.NET Rocks!

How do you manage legacy code? Carl and Richard talk to David Bernstein about his book Beyond Legacy Code. The conversation starts out talking about what legacy code is - and David brings up the idea that code is legacy if you don't have confidence in it. Now how do you get confidence? This is where the rewrite behavior comes from: You're naturally more confident in your own code. But is it a good idea? David talks about nine practices that are most effective at getting your application under control and out of legacy!

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How do you bring a DevOps practice to an existing application? While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talk to Damian Brady about his experiences working with teams trying to get better at building, deploying, instrumenting and maintaining existing applications. Often the processes put in place when an application is first developed stay the same - new techniques are applied to new apps. But it doesn't have to be like that! Damian talks about engaging everyone involved in the app, including management, development, QA, data folks, operations and more to work toward a better, more reliable application. And the results are worth it!

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Should we go back to the moon? Richard says yes - time for a Geek Out! In recent months conversations around the Moon have surged - Richard discusses both the SLS EM-1 mission to the move and the SpaceX space tourism flight. And then on to the main topic: Why should we go back to the moon? Richard focuses on four points: We have not explored much of the moon at all, we can extract fuel and manufacture things on the moon, we need to understand how humans function long term in low gravity (rather than freefall), and finally, there are some unique science opportunities on the moon. And it's not just Richard excited about the topic - there are a ton of scientists and industry that want to go too!

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Ready for another actor framework? Carl and Richard talk to Roger Johansson about his work on proto.actor, and ultra-light-weight, easy to get into actor framework for .NET and Go. The conversation starts out with Akka.NET, the framework that Roger worked on a few years ago, and how it's origins in Java gave it a certain amount of ceremony that Roger thought could be simplified - hence proto.actor! With a focus on speed and simplicity, proto.actor uses libraries like Google's protocol buffers to work with other platforms and libraries well, check it out!

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Visual Studio 2017 ships! Carl and Richard talk to Tim Sneath about his role in this version of Studio. Tim talks about speeding installation of Visual Studio by modularizing the various elements so you don't install things you don't need - but it's always easier to add more in! The conversation also digs into the extensibility model that makes it easier to build new features into Studio, and a great marketplace to share and sell them. Studio continues to evolve, the 2017 edition is awesome!

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Visual Studio is twenty years old! Carl and Richard chat with Julia Liuson, who has been involved with Visual Studio since its very earliest days in the 90s. Julia talks about how Microsoft decided to build a unified IDE for all its various development products including Visual Basic, C++, FoxPro and their new web development tool, Visual InterDev. But following quickly on from the 1997 edition was .NET and the complete change that it created for Visual Studio. Lots of great stories from someone that has been involved since the beginning - here's to another twenty years of Visual Studio!

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How do you evolve your team when it triples in size? Carl and Richard talk to Ryan Stelly about his experiences working at Rally Health when an acquisition grew the development team from eight people to 30. The conversation begins with a look at where they came from, building ASP.NET MVC apps. The new team used Scala and Angular together - how do you move forward? Cross team training, exploring new technologies and a lot of fun leads to React/Redux, a new DevOps stack and a culture that you'd want to be a part of!

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What's your strategy for moving to containers? While at NDC London, Carl and Richard chat with Michele Bustamante on how she talks to companies about utilizing container technology effectively. Michele discusses the fact that implementing containers represents more than just a technology investment - it's also a change in culture and process. This means that buy-in for container technology has to start at the top and permeate through the organization. And the benefits are just as comprehensive; it can be a significant part of a DevOps practice within an organization.

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What is Conway's Law and how does it apply to your organization? Carl and Richard met up with Mark Seemann in Copenhagen to chat about how organization structure affects the structure of software. That is the essence of Conway's Law, going all the way back to the 1960s, where he talked about how committees designing software end up making software that reflects the structure of the committees themselves. This leads to a broad conversation about how virtually every company today is actually a software company, and that software represents a vital asset to most businesses, but they may not recognize it yet. Getting your organization into shape to build great software can be the difference between success and bankruptcy!

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Windows Containers are here! While at NDC London, Carl and Richard chatted with Ben Hall about his on-going exploration of container technology. Windows Server 2016 shipped in late 2016 with support for two kinds of Windows containers. Ben talks about migrating an existing web application, IIS and all, over to Windows containers, providing some great deployment automation and scalability. There are still more bits to be built, but you can be productive with Windows containers today - check it out!

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