Deep into Elixir with Rob Conery

Are user groups obsolete? Carl and Richard talk to Blake Helms and Robb Schiefer about their experiences starting and growing a .NET Meetup Group in Birmingham, Alabama. Modernizing on the user group with Meetup doesn't change the fundamentals - it takes dedicated volunteers, a good location, great speakers and consistency to make a group grow. Are meetups still worth your time? Definitely! The conversation turns to the power of networking: Not TCP/IP, but actually meeting and talking with people that share a common interest. If there's a Meetup group in your area, go to it! If not, start one - Blake and Robb have great suggestions on getting started!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

13 Okt 201653min

What role does distributed caching play in applications today? Carl and Richard sit down with Iqbal Khan to talk about nCache, an open source product built to do distributed caching in the .NET world. The conversation starts out with the traditional role of a distributed cache - state storage for a large scaling websites. It's never as simple as it sounds! From there, Iqbal dives into comparing caching to noSQL stores and RDBMS - they can all have a role in your application. The discussion then turns to more complex challenges around using distributed caches for map-reduce problems, and so on. Caching can do a lot!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

12 Okt 201650min

What the heck is Hybrid Transactional Analytical Processing (HTAP)? While at Ignite, Carl and Richard sat down with Lindsey Allen to talk about taking SQL Server "beyond relational." HTAP focuses on being able to do data analysis as data arrives in the database, independent of the transaction that actually wrote it. Lindsey talks about the power of being to get to near-real time with data analytics, rather than batch processing. Different than streams, you're still talking about data written to the database, so you already know your application logic and data integrity have been applied before you start your analysis. HTAP has huge potential for making super responsive applications!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

11 Okt 201646min

Has voice control come of age? Carl and Richard talk to Austin Dimmer about his efforts to build a great voice control system - including for Visual Studio! The conversation digs into the complexity of recognizing a diversity of voices and being fast enough to get the words right. Then the hard stuff: How to keep words in context so that you can derive enough meaning from them to be useful. This isn't just about transcription, it's about control. Austin also talks about all the different voice-related products that Microsoft makes, it can be a confusing landscape. Is it time for voice to be part of your application?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

6 Okt 201658min

Compiled PHP on .NET! Carl and Richard talk to Benjamin Fistein and Jakub Míšek about Peachpie, and open source project to implement PHP on the .NET Core. While the project isn't complete yet (you can help - it's open source!), the potential power is huge - taking existing PHP code and being able to compile it down to the CLR. Ben and Jakub talk about the challenge of mapping functionality across the languages, and the huge performance boost that compiled CLR code gets. How fast could WordPress be? The goal is to make PeachPie run on the .NET Core as well, so it can work on any platform you want. Check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

5 Okt 201647min

How does Microsoft maintain mature applications? Carl and Richard talk to Dustin Metzgar about his work at Microsoft maintaining applications and libraries like Windows Workflow, older versions of ASP.NET and Entity Framework and more. These products are maintained for a long time, typically without adding features, but rather to make sure new operating systems still work with them, security is maintained and bugs are fixed. There's a ton of cool stories in this space, it's the ultimate brownfield project challenge - rarely, if ever, do folks who created a product continue with it throughout it's life time!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

4 Okt 201652min

You can't multitask! Carl and Richard talk about the myth and scourge of multitasking, which has been proven again and again to not actually work. Ben talks about how the human brain is not that different from a microcomputer CPU - the context shifts involved in multitasking are expensive, and if you do too much of it, you spend all your time switching contexts, rather than actually getting work done. The conversation digs into all sorts of good discussion around productivity, but first and foremost, it is about getting things done - focus on one task until you're finished, then move on!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

29 Sep 201654min

Time to review the web application stack! Carl and Richard talk to Dan Wahlin about his current explorations into building web applications. The current stack for Dan is Angular 2 on the front-end, ASP.NET Core on the backend and Docker as the hosting environment. There are so many cool capabilities in this configuration that it can affect the way you build software as a whole, making it easier to automate deployment, accelerate testing, distribute sample versions, and so on. This could be the future of .NET development!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

28 Sep 201654min