.NET Rocks!

Microsoft is making several Copilot products - should you? Carl and Richard talk to Phil Haack about the latest version of ab.bot, his customer success startup. Now Phil is calling ab.bot a Copilot for Customer Success since he incorporated OpenAI ChatGPT into it. The conversation tries to steer clear of the hysteria around modern large language models (although it is hard!) and more into the practical applications - using large language models to summarize long customer support conversations and find related conversations to current ones - perhaps identifying new high-priority features! The wave of large language models is in its early days, and with the new APIS available, it may be time to make them part of your projects too!

Do you know what your web app is up to? Carl and Richard talk to Sam Basu and Rosen Vladimirov about the latest versions of Fiddler. The original Fiddler for Windows is a free tool, but the Progress team has written all new products in the Fiddler space that are cross-platform and designed to work with different groups of people. Fiddler is for developers, first and foremost, letting you see the messages passing between the browser (or other clients) and the server in HTTP and HTTPS. With the new products, you can also connect to SignalR and gRPC data! Then there are tools for tech support and even embedding capabilities into your applications.

An MAUI version of Doom? Carl and Richard talk to Wesley Cabus and Nico Vermeir about their efforts to port the venerable game Doom to C# and .NET 6 with MAUI as the UI. Wesley did the base conversion of Doom over to .NET, while Nico focused on getting the UI working through MAUI. Converting code, graphics, music, and sound effects from the 1990s into modern solutions is challenging but fun! Primarily working on the PC, there's a concerted effort to get a version running on Android devices too - and they could use your help!

What if you didn't have to choose between client-side and server-side Blazor? Carl and Richard talk to Javier Nelson and Steve Sanderson about Blazor United in its early stages of development, providing flexibility at the web component level for client- and server-side rendering. At the simplest level, Blazor United offers server-side rendering when a site is first hit so that you can load the larger client-side components over time. But deeper is the idea that some elements on your web page benefit from being client-side, and some from being server-side, and why should you have to choose only one?

How can the cloud help developer velocity? Carl and Richard talk to Bryan Foster about the complexities of modern software development - and how different cloud technologies can help move faster and not be afraid to break a few things along the way! Bryan talks about using Azure Deployment Environments to make it easy for developers to stand up resources for their apps - and just as quickly shut them down when done. This leads to a broader conversation around the governance of CI/CD pipelines and the role of the cloud, even to the point of using DevBox to have an entirely virtualized development environment!

ChatGPT, BingAI, and Google Bard are the latest examples of large language model machine learning - are we at an inflection point in technology? Carl and Richard talk to Grant Barrett of A Way with Words about the power of these new technologies to solicit reactions from many folks, including many tech journalists. Grant talks about how language conveys a sense of intelligence even when there is none to be had and the problems created by those assumptions. It is still the early days for these chatbots - will they rapidly improve or fade into another AI winter?

What's next for C#? Carl and Richard talk to Mads Torgersen about what the team is working on for C# 12. Mads talks about how the language design team is organized to take ideas for C# and explore them, considering all aspects before implementation. The conversation digs into a few of the new features coming and some of the considerations, like breaking changes, that might be necessary to make a feature as good as possible. With C# nearly 25 years old, there is lots of legacy to deal with, but the future looks bright!

What does web front-end development look like in 2023? Carl and Richard chat with Amy Kapernick about her work helping companies build web front ends with a vast array of tools. Amy talks about how client frameworks continue to evolve, extending the so-called "big three" of Angular, Vue, and React to focus on different styles. The conversation also ranges over testing web apps, building pipelines for automated testing, accessibility, and more!

MAUI is out! What's next? While at Swetugg in Stockholm, Carl and Richard chatted with David Ortinau and Maddy Montaquila about getting MAUI shipped and seeing how the world is using it! The conversation digs into what typical developers are doing with MAUI and other platforms in the plans for future MAUI. David and Maddy talk about how Blazor Hybrid is creating a lot of excitement for folks, balancing the reach of web development with the power of native development - it's a great time to be building cross-platform software!

Why write functional C#? Carl and Richard talk to Simon Painter about what happens when you apply functional programming approaches to your C# code. Simon discusses how some functional programming aspects are best served in a functional language like F#, but you can write C# in a more functional style. The conversation focuses on minimizing side effects - writing your code so that you can see what it does and how it would behave when changed. Functional code tends to be more testable as well!