.NET Rocks!

Whatever happened to the future we were promised? Time for a Geek Out! To celebrate the end of the opening history bits, Richard pulls together all the most popular topics of "things we were supposed to get in the future." From flying and self-driving cars to fusion power, personal jetpacks, Star Trek replicators, space tourism, and more! While some things are coming true, in a form different...

It's Tray-Tober! Carl and Richard talk to Joe Finney about his latest project - building small, useful Windows apps that live in the system tray. Joe talks about his original project inspiration, Radio Tray - a way to have internet radio playing on his PC without creating a whole browser instance, because he needs that memory for AI! The conversation digs into how code is no longer the barrier to...

OpenSilver evolves! Carl and Richard talk to Giovanni Albani about how OpenSilver continues to help folks migrate Silverlight apps into a sustainable model not dependent on the plug-in - but now the focus is on WPF! Giovanni talks about XAML.io and its ability to turn WPF applications into WebAssembly apps that run in the browser with no plug-ins and no HTML or JavaScript coding required. The...

Can AI tech work in live television broadcasts? Carl and Richard talk to Tim Huckaby about his work building Duff Foreman, an AI-powered avatar for live golf programs. Tim talks about using AI to build AI, using M365 Copilot to architect and ultimately implement the AI avatar, pulling from golf statistics to provide a digital commentator for the sport. The conversation explores the stack of tools...

The Critter Stack is growing! Carl and Richard talk with Jeremy Miller about the latest Critter Stack updates, including Marten, Wolverine, and more! First up is the stack's expansion with Polecat and Fisher, versions of Marten built for SQL Server 2025 and SQLite, respectively. Jeremy also talks about the evolution of event sourcing and how the framework continues to advance to take advantage of...

What happens to your digital assets after you pass away? Carl and Richard talk with Mattias Karlsson about his experience navigating the challenges of losing a friend and having to reorganize their digital assets. There are the immediate issues around access to email, authenticators, and the like, but also the long-term items like GitHub maintainer roles. Mattias talks about looking through your...

How about a cloud-native AI assistant? That's RockBot! Carl and Richard talk with Rocky Lhotka about RockBot, Rocky's own variant of the OpenClaw/Hermes type personal assistant. Rocky talks about being uncomfortable with the security approaches the other agents have taken, so he went full enterprise architect on the problem and built RockBot as a set of containers behind the Kubernetes...

Whether quantum computers are around the corner or not, the message is clear: the time for post-quantum cryptography is coming fast. Carl and Richard talk to Michael Howard about Microsoft's efforts to make post-quantum cryptography available to everyone by 2029. Howard discusses the quantum computing and cryptography issue, specifically the ability of quantum computers to run Shor's algorithm...

So what can numerics do for you? Carl and Richard talk to Jeffrey Sax about his work building Numerics.NET, a collection of general-purpose mathematical and statistical classes built for .NET. Jeffrey explains that numbers in a computer differ from real numbers in the world; for storage and computational efficiency, typical variable types in any programming language have limits on precision and...

How can constraints make software development assistants more efficient? Carl and Richard talk to Don Demcsak about his work on getting LLMs to build higher-quality software with fewer resources. Don talks about how domain-driven language techniques help to define and constrain language around a given application problem space, but that largely hasn't been applied to coding agents so far. And as...