At the San Antonio stop of the .NET Rocks! Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Carl and Richard talk to John Sonmez about Service Stack and MonoGame. John starts off the conversation talking about Service Stack, an open source .NET and Mono REST Web Services framework, eventually moving back to the subject of MonoGame and the huge potential for cross-platform development. John also mentions MvvmCross, a cross-platform MVVM project where you have common code across all platforms except for views. Cool stuff!

At the Nashville stop of the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Carl and Richard sat down with Kate Gregory to talk about C++ in Windows 8. Kate talks about how C++ has evolved to be a much more pleasant language to work in than the old days, as well as exploring how you can take advantage of amazing C++ technology like AMP to harness GPUs to do parallel processing. The conversation also turns to Hilo, a sample C++/XAML Windows 8 project on CodePlex. There's never been a better time to be a C++ programmer!

While at the Albany stop of the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Carl and Richard talked to Mark Miller about modern UI design. Mark discusses the conceptual differences between mouse driven and touch driven interfaces, grouping using space rather than borders, and how to deal with your fingers getting in the way of what you're trying to touch.

At the Rochester stop of the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Carl and Richard talked to Brian Noyes about building line of business applications in Windows 8. Brian talks through the architectural differences in Windows 8 and how developers need to overcome certain design patterns to be successful building apps in this new world, even for line of business. No data grids, please!

At the Pittsburgh stop of the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Carl and Richard chat with Billy Hollis about the design concepts around tablet applications. Billy talks about the differences between graphical design and interactive design - including the idea that an experienced developer is the best candidate for becoming a great interaction designer! As always, Billy inspires everyone to build a better app a better way.

At the Detroit stop of the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Road Trip, Carl and Richard sat down with Jeff Wilcox of 4th and Mayor fame to talk about the role of the cloud in phone applications. Jeff talks about how his application works with the Foursquare services on the back end, but how he also needed to build his own services to complete the 4th and Mayor experience - not everything his customers wanted came from Foursquare! The conversation also digs into why he built those services in node.js and the serendipity that he ended up moving from the phone team at Microsoft to Azure - working on node.js!

At the Indianapolis stop of the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Carl and Richard talked to Atley Hunter about his near compulsive habit of building Windows Phone 7 applications. Atley talks about how he maintains a list of hundreds of application ideas and since publishing more than a hundred applications, is straining the ability of the phone store to organize all of his apps under a single account! The conversation digs into what makes a great application, the revenue models that work, design choices and a look to the future of the app store model in Windows 8.

While at DevReach, Carl and Richard moderated a panel discussion between Chris Sells, Brian Rinaldi and Jon Flanders about the current state of mobile development. The conversation first focuses on the ascendancy of PhoneGap, comparing its flexibility in doing partial native, partial HTML implementations, versus native apps with web browsers embedded. Look for mentions of MonoTouch and Mono for Android, as well as a couple of great lines about Flash!

While in Denver on the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Carl and Richard sat down with Tim Huckaby for a hilarious run through the various technologies that Tim's companies have been working with. Tim talks about how he's building tablet applications for businesses as well as all of the Kinect-based interactive systems.

While at the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip stop in Salt Lake City, Carl and Richard chat with Scott Stanfield about core design concepts for building modern applications. Scott talks about typography, negative space and other designer topics in a way that blows the audience's mind!