.NET Rocks!

Meet Matt Steele, a Georgia Tech grad focusing on AI, Gheida Omar, an innovator empowering girls in STEM, and Daniel Kim, a Stanford student merging math with neuroscience. They share projects that won accolades at the Imagine Cup. Gheida's Signverse app breaks communication barriers with real-time translation, while Matt's Hair Match focuses on hair care for textured hair. Daniel's Argus, a winner in the competition, offers assistive technology for those with visual impairments, showcasing remarkable innovation driven by personal passion.

Nicole Forsgren, a renowned expert in DevOps and developer productivity, shares insights on eliminating friction in software development. She discusses her upcoming book and the significant role of AI tools in workflow enhancement. The conversation dives into DORA insights that reshape software delivery, emphasizing the importance of culture and collaboration. Forsgren also highlights the balance between automation and creativity among junior developers, addressing challenges such as technical debt in today's rapidly evolving tech landscape.

Debbie O'Brien, a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft and Google developer expert, dives into the transformative features of Playwright MCP. She discusses how AI integration can streamline web testing, even illustrating how to automate test creation using large language models. The conversation highlights the balance between automated and manual testing, explores security challenges in cloud platforms, and introduces the playful concept of 'vibe coding' as a fresh approach in software development. Debbie's insights showcase the future of automated testing in an engaging manner.

How will coding agents change your code? While at Build, Carl and Richard chatted with Scott Hunter about the announcements around coding agents at the keynote. Scott talks about the agent mode available in Visual Studio Code - and now in Visual Studio! Agent mode allows the LLM to evaluate the code across an entire solution, not just the file you're currently looking at. You can create a workflow where GitHub issues are assigned to the agent, which then generates code and provides a pull request for evaluation. The agents are here and helping us do more!

What if you could use ElasticSearch serverless? While at Build, Carl and Richard chatted with Ken Exner about the new announcements around Elastic providing serverless storage and search! Ken talks about paying for only the data you move and store with serverless, rather than needing to operate any infrastructure for Elastic. The conversation digs into the potential of Elastic in Azure AI Foundry to provide ultra-fast access to current company data for your LLM implementations. Elastic did vector databases before LLMs made them essential for RAG - and you can take advantage of it!

Do you understand how networking works in C#? Carl and Richard chat with Chris Woody Woodruff about his new book on networking with C#. Chris runs down the fundamentals of networking and then discusses the different approaches readily available in the C# world, including web sockets, gRPC, SignalR, and many more! The conversation also turns to the upcoming QUIC standards built into HTTP/3 that should simplify networking. Sure, you could go with the defaults, but why not explore all the options!

How do you secure browser-based frontends with ASP.NET Core backends? Carl and Richard discuss the Backend for Frontend (BFF) Security Framework with Erwin van der Valk. Erwin talks about Sam Newman's BFF Pattern and how it helps deal with the diversity of clients, including web, desktop, and mobile, to work with a common backend. OAuth 2.0 is capable of dealing with this complexity, but there are many moving parts, and that's where the security framework can help!

How do you balance architecture and code? Carl and Richard talk to Steve Smith about various architectural strategies and the swing back-and-forth against over-designing architecture and getting code written. Steve talks about how architecture changes depending on the size and number of teams, how the latest tools can help with architectural choices, and the challenge of effective refactoring when things need to change. Lots of great conversation!

Open Source Maintainers are burning out or going commercial - how do we solve this? Carl and Richard chat with Rob Mensching about his work to create the open source maintenance fee through GitHub. Rob talks about the common problem of single maintainers getting buried under issues and demands of consumers for a project. Recognizing that most people cannot contribute to the project, a maintenance fee helps support the maintainer in a low friction way for everyone involved. Check out the links to get started!

How can a large language model help your organization answer government RFPs? Carl and Richard talk to Vishwas Lele about his startup pWin, as in proposal win. Vishwas talks about being a year into the startup and his deeper understanding of how AI technologies can augment skilled operators to produce better quality products in less time, including responding to RFPs. The conversation digs into tuning the LLM to focus on the data relevant to each section of the RFP so that the operator can interact with the tool and build better responses!