.NET Rocks!

Another set of stories from Oredev, this time around development practices. The first interview is with Dan North, where he discusses how development teams can move beyond just being able to ship software into something he calls hyper-productivity. He talks about teams that ship software twenty times a day! Next up, Jean Tabaka talks about how RallyDev uses Agile practices to make the entire company Agile. At RallyDev every person is involved in planning out the vision of the company quarter to quarter, from developer to executive. Finally, Gary Short digs into the challenges of technical debt - the idea that shortcuts in code increase the cost of development in the long term. Sometimes debt make sense, getting more features shipped in less time. But eventually the debt has to be repaid or the project goes bankrupt, unable to ship new features and ultimately cancelled.

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Recorded live from the GrapeCity booth at DevConnections, Kathleen Dollard (and her son Ben) talk about his PhD work in algorithms, how they are being utilized by her company, software composition (see show 708 with Juval Lowy), and ruminations on the future of software.

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Next up from Oredev - the cool projects! Carl and Richard talk to the one-and-only Tess Ferrandez from Microsoft. Tess has moved on from the mad debugging skills she blogged about to focus on Kinect and Windows Phone 7. The conversation digs into using Kinect beyond XBox games. Next up, Luca Minudel discusses his experiences building software for Formula One racing, perhaps the ultimate gadget ever! Finally, the show closes with Henrik Andersson of Tobii talking about prototype eye tracking hardware built into a laptop. Tobii also makes a .NET SDK so that you can easily add eye tracking to a XAML application. These are just some of the cool projects that were talked about at Oredev!

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Recorded live from the GrapeCity booth at DevConnections in Las Vegas. Carl and Richard talk to Dr. Neil about his work with Kinect, Surface 2, tablets, smart phones, and how they can all work together in a meeting space.

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While at DevConnections, Carl and Richard were part of a panel discussion on the cloud entitled 'Are We There Yet?' with Brian Noyes, Michele Leroux Bustamante, Brian Prince and Scott Seely. The conversation dug into migrating existing applications to the cloud, greenfield development, security, reliability and scalability.

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The next collection of tales from Oredev focuses on data visualization. The first conversation is with Alastair Allan, talking about his experiences in visualizing the GPS tracking data stored by every iPhone 4. While it was generally known that the iPhone kept a record of every GPS location and WiFi connection, it was not until Alasdair's visualization application let anyone (especially reporters) see on a map exactly what was in their own phone that the story became a sensation. Next, a conversation with Jon Dahl about minimalist programming and it's impact on the readability of code - a different, yet still important type of visualization. Finally the show ends with a conversation with Nora Herting and Heather Willems of ImageThink. ImageThink was at Oredev to create, in real time, graphic visualizations of the keynotes and conference sessions. While not technical specialists themselves, Nora and Heather talk about how really listening to lectures and conversations about technology provides cues for what is important in the visualizations. Visualizations have power!

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Where is Windows 8 taking us? While at DevConnections, Carl and Richard participated in a panel discussion with Tim Huckaby, Billy Hollis, Dr. Neil Roodyn and Paul Sheriff about the new Windows Runtime. Also listen for a brief appearance of the one-and-only Mark Minasi.

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The first of the vignette shows from Oredev, this show focuses on web development. The first conversation is with Peter Moskovits, talking about using HTML 5 WebSockets to build real bi-directional communicating applications in the browser. The second part of the show the boys talk to Troels Thomsen about building web applications in the cloud using AppHarbor. AppHarbor focuses on making it simple to take existing ASP.NET applications into the cloud. Finally, the last conversation is with Robby Ingebretsen talking about how closely related designers and developers actually are. A great group of stories and one of many sets from Oredev!

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Carl and Richard talk to Dan Hanan and Danny Warren about mixing Kinect together with WinRT. Back at the Build conference keynote a 'marketecture' diagram showed how existing applications still work in Windows 8 but also introduced a new platform using WinRT. At the time attendees were told that the blue side (existing applications) and the green side (WinRT) will never cross. Then the folks at Interknowlogy got to work. Dan and Danny talk about how they built an application utilizing Kinect, depending on an SDK that runs on the blue side to communicate with a Metro application that runs on the green side. Crossing the streams? You bet!

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Carl and Richard talk to Neil McIsaac about building SharePoint sites in the cloud. The conversation starts out talking about the state of SharePoint development - that the combination of SharePoint 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 really works! Neil also talks about Silverlight's role in SharePoint as well as LightSwitch. Finally, Neil digs into the challenges around SharePoint in the cloud. After spending some time talking about SharePoint hosting options, Neil digs into SharePoint Online, which is Microsoft's SharePoint offering in Office 365. Neil talks about the challenges of SharePoint in the cloud, including multitenancy, claims-based security and scalability. SharePoint works in the cloud!

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