.NET Rocks!

How can space science help you learn Postgres? While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talk to Rob Conery about his latest book, A Curious Moon. Rob talks about being inspired by Andy Weir's The Martian to write a book that teaches Postgres by using the data from the NASA Cassini mission to Saturn. The book is part story, part tutorial about using Postgres, data loading and analytics. And the data is real - you're working from the actual data from the Cassini mission. The book is an innovative way to learn and starts you down the path of doing real data analytics, looking at what your data says!

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Another year goes by, time for an identity update! While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard talk to Dom and Brock about the latest updates to IdentityServer. A key aspect of the past year was two versions of .NET Core - both 1.1 and 2.0. Dom and Brock talk through all the twists and turns that it takes to keep IdentityServer up to date with the latest .NET Core pieces. So what about authentication? The conversation turns to the new PolicyServer available as both an open source and a retail product version. Identity continues to evolve!

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How do you get girls interested in programming and help them learn? While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard talk to Jennifer Wadella about her experience building Kansas City Women in Technology. Jennifer talks about trying to build a community of women peers in Kansas City, only to discover a huge group of women who wanted to get involved in technology. So off into the teaching practice, aimed at girls called Coding and Cupcakes and for women, an event called Coding and Cocktails. Lots of great thinking about how to make programming more approachable!

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Still exploring options for cross-platform mobile development? Carl and Richard talk to Tim Sneath and Adam Barth about Google's Flutter - using the Dart language to build mobile applications that compile to iOS and Android. Tim has only recently joined Google but has dived head-first into this new approach to mobile development. Adam as one of the originators of the project talks about his key focus - the architecture that allows you to build for both platforms from one code base, and a rapid code-compile-deploy-edit cycle called hot-reload that makes iterating on your mobile app development fun! With a choice of editors (including VSCode), Flutter might just be the approach you'll enjoy to cross-platform mobile development!

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How can storytelling advance your career? Carl and Richard talk to James Whittaker, who recently published The Storytellers Spellbook, about the power of stories to help people understand you and the things that are important to you. James tells his story about realizing how important storytelling was to his career and what it could do for him - and the additional challenge of teaching others how to tell stories. He breaks down three key aspects - the story you tell, how you tell it, and what you do while telling it. You don't have to be on stage, even your regular performance review at work is a type of storytelling, and it's in your best interest to get better at it!

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How do you make sure your APIs can interop across languages and other complexities? Carl and Richard talk to Darrel Miller about OpenAPI, the open source specification for standard aspects of APIs like collections, security rules and more. The specification is now at version 3 and starting to really mature - all the big players are involved, and you can contribute as well! Darrel discusses how Microsoft has been implementing OpenAPI standards to their own APIs and what it takes for you to do it as well. There is an OpenAPI.NET implementation available at GitHub for you to work from and lots of great information in Microsoft docs. Check it out!

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How do you get a job in software development that you love? Carl and Richard talk to Chuck Max Wood about his experiences teaching people to get jobs in software development. Chuck starts with finding a job you really want - there are lots of options in software development. He talks about LinkedIn as a great source of information about companies and the people that work at them. Making connections to people in companies, understanding what the company does and who is responsible for hiring is all part of the practice of getting the right job - you can do it!

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Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are here, and Chris Love has some thoughts! Carl and Richard talk to Chris about his view on PWAs and their impact on building great web applications. Chris talks about the power of service workers to increase the performance of a web application through pre-loading of caching, tolerating unreliable connections, even cool event features that allow web apps to light up when they are needed, especially in a mobile scenario. Graceful degradation of features means that you build to the ideal browser, but tolerate versions that don't have comprehensive support for all PWA features. And check out Chris' offer for a PWA Course, special to .NET Rocks listeners!

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Artificial Intelligence has transformed vision technology! Carl and Richard talk to Tim Huckaby about his latest work with vision systems for retail, security and more. Tim talks about how AI has fundamentally changed the way you implement vision systems, taking away many of the limitations on number of people tracked, object and face recognition and so on. The conversation digs into the demonstration done at the Build conference for using regular security cameras to implement a real-time safety tracking system on a construction site - aspirational, but coming soon! And of course, there's a long conversation about privacy. What is fair, reasonable and wise?

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A new year, and new features for ASP.NET! Carl and Richard kick off the new year by talking to Jeff Fritz about his on-going work on ASP.NET - both the framework and core editions. The conversation naturally turns to web forms, the big exclusion from the core edition, but new features continue to be released in .NET Framework 4.7.1. Jeff talks about what modern development looks like for ASP.NET web forms, and the power of continued support for existing web applications, while providing approaches for adding new capabilities like mobile development and more. It's going to be an exciting 2018!

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