.NET Rocks!

The first of the new Tablet Shows as .NET Rocks episodes, Carl and Richard talk to Scott Allen about the continued evolution of JavaScript. The conversation starts out with a comment from a listener about a past show with Scott on Modernizr, and Scott talks about how things have changed since then - the focus on newer browsers (if IE9 counts as new) means that the tool needs change. Scott also talks about what new features are moving into the browser, reducing the library load your web page needs. Is the browser becoming a smart client platform?

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A flash from the past! Carl and Richard chat with Robert Scoble! Carl and Robert go back to the VBits days and the beginning of the public internet, the first blogs and Robert's time at Microsoft. Then the conversation turns briefly to Robert's work at Rackspace and their attempt to make the cloud even better. Robert also talks about his book the Age of Context, the stories they collected to create the book and a vision of the future!

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Carl and Richard talk to Marcel de Vries about CodedUI - the test functionality built into Visual Studio that nobody knows about. CodedUI tests are tests built to automatically operate your UI so that you can test your application top-to-bottom, no short cuts. Marcel talks about how CodedUI tests are actually built using a test recorder and then tweaking the tests to increase coverage. You can build tables of data to use for entry to challenge boundary testing, add additional assertions and validations - it's very clever! If you own Visual Studio 2013, you need to check this out!

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Carl and Richard chat with Micheal Learned about modern release management with Visual Studio. The conversation starts like many do when it comes to ALM: what's hard, and what's easy. And let's face it - releasing software properly is often hard! Micheal talks about the various pitfalls that folks fall into around releasing software and how today's environment just won't tolerate those mistakes any more. This leads to a discussion about release pipelines (check out the great doc in the show notes) and Microsoft's acquisition of InRelease by InCycle Software. If you've got an MSDN license, you have to take a look at Release Management! And if you don't, take the trial out for a spin, it's worth it!

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Well, you knew this was coming - a geek out on the not-fun topic of nuclear accidents. Richard runs down the fundamentals of nuclear accidents, with some story telling around what happened at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Then on to the main event - Fukushima. The situation is serious, but progress is being made and the Japanese remain committed to fully cleaning up the mess made there. So is nuclear power worth the risk? Be part of this conversation; it's certainly not done yet!

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Carl and Richard talk to Amber DeRosa and Alicia Hatter about usability testing. The conversation starts out by digging into what usability testing is all about - actually looking at how users are using your software... or perhaps would want to use your software. Amber and Alicia talk about working through usability studies even before the software is built to get a feel for what the user would really like. And while software is being built, routine testing digs deeper into how the software will be used, what users actually like to do with it and how that can affect the final product. The discussion also digs into the dynamic between the developers, QA, project management and usability testing - they all have important roles in building great software!

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Carl and Richard talk to Alan Stevens about his views on software craftsmanship. Well, if he just agreed with it, it wouldn't be much of a show now, would it? Alan starts off talking about what it really means to be a craftsman - referencing such wonderful talents as Kevin Ryan Guitars and Steinway pianos as examples. This leads to a discussion about function, construction method and artistry - they're all part of making anything great. The conversation also digs into the whole medieval guild model that software appears to be grabbing onto, with apprenticeships, journeymen and masters. Does it make sense? Does it keep us humble? Does it really ship better software?

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Carl and Richard chat with Rob Conery about his open source project called Biggy. Biggy is a project in GitHub that puts a wrapper over top of Postgres (and SQL Server for that matter) to allow you to handle documents (aka JSON) efficiently and fast. Rob takes on thinking around noSQL in general, including graph and document databases. This leads to a whole discussion on what we should store and why. Rob mentions a ton of cool GitHub projects around storage (links in the show notes), and how much fun it is to be a developer today.

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While at the ModernApps2013 event in Mountain View, California, Carl and Richard got a chance to sit down with David Chappell and get his views on the changing landscape of software and software development. David talks about how applications have evolved into a devices+services model, where parts of the application live in the cloud, and the rest live in the various form factor devices that we all now use. Later the conversation turns to the evolution of Application Lifecycle Management, with concepts like Continuous Delivery and DevOps becoming essential skills for the modern developer. Great thoughts from an awesome thinker in our industry!

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Carl and Richard talk to Neil Danson about his experiences with F#. The conversation starts off connecting Carl's thoughts on neural networks and a listener question - so what is the role of F# in the big data analytic world? Neil digs into how F# has permeated all types of development in the .NET world, even WPF! There's also some serious discussion about quality of code in F# and how Bob Martin's SOLID principles can be applied to functional programming.

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