.NET Rocks!

Ready to talk about Thorium again? Since the last Thorium Geek Out in 2013, there have been a number of important developments. Richard takes Carl on a tour of why we want Thorium as a fuel, molten salt as a reactor design, and the choices we can make around different turbine technologies. Aspects of molten salt reactors continue to mature, offering continuous fuel reprocessing that means more of the dangerous radioactive material can be used for heat and left with safe residuals. Is it time to get building a molten salt reactor?

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How do we get all our IoT devices talking to each other? While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard chatted with Jimmy Engstrom about AllJoyn, a Qualcomm started project now part of the Linux Foundation that provides a common language for devices to communicate with. Jimmy talks about the different elements of AllJoyn, servers and clients and how they share information about their capabilities. There's a plugin for Visual Studio to make it easier for you to implement AllJoyn in your IoT applications and get access to the ecosystem. Jimmy also talks about building and utilizing bridges to other device protocols including Zigbee, Z-Wave and more!

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ASP.NET Core is released, now what? Carl and Richard talk to Shawn Wildermuth about his efforts to migrate to the RTM of ASP.NET Core. As Shawn points out, the framework is ready, but the tooling is still in preview, so more changes to how you build your web sites and services will happen before everything is said and done. Lots of digressions in the show too, talking about the road trip, being an old developer and trying to do things right - a fun conversation!

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What's the best way for you to learn new technology? Carl and Richard talk to Ben Hall about his latest creation, KataCoda. KataCoda is a free web site that hosts tutorial systems for a variety of technology content including Docker, Erlang, C#, Jenkins and so on. Rather than make you set up an environment to experiment with new tech, KataCoda is all set to go and has great scenarios and walkthrough for you to practice with. And when you're ready to try your own thing, there are playgrounds also! The conversation digs into the different learning styles of developers and the challenges of doing effective hands-on practice. Give KataCoda a try!

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Write your build scripts in C#! While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard talked to Gary Ewan Park about Cake - aka C# Make. Cake is a cross platform build automation solution - it works on Windows, OSX and Linux. Gary talks about being able to work in C# to define everything that needs to happen in your build process, including testing, documentation generation and so on. Your script can call other scripts so that you can contain complexity based on task. And since it's an open source project, if you want to use something that isn't directly support it, you can add it yourself. Take a look!

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Quick, how long can a file path in .NET be? Carl and Richard talk to Jeremy Kuhne, who has taken on the challenge of breaking the 260 character limit on file paths in .NET. Why has this problem persisted for so long? Jeremy references some blog posts from Kim Hamilton back in 2007 when the issue came up big - at the time, .NET was deeply intertwined with Windows, and there were too many things to fix. But the creation of .NET Core presented an opportunity to fix the problem once and for all, and Jeremy jumped on it. What happens next?

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The Hololens SDK edition is out - are you ready to write some code? Carl and Richard talk to Rene Schulte at NDC Oslo about his work building apps for the Hololens. The conversation explores the differences in virtual reality and augmented reality and the huge number of possibilities out there for Hololens. Rene talks about what it's like to develop for Hololens, discussing the relative merits between writing code in Unity3D and the Universal Windows Platform (XAML!) - it's all C# in the end! There's as much to discuss about the capabilities of Hololens as there is to talk about the potential solutions it can generate. There's a lot to think about!

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How does testing contribute to the failure of a project? Todd Gardner chats with Carl and Richard at NDC Oslo about his experiences with failing projects and testing. More than just the usual case that a lack of testing led to unreliable software, Todd also talks about how testing the market is important too - what if you build software nobody wants? The focus has to be on relevant tests, because every test represents an overhead of computing and maintenance. This ultimately comes back to understanding the value proposition of your software: What does your software do that is valuable, and how do you assure that value with testing?

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What does it mean to build for the cloud? While at NDC in Oslo, Carl and Richard chatted with Paul Stack about thinking about architecture specific for the cloud - not necessarily Azure or AWS, but the overall concepts of what it means to be in the cloud. It starts with the idea of everything you build being virtual and portable, whether than be VMs or containers. But there's also so-called 'server-less' designs as well, where your software runs on a platform in the cloud. If you could get rid of the need to patch operating systems, wouldn't you? Paul also talks about the smaller cloud providers and some of the cool stuff available there as well - there are lots of choices!

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Can you detect lies with machine learning? Jennifer Marsman can! Carl and Richard chatted with Jennifer while at the NDC conference in Oslo. Jennifer talked about gathering EEG data with Emotiv headsets to do lie detection by taking base line (known true and known false) questions and then applying Azure Machine Learning to classify the data. The conversation dives into the different machine learning techniques available on Azure and how certain algorithms are more effective on different data sets - it turns out EEG data works great with deep neural networking! There are lots of different opportunities in the machine learning space, time to check it out!

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