.NET Rocks!

The first Geek Out show of the new year, Carl and Richard talk about electricity. Call it a primer for many geek out shows to come, the conversation starts at the fundamentals of electricity, from individual atoms all the way to multi-gigawatt high-voltage direct current transmission systems. What does the future hold for the electrical grid? The conversation starts here.

Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to the one-and-only Scott Hanselman, it's the all radio voice show! Scott starts off the conversation explaining the recent move of Scott Guthrie over to Azure - by pointing out that he hasn't moved anywhere, just added Azure to his repetiore. Then the focus goes to the MVC vs. WebForms debate, which isn't a debate at all in Scott's eyes. And then things take a turn for the worse (or is that silly) and Scott starts answering questions on twitter about his hair. Lots of laughs, but not a lot of technical content ensues thereafter.

Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to John Papa about his views on the client development landscape. John has recently left Microsoft where he was a Silverlight and Windows 8 evangelist. The conversation starts off talking about the state of Silverlight now that Silverlight 5 has shipped and the ascent of HTML 5. John talks about his favorite HTML 5 libraries, including KnockoutJS and JS Render. Finally, the show wraps up with how Windows Phone 7 and Kinect will change the world.

Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard start off 2012 remaking a show that was lost at DevConnections, talking to Jim Holmes about testing. After a quick detour to chat about the amazing CodeMash conference that Jim helps run, the conversation dives into why you want to automate your web testing. Jim talks about free tools and pay tools, including Selenium, WatiN and Telerik's Test Automation Studio. Jim mentions a ton of great tools and resources, check out the links!

Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Corey Haines about his global code retreat. But before the discussion starts on code retreats, Corey digs into his interest in teaching children software development using a tool called Scratch. The global code retreat was an event run on December 3 2011 around the world - 93 cities participated. Next year the goal is 200 cities, including a group in Antartica, and if all goes well, the space station too!

Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to the one-and-only Steve McConnell about the evolution of software development practices. The conversation digs into where Microsoft is at these days - Steve has been close to the company for many years. Then Steve talks about his focus on what a good software executive looks like, how they can support their team effectively and be part of the success of the development process. Along the way Steve talks about how Agile fits into his views in Code Complete, scrum practices, continuous integration and more! Great insights from one of the best minds in the business!

Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

The last of the vignette shows from Oredev, this one only has two parts, but they're oddly related. The first interview is with Aaron Parecki, who talks about taking a side project that was worked on only evenings and weekends into an actual funded startup. Then an amazing conversation with Amber Case, an actual cyborg anthropologist. It's not as weird as you think, as Amber points out, any time you extend your physical or mental abilities with a peice of technology - say, a cell phone, you're a cyborg.

Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Kathy Malone about green computing. Kathy, who has a day job as an environmental engineer, talks about different types of green behaviour, including turning off PCs over night, using suspend mode and the like. But for developers, there are approaches to building software that consumes fewer resources, both electrical and human energy. Is there an additional price in resources to be paid for touch computing?

Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Another of the vignette shows from Oredev, Carl and Richard explore topics of communication. Up first is Udi Dahan, discussing his approach to domain driven design, focusing on communicating deeply with the stakeholders and domain experts to thoroughly explore the domain - even around something on the surface that seem simple like the concept of a customer. Next, Jim Benson digs into Kanban, including the idea of personal Kanban, which like the development and manufacturing methodology, focuses on being able to clearly see how much work is in progress and where things are being delayed from completion. Finally, the one-and-only Jon Skeet, talking about how his technical communication skills have evolved from answering thousands of questions on newsgroups and Stack Overflow.

Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Carl and Richard talk to Damian Edwards and David Fowler about SignalR. SignalR is a library for providing persistant connections between a web server and a browser by providing an abstraction over top of technologies like WebSockets or even AJAX polling. SignalR requires .NET 4.0 on the back end and jQuery on the front end... although non-browser clients are in the future!

Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations