.NET Rocks!

Visual Studio Team Services continues to evolve! While at Connect in New York, Carl and Richard chatted with Brian Harry about the latest set of features coming out of the VSTS team. Brian talks about how Microsoft has been eating its own dog food and using VSTS everywhere, even with the development of Windows. Discussions also dig into the challenges of moving so fast with so many developers, managing testing at speed and more!

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Ready to use GitHub beyond your browser? Carl and Richard talk to Phil Haack about his latest work at GitHub, where they are focused on expanding the audience that can rely on GitHub for social coding of all types. The discussion starts out focused on the rewrite of GitHub Desktop to Electron and the impact that has had for maintainability of code, and then moves to the latest work done to support game development in GitHub, specifically for Unity developers. Game development involves large digital assets like 3D models, movies and music - not the usual fodder for a Git repository. But Phil's team has build stuff to make life easier - check it out!

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No anti-patterns this time - Steve is talking patterns! Carl and Richard chat with Steve Smith about various development patterns that can help you build software that is more reliable, scalable and robust. While Steve is famous for his anti-pattern calendars, this time around he's discussing a number of excellent patterns that are becoming more prevalent in the .NET development world, including the Builder pattern (which .NET Core relies on), Null Object Pattern, Strategy and Rules Patterns and more! If an hour isn't enough, check out Steve's books and Pluralsight videos!

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Ready to experiment with containers? Carl and Richard talk to Kendra Havens about the on-going integration of container technology into Windows, Visual Studio and .NET. Kendra talks about moving existing applications into Docker containers, and how even when the underlying operating system is large (say, Windows), you only need to download it once to use it across any number of container instances. There's great tooling for Docker support in Visual Studio and VS Code, so you can use Docker the way you want to. And Microsoft uses containers extensively internally as well, so the tooling just keeps getting better!

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Can everyone benefit from DevOps practices? While at Ignite in Orlando, Carl and Richard sat down with Donovan Brown and Damian Brady to talk about the recently formed League of Extraordinary DevOps Advocates and the effort to get both developers and operations folks taking advantage of Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Instrumentation tooling and more. While the key to a good DevOps practice is the culture and process, having great tools makes everything easier, and today VSTS and TFS offer one-button delivery pipelines. It's never been easier for everyone to get onboard with a DevOps practice!

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How does Microsoft make Visual Studio Team Services? With Visual Studio Team Services! While at Ignite in Orlando, Carl and Richard sat down with Dan Hellem and Rogan Ferguson to talk about their work in the VSTS team building and deploying features on a three-week cycle. The discussion dives into the agile practices that the different teams use and how they come together to get new versions out on a regular basis as part of the Software-as-a-Service offering of VSTS. Great conversation about keeping developers productive!

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DevOps with SQL Server? Yes! While at Ignite in Orlando, Carl and Richard sat down with Kevin Cunnane and Eric Kang to talk about the latest set of tooling in SQL Server to facilitate incorporating SQL Server databases into your DevOps workflows. Databases seem to be the biggest obstacles in the continuous deployment process - how do you make them part of the process? Kevin and Eric talk about the SQL Server Data Tools as a mechanism to allow database schema to be part of your source code and to be able to build deltas for version changes. Lots more tools in the show links, check them out!

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What can developers do with artificial intelligence? While at Ignite in Orlando, Carl and Richard sat down with David Carmona to talk about the latest AI offerings from Microsoft. The conversation starts out focused on some of the higher level issues in AI tech - the moral and ethical aspects. The major AI players in the world are collaborating to help develop standards to do the right things. Then David digs into the tooling available from Microsoft including all of the cognitive services, deep learning and analysis models. Lots of great things to experiment with!

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Ready for a different vue on web pages? Carl and Richard talk to Shawn Wildermuth about his experiences with vueJS. The conversation starts out with a discussion about the endless range of JavaScript frameworks - do we need another one? Shawn compares his experiences with Angular, React and vue. They all have strengths and weaknesses, the question is, what is important to you when building websites?

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Git for everyone! While at Ignite in Orlando, Carl and Richard talked to Ed Thomson and Dmitry Lyalin about the latest updates to Visual Studio Team Services that includes deep integration with Git - not just GitHub, but Git the repository technology. The conversation digs into the commitment Microsoft has to contributing to open source projects including Git itself - including moving Windows into the world's largest Git repository, a whole 300GB of source code! Git has penetrated deeply into Microsoft, is it the right choice for your projects?

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