.NET Rocks!

Carl and Richard continue the Geek Out series on alternative energy with wind power. The conversation starts with the admission that as much as has been done with wind power so far, it's just a tiny drop in the bucket of total power consumption - less than 1% of US power comes from wind. Then the boys dig into the different types of wind power generation, the challenges that the power grid has incorporating wind power into the grid, and the kinds of problems that home owners have with wind power also. Wind has potential, but also problems. But long term it's part of the solution.

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Carl and Richard talk to Jeroen Hulscher about web accessibility. Accessibility challenges come in lots of different forms, and the way we build web pages can make it impossible for some to use your site. Jeroen talks about the tools and techniques to help developers understand what you need to do to make your site easy to use no matter what challenges you might have. As Jeroen says, at some point all of us are going to have some accessibility issues - the web site you make accessible may one day help you!

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Carl and Richard have a discussion with a vegetable. Yeah, that's right, we interviewed a leek named Ricky Leeks. Beyond all the endless puns, is a great conversation about memory management in .NET. Ricky also lets us know about a free e-book on .NET Memory Management you can download from the links in the show. Check it out!

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Carl and Richard talk to John Bennett and Colin Hicks from MSNBC along with Oren Eini about the role RavenDB has played in building applications. John talks about how MSNBC was using SQL Server essentially as a blob store, storing stories as XML documents inside of the database. The conversation digs into the challenges of running a web site with well over a billion page views a month, the impact of breaking news on traffic, and how RavenDB solves the document storage problem effectively for MSNBC.

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Another panel discussion from DevConnections, this one focused on how cloud computing is impacting developers. No holds are barred as the panel digs into virtualization, infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and more.

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A panel discussion at DevConnections in Las Vegas digs into different styles of web application development in 2012 - comparing web forms to MVC to the up-and-coming Single-Page style of web app. Carl handles questions from the audience while Richard causes trouble on the panel.

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Carl and Richard talk to Bart de Smet about the beta of Reactive Extensions (Rx) Version 2. Currently in beta when the show was recorded, Rx 2.0 works with .NET 4.5, both for desktop and metro, as well as Silverlight 5 and Windows Phone 7.1. Bart talks about how Rx lets you write LINQ expressions over top of events, completely changing the way you think about responding to events. If you're tired of cluttering up your UI code with event handlers or you've got a back end process that needs to deal with millions of incoming events, you owe it to yourself to look at Rx!

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Carl and Richard talk to Bill Wilder about Hadoop on Azure. Hadoop is a technology for analyzing massive (petabytes) amount of data efficiently. Originally developed by Yahoo, it was given to the Apache Foundation as an open source project. Google, Facebook and others have all contributed to the project. Microsoft has come late to the game, but with a very compelling offering - you can run Hadoop on Azure and use Visual Studio to work with it. There's lots to learn about Hadoop, this show is just the starting point!

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The first of many alternative energy geek outs, Carl and Richard talk about solar power. The boys talk about using solar in the home in the form of thermal as well as photovoltaic, at utility scale with solar thermal, even space-based power. The conversation explores the huge diversity of photovoltaics, including concentrators and quantum dot technologies, the advantages and disadvantages involved. There's also a brief discussion on battery technologies, since solar power doesn't work all that well at night. In the end there aren't easy answers, but things are advancing forward - the amount of solar power being generated these days is increasing!

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Carl and Richard talk to Bryan Hunter and OJ Reeves about programming in Erlang. Erlang is a language built by the telecommunications industry for maximizing concurrency, distribution and reliability. If you're looking to develop applications that take advantage of parallelism, you owe it to yourself to look at Erlang!

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