

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Carl and Richard talk to Mårten Rånge about his efforts to contribute to the open source project that is F#. F# is really open source and taking public contributions, but as Mårten explains, it's not that simple. You need to get engaged with the project on CodePlex and actually get to know the team and where the project is at to hope to make a difference there. As Mårten says, everyone is very nice, but they do have a vision of where the project is going - and you can contribute to that vision! The conversation digs into what it takes to actually build your own version of F# as well as the art of making a contribution to a project that will ultimately be delivered in Visual Studio. This is just the start for Mårten, and perhaps for you also!

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Carl and Richard talk to Trevan Hetzel about writing CSS code to do JavaScript work in modern web pages. When you're a coder, you tend to code. When you're a designer, you're more likely to style. Trevan discusses the many things that CSS can do that most coders tend to write JavaScript for instead. And once you see what's possible in CSS, the question drills in on - is this a good idea? Are we writing JavaScript that is better served as a behaviour in a style? Where do you want your stuff to live? Trevan also digs into a bunch of great tools for taking your CSS to a higher level, check them out in the show notes!

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Carl and Richard chat with Mike Hostetler about his work with Node.js and the Sails.js MVC Framework. The conversation starts out with a recap of Node itself, how it takes on the web services problem with a minimal footprint at first, and how you can add in the bits you need with the Node Packaged Manager. Then Mike digs into Sails.js, an MVC framework to help you build well-structure web pages in JavaScript against Node on the backend - JavaScript everywhere! The discussion also deals with the state of the Node community, including the announced departure of TJ Holowaychuk, one of the most prolific Node library developers out there. Node is moving into the mainstream, have you checked it out? Lots of links below!

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Once more into the breech for the last of the fusion power GeekOuts, at least for now. Carl and Richard dive into the most controversial aspect of fusion power, so-called "cold fusion." This is a sensitive topic in the scientific community, so much so that it's name changes on a regular basis. The current popular name is Low Energy Nuclear Reactions. And the name is a big deal - Richard starts off the conversation by digging into the idea that there is more than one kind of cold fusion. Then the history lesson starts, with a study of what led up to the dramatic announcement by Fleischmann and Pons in March of 1989 - and the catastrophic fallout that led to the concept of "pathological science" and forcing it essentially underground. So what's real and what is snake oil? Is there something to cold fusion after all? The answers, as always, are complex and interesting!

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Carl and Richard chat with IdeaBlade man Ward Bell about the latest in Breeze and the whole concept of building web clients that can function in a disconnected state. It's possible with modern browsers to store information locally, which can help your web app survive an intermittent connection. Ward talks about how Breeze, his open source tool for caching, validation and querying, helps solve the disconnected problem. The challenge is finding the right patterns of development so that you don't have to litter your code with connectivity testing, just handle failures when they come without losing the user's work. Easy, right?

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Carl and Richard talk to Kathleen Dollard about her deep dive into Roslyn. The conversation starts out with a great question from a listener about using Roslyn to step into the compiler and understand how syntax trees would look... and what the potential for visualization is. Kathleen talks about her own open source project RoslynDom to help understand what's going on inside of Roslyn. The discussion also gets into some of the cool new capabilities coming in the next version of Visual Studio, and how Microsoft has changed the shipping process entirely - it's not the Studio you once knew!

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