.NET Rocks!

So many amazing things announced at Connect! Carl and Richard talk to Scott Hunter about his favorite bits of Connect, including a ton of important announcements including new support in Visual Studio for containers, cool new integration with SQL Server 2016, the on-going evolution of .NET Core and it's tooling and so much more! You've seen the keynotes, now listen to a deeper dive with one of the key people behind .NET today!

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Functional programming for mobile development? Carl and Richard talk to Scott Nimrod about his experiences building mobile apps with Xamarin using F# as the primary programming language. Does functional make sense for mobile development? Sure, but F# can handle OOP problems too. Scott calls it "functional first". The conversation digs into the power of staying within Visual Studio - tools that you know and understand! But there are also features in Visual Studio that don't necessarily work well (or the same) with F#, so it does take time to learn your way around your new language. But worth it!

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How do you get to coding quickly with the new web development frameworks? Carl and Richard talk to Steve Sanderson about JavaScriptServices, which is actually a set of templates for helping you set up your development environment for Angular, Knockout, React and/or React-Redux. Steve talks about all the bits and pieces necessary to actually get to your code-run-debug cycle of development. Along the way he mentions a number of tools involved to make life easier, including Yeoman and WebPack. The conversation also turns to this diversity of client development stacks and the philosophy behind them - more great thinking by a web leader!

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DC Lighting real, and Richard has installed it! Time for a Geek Out! You've heard bits and pieces about the flood in Richard's basement and the year long effort to get it restored and renovated - including DC LED lighting! Richard discusses his experience getting the LumenCache lighting system working in his basement, along with the various kinds of lights possible: new dedicated LED light fixtures, refitting existing light fixtures with LED and custom making LED lighting with aluminum extrusions and LED light tape. Power efficient, cool running and cool looking - this is what modern lighting should be!

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Making mobile apps is never simple - but it can be made easier! Carl and Richard talk to Matthew Robbins about MFractor, a tool designed to help you build mobile apps using Xamarin across platforms more easily. Matthew talks about the challenges of trying to create common code (typically C#) in Xamarin that actually runs correcting in Android and iOS. A big part of MFractor is the code analysis tooling that helps you verify correctness for schema assignments, references, and so on. There's also help with code generations, navigation and a variety of other utilities. Check it out!

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So many versions of .NET Framework, so little time! Carl and Richard chat with Immo Landwerth about the .NET Standard specifications. Now that .NET has gone cross-platform, the sheer number of implementations of the framework can be overwhelming. And if you're building products for .NET, how do you communicate with your customers about what your product will work with? This is what the .NET Standard is all about - setting specific rules on what needs to be implemented to comply with a specific version of the framework. It's early days yet, but at least there is a plan to keep everyone organized. Dive in!

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Data Lakes are growing up, and you want one! While at Ignite in Atlanta, Carl and Richard sat down with Michael Rys to talk about Azure Data Lakes - a place to store your data "as is" so that you can easily query and organize the data for further analysis. Michael discusses the problems of data warehouses, with their Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) processes that manipulate the data into a particular shape for the warehouse - and make it harder to ask new questions of the data. Leave the data as it is in the data lake and then build mechanism to extract on demand for the various data marts you have. The conversation turns to USQL (U as in Universal) and HDInsights (Hadoop) as different ways to extract data from the Data Lake for analysis. Lots of choices!

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What does it take to make the web more accessible? Carl and Richard talk to Aaron Gustafson about his years of work helping to create and support standards for accessibility on the web - all kinds of accessibility. While supporting visual and hearing impaired is important, there are so many more aspects to accessibility, especially today where those capabilities translate into new devices that make focus on speech or other completely different UI paradigms. The good news is, the tooling is getting better (check the links on the web page) to make it easy for you to keep accessibility in your mind as you code - don't bolt on at the end!

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Are you afraid to make your API public? You should be! Carl and Richard talk to Vishwas Lele about Azure API Management, the safe an effective way to expose your API to the world and not take down your system. Vishwas talks about the array of problems in front of you once the public has access to your API: What happens if it's too popular for it's own good? Or someone builds runaway software that hammers it constantly? Or you want granular control over who can call your API, how often, and how fast? That's where Azure API Management comes in, taking on all of the front end side of APIs, even if you run the application behind the API on-premise. Check it out!

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Installation is in chaos! Carl and Richard talk to Rob Mensching about the crazy amount of change that has come to distributing and installing software. The conversation references a comment from a listener about the diversity of server installation solutions including MSDeploy. But what about the desktop? As Rob says, things have been pretty stable for a long time with the MSI - and Rob led the WiX Toolset project to make MSIs. But with AppStores, MSIs are looking long in the tooth. What does the new desktop installation look like?

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