.NET Rocks!

How do you know how your software is working? While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard talk to Jessica White about her experience building dashboards to instrument operations, management and development. The conversation dives into what needs to be measured as well as how to represent those measurements in ways that help people understand - do it wrong and you can actually confuse people, or have your dashboard ignored. Jessica talks about how dashboards have to evolve with business needs. With new goals come new metrics and new dashboards to show those metrics. Your dashboard is no more static than your business is!

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

SharePoint development continues to evolve in 2018! Carl and Richard talk to Sahil Malik about his view on the latest offerings around SharePoint. At the Ignite event in 2017, Microsoft announced SharePoint 2019, so there's definitely a new on-premises version of SharePoint coming. Obviously, it's taken from the cloud edition, which is why the development model has changed so substantially. Sahil talks about the SharePoint Framework as the model for doing SharePoint customizations, and the coding is primarily in JavaScript - now SharePoint development is web development!

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

What does it take to build an application where the UI is strictly voice? While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard sat down with Heather Downing to talk about her experiences building voice-driven applications with a variety of tools, including Alexa and Google Voice. Heather digs into the challenges of thinking through what the voice interface is really good at, versus more traditional screen, keyboard, and mouse driven software. This leads to a broader discussion about getting away from the desk entirely, into highly mobile and standing environments where the keyboard is just not a practical option. Voice-driven apps are a different class of app entirely - does it make sense for your organization?

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

What goes into a Docker stack? Carl and Richard talk to Rob Richardson about how containers are evolving in the .NET world. Rob talks about how the Windows side of Docker is actually getting stronger - most developers using Docker use Linux as the template OS. The conversation focuses on moving existing .NET applications into Docker - aka, without .NET Core. It's certainly possible, and you get some of the container advantages. But with containers comes new thinking around architecture, the ability to organize and scale your services differently. But you can implement those features gradually, and take advantage of what orchestration can do for you. Whether in the cloud or on-premises, containers have a lot to offer!

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

Modern software development is complex, how do you teach it to beginners? While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard sat down with Maria Naggaga to talk about her approaches to teaching software development, both to children and adults, from the very beginning. Maria talks about using more approachable cause-and-effect type tools at the beginning to learn about procedural programming, and how the latest bits actually allow you to take that code forward into more advanced tools. Interactive documentation and minimal installation requirements are also important - check out Try .NET!

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

C# continues to evolve - there's more to learn! While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard talk to Jon Skeet and Bill Wagner about their on-going work on C#. For Bill, he's now part of the docs team helping people understand C#, and for Jon, it's his contributions via GitHub to ideas and features for C#. Both write great books and talk about the challenge of how C# is evolving as open source and in public. What features matter, and where does it all lead to? Will C# ever be finished, or is this an endless process? Is it getting easier to develop with C# or more complex? Great thoughts from two of the nicest thinkers on C#!

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

Whether you're a multi-national NGO or your local church group, every non-profit has cybersecurity issues! Carl and Richard talk to Cameron Birge and Tarek Dawoud about tools, techniques and mindset to protect data and resist hackers. While the practices are broadly applicable to any organization and applications, non-profits have specific challenges that make cybersecurity all the more challenges - how do you train volunteers that turn over steadily? How can you be sure that a volunteer software developer is doing the right thing security-wise? Lots of good thinking about how to prioritize your security needs, it's a journey, not a destination!

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

How is machine learning different over in the land of Amazon? While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard talked to Kesha Williams about her work building machine learning solutions using various Amazon technologies. The conversation starts out talking about the challenges around bias being amplified by machine learning technology - there are no simple solutions. Kesha talks about building a crime risk evaluation system using image recognition and machine learning. Just a prototype, but it opens the door to a deep conversation about the moral obligations on developers today. And the tech is cool too!

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

What does it mean to build a cloud-native application? While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard talked to Scott Guthrie about the latest features available in Azure. While there are always the Infrastructure-as-a-Service options of VMs and the like, you don't really get the power of the cloud until you move into more of the platform features. Scott describes how existing applications and be lifted-and-shifted into VMs in the cloud, and then broken apart to take advantage of various services. The ultimate manifestations use technologies that are cloud-specific, like CosmosDB and Logic App features so that you focuses solely on your code.

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

What if you could program in C# in your browser? Carl and Richard talk to Daniel Roth and Steve Sanderson about the evolution of Blazor - Steve Sanderson's amazing project using WebAssembly to put .NET In the browser. The big news is that Blazor is moving from a Sanderson research project into the ASP.NET GitHub repository - the team is going to work on it! Still experimental, the Microsoft team is keen to see what all of us will do with Blazor. If you want a C# experience end-to-end in web development, you need to check it out!

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