.NET Rocks!

Struggling to get started with Universal Windows Platform applications? Carl and Richard talk to Clint Rutkas about the Windows Template Studio (WTS). WTS was first released into the Studio marketplace at Build in 2017 and has been updating every six weeks or so - with lots of community contributions. Clint talks about striking the right balance between generating code automatically that demonstrates best practices and getting in the way of you writing your own code - it's never simple, but when done right, hugely powerful. WTS is an open source project on GitHub, you can contribute to it as well!

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New to ASP.NET Core 2 is Razor Pages - how is it different from Razor? Carl and Richard talk to Jess Chadwick about how Razor Pages takes Razor to the next level, getting away from traditional MVC (which is a funny thing to say) and into a more flexible model with a simpler code-behind approach. Jess talks about how this approach often ends up more closely coupled, but in a lot of cases, that's just fine. The different techniques are not mutually exclusive, you can mix-and-match as needed. This leads to a great conversation about state management, server-side rendering and more - web development continues to evolve!

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Do you have animation in your work? Carl and Richard chat with Rachel Nabors about her work putting animation into web applications. The conversation starts out with a bit of a history lesson around early animation on computers, especially around touch - Rachel argues that what made the iPhone great was the keyboard animation metaphor so good you forgot you were typing on glass. Animation when done right just makes your software easier and more enjoyable to use - but it shouldn't be too noticeable! Want to learn more? You can get 10% off of Rachel's books and courses with the code NETROCKS.

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Ready to try on F#? While at NDC Oslo, Carl and Richard chatted with Scott Wlaschin about what C# developers need to know to get started with F#. Scott talks a bit about his own history with development which ties in with the evolution of functional programming which in a way lost out to object-oriented programming back in the 1980s. Not that the two approaches are mutually exclusive, and Scott discusses how objects and functions live happily together in F#. It's a different way of thinking, but can be a very productive way to build applications - check it out!

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How do you get to know your customers? While at NDC Oslo, Carl and Richard talked to Diane Zajac-Woodie about empathy mapping, a process for trying to internalize the dimensions of your various customers. Diane talks about considering various dimensions of people, looking at what the see, hear, think, say and do. Empathy mapping is a way to get your team more engaged around what customer needs are, but they're only guesses - you also have to craft experiments to figure out the truth! In the end, the goal is to make the best software you can.

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Serverless is here - why would you do anything else? While at NDC Oslo, Carl and Richard hosted a panel of Rob Conery, Lynn Langit and Mathias Brandewinder to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the serverless approach to building applications. First up - the terrible name. Of course there are servers involved in serverless computing, you just don't have to think about them. The conversation spans over a number of different offerings, including AWS Lambdas, Azure Functions and Google Firebase. Serverless is worth serious study, there's a lot of potential!

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How does security work in ASP.NET Core? Barry Dorrans knows, he's writing it! While at NDC Oslo, Carl and Richard sat down with Barry to talk about all his work in the security space at Microsoft. As Barry says, .NET Core represented a unique opportunity to reboot how security works on the web for the Microsoft stack, and he tried to do right by us all. Nothing is ever simple as you want it to be, especially when it comes to security, but there are good things available today if you spend some time to understand them. And a little scotch doesn't hurt either!

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How do you make your applications accessible to everyone? Carl and Richard talk to Elle Waters about her working building applications for the visually and hearing impaired, on all sorts of platforms. The web dominates the discussions since so much can be built there. Elle talks about the array of tools that users have to help them understand a web page through audio, even touch solutions using braille! You can make your applications work well with these tools, but it takes empathy, effort and lots of testing.

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How can ETW help you? While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard talked to Dina Goldshtein about her work instrumenting applications. This leads to a conversation about Event Tracing for Windows, which Dina uses primarily to take measurements of different applications running on Windows machines - but you can have your app add to the ETW stream as well. Monitoring, profiling and debugging are all different tasks that can take advantage of the data provided by ETW, it depends on your needs at the time. Lots of discussion on the impact of measuring as well - nothing is free!

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There's a lot of stuff in Azure - how to sort through it all? While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard talk to Barry Luijbregts about the huge array of features that exist in the Azure Platform-as-a-Service offerings. Barry runs down the list, helping to categorize what elements are very similar, what are totally different, and how things work together. The platform is where it's at in terms of value, it's well worth your time to figure out what parts can work for you!

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