
Understanding R with Barbara Fusinska
What do you know about R? While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talked to Barbara Fusinska about her work using R as part of real system. Barbara talks about the role of statistics and machine learning as well as the various tools that make it easier to incorporate into your application. The conversation turns to MatLab and Revolution Analytics language R. R is focused on machine learning, it's not a general purpose language. Think of it as SQL for machine learning - great at the thing it does, but not for everything. And now that Microsoft owns R, you can expect to see it more and more in the .NET development world!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations
28 Jan 201653min

Service Discovery with Ian Cooper
Service Discovery? Is UDDI back? While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talk to Ian Cooper about service discovery in the microservices world. Ian talks about the effect of microservices in making systems more complex - it's easy to end up with hundreds of services. And you don't want to be hard-coding service locations into your application, what happens when things change? While you could roll your own, Ian talks about a range of tools already out there to help your applications discover the services they need. Everything needs to be redundant and reliable - which is actually hard to build. Check out the links for all sorts of great tools!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations
27 Jan 201658min

Containers and Microservices in Azure with Michele Bustamante
What's the current situation with containers in Azure? While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talk to Michele Leroux Bustamante about the continuing evolution of containers in the cloud, especially around Azure. Michele digs into the story of Docker and the idea of configuration-as-code extending to the virtual machine. Then the discussion turns to analyzing the various tiers of container service provide by the major cloud provides, including Microsoft. Ultimately there is a vision of a Platform-as-a-Service offering around containers, but what that looks like is still evolving. Could Azure Service Fabric be the solution? What about Windows 2016? There's more to come!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations
26 Jan 201654min

Space Elevators and Tethers Geek Out
Are space elevators really possible, or just science fiction? Time for a Geek Out! Carl and Richard chat about the idea of being able to build a cable from the surface of the Earth into space to make space transport 100 times cheaper than rockets. The conversation starts out focused on the concept of space tethers, of which the space elevator is one particular species. Tethers have actually flown in space and demonstrated some amazing properties, including using the magnetic field of the earth to generate electricity. Tethers can also be used as Skyhooks to lift and fling payloads into orbit. Richard then digs into the details of space elevators themselves, including the materials needed for the cable, construction approaches and the sheer scale of what is needed to make an elevator. Possible? Maybe!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations
21 Jan 20161h 1min

Glimpse V2 with Anthony van der Hoorn and Nik Molnar
Glimpse is moving to version 2! Carl and Richard chat with Anthony van der Hoorn and Nik Molnar about the latest version of Glimpse and what moving from version 1 to 2 really means. Still in beta, Glimpse V2 is very much a rethink of how you instrument a client while still keeping what you love about V1 - a great dashboard to understand what's going on with your web app. Anthony and Nik talk through the changes and the power of taking everything you've learned about a project to a clean slate. Glimpse is only getting better, you need to check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations
20 Jan 201659min

GitHub Goodness with Phil Haack
Time for a GitHub sync with Phil Haack! Carl and Richard chat with Phil about the latest developments at GitHub, including the on-going evolution of the extensions to Visual Studio (getting better) and a bunch of other third party components that can help you use GitHub more effectively. Phil talks about Gitter, the chat system associated with GitHub projects. GitHub is not just about source code, there are all sorts of projects going into GitHub, including blogs, legal documents, even creation of new open source fonts. If you haven't gotten into the GitHub community, it's a great time to take a look!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations
19 Jan 201654min

Cryptography with Stephen Haunts
Encrypt all the things! Carl and Richard talk to Stephen Haunts about how to use cryptography properly. And as it turns out, you don't have to be a mathematician to put crypto to work for you! The conversation starts out focusing on password hashing - lots of ways to do it wrong, salting seems complicated, but in the end, there is a built-in, poorly named function in the .NET Framework that will give you proper leading edge password hashing, you just have to know what it is (check the links on the show page). From there Stephen talks about 2-way symmetric and asymmetric encryption. Best used together, and best used on any and all data that you have. Good stuff!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations
14 Jan 201653min

Successful Test Automation with Arnon Axelrod
What does it take to successfully implement test automation on your application? Carl and Richard talk to Arnon Axelrod about his work using test automation. The discussion dives into the diverse world of testing, both manual and automated, as well as the variety of tests you can write. How do you go about building tests that aren't so fragile that you have to rewrite them all after every build? What tests are actually valuable to the overall quality of your software? And why automate? What can automation do that can't also be done manually? Arnon also digs into a set of open source libraries he's built to make it easier to automate testing. Check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations
13 Jan 201648min