.NET Rocks!

Carl and Richard talk to Tim Thomas about his thoughts around holistic design. And Tim means it - thinking about all levels of design, not just the UI, but how the whole application goes together. The conversation digs into the debate around skeuomorphism and how technology users themselves are evolving. Lots of broad thinking about the state of technology and how to best interact with your users to inspire and delight!

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Carl and Richard talk to Neil Black from the XBox team about SmartGlass. SmartGlass is Microsoft's technology for utilizing smartphones and tablets as an extension of the XBox. Neil talks about the various roles that the 'second screen' can play in XBox applications and games. The conversation digs into how SmartGlass works with television events to create a more social experience, how you can provide secret information to game players on an otherwise shared screen, and more! If you're up for doing some SmartGlass development, grab the SDK, the link is included in the show links!

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While at DevIntersection in Orlando, Carl and Richard sat down to chat with Zoiner Tejada about his work instrumenting cloud-based web sites. Zoiner talks about using a wide variety of features in Google Analytics to instrument his Azure apps, including going directly to the Analytics APIs to do instrumentation of other kinds of apps, connecting up just about anything that can speak HTTP! The second half of the conversation dives into utilizing this analysis - with a long chat about what a real Minimal Viable Product means and how the Lean Startup principles can be abused. Great conversation from a brilliant guy!

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Carl and Richard chat with Brian Noyes about the state of affairs with WPF, Windows 8 and the Prism project. Brian starts out the conversation talking about WPF is far from dead - Microsoft continues to invest in it, and lots of folks, including Brian's customers, are building great applications with WPF. This leads to a discussion about how the changes to Windows 8 at Build affect the WPF story and development in general - a huge topic area that warrants a bunch more shows. Finally, Brian digs into Prism, Microsoft Patterns and Practice group toolset for building great Windows apps for all sorts of versions of Windows, including Windows 8. Prism has moved beyond Silverlight, and is worth a serious look!

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Carl and Richard talk to Burke Holland about building mobile apps. But the conversation starts out with an announcement - Telerik's KendoUI is going open source! Burke talks a bit about the history of KendoUI and how it has evolved over the years, including a KendoUI Mobile (which is also open source). That leads to a discussion about mobile development as a whole, including his preferred tools and styles for building apps across different mobile platforms, comparing native, hybrid and web development on the smartphone and where tablets fit into this story.

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Carl and Richard chat with Richard Astbury about the Microsoft Research project known as Orleans. Orleans brings the Actor model of development to C# - the Actor model is typically found in functional languages, but you can write functional C#, so why not? Richard talks about Orleans being used to run Halo 4, where hundreds of thousands of players connected with each other between hundreds of Azure instances. Orleans was officially released into the wild at Microsoft Build. Looking at scalable software strategies? Take a look at Orleans!

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Carl and Richard go back to space with Uncle Bob! What started at NDC last Fall finishes today! But first, a quick conversation about an episode with Alan Stevens around the software craftsmanship movement, which Uncle Bob is a key part of. Then off to interstellar space! Bob pulls no punches, jumping straight into why nuclear technologies are key to significant space travel. Lots of history in this show too, talking about NERVA engines, Project Orion, Bussard Ram Engines and more! No warp drives or wormholes, what could we build today to go to another star?

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Carl and Richard talk to John Papa about the current state of Single Page Application development. John digs into his latest focus on libraries, the constant evolution in the Javascript world, and how AngularJS is still a big pile of awesome. The conversation also turns a bit philosophical, with a discussion of Javascript being the assembly language of the web, and how languages like Dart, CoffeeScript and TypeScript create abstractions over assembly language to make web applications more maintainable.

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Carl and Richard chat with Nicholas Blumhardt about his work on Serilog, a structured logging tool. But first, the conversation dives a bit into Octopus Deploy, an awesome tool for helping you manage your application packages and help deploy them to testing, pre-production, production, and so on. Then on to the main event - Nicholas' amazing Serilog product. Logging is a pain, and Serilog makes it as painless as possible - one line per log entry, and configuration to write your log anywhere: text files, other logging products, even Event Tracing for Windows!

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Carl and Richard talk to Hugh Jones about EU Data Protection laws. But first, a long discussion about the NSA revelations and the surveillance culture we're living in today. Hugh talks about the evolving perceptions around privacy and how data needs to be better protected. From there, Hugh dives into the EU Data Protection laws, which apply not only to companies doing business in the EU, but companies outside of the EU that are handling EU citizen data. The focus is on personally identifiable information - what is it, how do you handle it, how do you protect it, when does it become too risky to keep. Good thinking around data protection!

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