Have you automated your deployment infrastructure? Carl and Richard talk to Matt Wrock about his tool chain for doing deployments. The raft of tools is long, but largely familiar: NuGet, Chocolatey, Boxstarter, Vagrant. Matt continues on with Atlas, Packer and Boxcutter to put together a completely automated process to build new VMs with services, tools and your software all pre-configured and ready to go. More good thinking about getting your configuration down as code!

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

How do you manage version numbers? Carl and Richard talk to Jake Ginnivan about his open source project called GitVersion. GitVersion works to automate the semantic versioning of your software. The conversation starts out focused on the details of semantic versioning - beyond the major.minor.patch, there are the alpha, beta and release candidate builds. Jake walks through the process of automating versioning, being able to understand what changes you've made to your code to know what numbers need to increment. This is a cool tool to check out!

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

Messaging in browsers? Carl and Richard talk to Derick Bailey about messaging patterns in Javascript. Yes, browsers always use messages, that's what HTTP is about - but there are messages, and there are messages. Derick talks about using the publish/subscribe pattern with RabbitMQ to build a highly scalable system. These are patterns that are popular outside of the web, but the modern web can do anything any other system can do - so it's time to put these messaging patterns to work in your web applications!

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

How does Windows 10 change NuGet? Carl and Richard talk to Jeff Fritz about the new features being added to NuGet to support Windows 10 Universal Apps. The core feature is the ability to build a NuGet package that will run on all the Windows 10 universal platforms - PC, tablet and phone. The conversation then switches to the Visual Studio 2015 launch and the crazy three day hackathon preceding it that Jeff participated in, building the AllReady applications for Humanitarian Toolbox and the RedCross. The project is now open source on GitHub and ready for lots of contributors, check it out!

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

One girl shy of a Mondays - Carl and Richard try and stay on topic with Mark Miller while they explore the science of great design. The truth is that Mark has been working for decades to build software that is truly intuitive to use, and the talks about all the subtle, but broadly applicable details that can make an application truly a pleasure to use. As is typical of Mark, this is nothing vague, but concrete, detailed and repeatable steps for making better designed software. You need to check out his amazing videos on the subject, it can make your software better!

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

And he's back! Carl and Richard talk to Shawn Wildermuth about his year-long journey around the world, part honeymoon, part working trip. The tour ended abruptly when an accident broke Shawn's arm, but he's home now and on the mend. The conversation digs into the huge array of developers and cultures that Shawn spent time with in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Shawn also talks about some ideas around building VR apps - is there something beyond games worth making? Is this technology going to take off this time around? Always fun to catch up with a very productive member of the community!

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

So what does it take to make scalable, resilient services in the cloud? Carl and Richard talk to Mark Fussell about Azure Service Fabric, the underlying infrastructure inside Azure to provide these capabilities. And the Azure Service Fabric doesn't only run on Azure - it runs on Windows Server too! Mark talks about creating your application in a way that allows it to scale into the cloud, whether its running there or not. In theory the fabric is just plumbing, but its the kind of plumbing that's hard to do right, and easy to mess up - and you don't want to find out you got it wrong when your customers are growing and demanding more!

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

You write a lot of code, but how often do you read it? And how do you read it? Carl and Richard talk to Tudor Girba about getting better at reading code by using tools that help you organize it. The conversation starts out with a simple idea - how do you get to understand the codebase of an existing application? Do you really just open a code window and start reading? Couldn't you use some tools that would help organize the code into some sort of summary that could get you moving faster? Tudor talks about Moose, a platform for doing software analysis. This leads to an idea called humane assessment, making it far easier to understand code - even your own!

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

So what's happened with Glimpse? Carl and Richard talk to Anthony van der Hoorn and Nik Molnar about the latest developments with their web instrumentation library Glimpse. First news - Anthony and Nik have joined Microsoft's cross platform team! The conversation digs into the history of Glimpse, its support by the community and Red Gate, and how it has progressed to live as an open source project with Microsoft. If you haven't worked with Glimpse, you're missing out on a great way to understand what's happening with your web site. And it continues to evolve - check it out!

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

How much of a language is essential? Carl and Richard chat with Mark Seemann about what features are critical to a language, and which ones are redundant. Who would put redundant features in a language? Mark talks about how languages evolve, and how more advanced features can supercede older features, but the old features can never be removed without breaking existing code. And worst still, when building a language is your business, you'll add features whether they are needed or not - you need something new to sell! The conversation also digs into understanding languages more deeply - do you really need that if statement? Just because a feature exists doesn't mean you need to use it!

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