.NET Rocks!

It's almost 2024, do we still need to talk about securing our apps? Carl and Richard talk to Laura Bell Main about her ongoing efforts to get everyone involved in creating and operating software to be part of making that software secure. Laura talks about committing one hour of each sprint to security and how, over time, those small efforts can build up to excellent secure guardrails that make our software more resistant to exploitation. Don't push security issues off to someone else - we can all help!

A new version of Polly is out - and it's a special one! Carl and Richard talk to Joel Hulen and Martin Costello about the release of Polly V8. Joel tells the story of Microsoft reaching out about Polly - because it is heavily utilized inside of Azure and at cloud scale, it needed further optimization. The results are a very high-performance library focused on resilience as a whole - with lots of smart defaults so that you can write even less code to have even more resilient applications!

How do we put large language models to work? Carl and Richard talk to Vishwas Lele about his work using LLMs with his customers. Vishwas talks about focusing on specific data sets for building LLMs and how size matters - things are simple when the source data is small, but as it grows, you need more complex tools to be able to allow the LLM to perform. Lots of cautionary tales and ideas on how to get great results from these new automation tools!

How do we make our software greener? While at NDC in Porto, Carl and Richard talked to Lea Mladineo about her work in sustainable development. Lea talks about the impact of digital technology on the environment and how, with some thought and effort, we can make a real difference to that impact. The conversation explores how cloud computing can worsen the problem - or better! Software efficiency can reduce the number of cycles needed to complete a task, which is good for the environment and could save your organization money!

Aurora Walberg, React Server Components and Next.js expert, discusses mixing server and client rendering, using a mix and match approach with static and dynamic content in React Server Components, and the trade-off between complexity and speed in React Server Components. The hosts also discuss the challenges of compatibility and adoption, and express their excitement for a new version of a web framework.

How do you commercialize open-source products? While at NDC Porto, Carl and Richard talked to Victoria Melnikova about her work with Evil Martians, helping startups make open-source products and make a living at the same time. Victoria talks about various revenue strategies, but always with a mind to providing a "forever free" tier to be responsible to the open source community. Charging for pro-features, limiting the number of uses before a paid tier... there are several approaches to revenue that users can work with, as long as you are open and honest about how things work!

Jeff Fritz, a speaker and expert in .NET, joins the show and talks about the upcoming .NET Conf event. He shares his top ten favorite sessions, including 'What's new in C sharp 12' and 'Packing light with VS code and C sharp dev kit'. They also discuss creating project templates for Blazor web apps and advancements in AI in .NET. The hosts wrap up by sharing road trip stories and industry connections.

Charity Majors, Co-founder of Honeycomb, talks about observability engineering, the evolution of telemetry, benefits of high cardinality in observability, effectively communicating the value of engineering work, and challenges in instrumentation and spans.

What's the latest with bUnit? Carl and Richard chat with Egil Hansen about his excellent testing library for Blazor. Egil digs into the ongoing improvements being made in Blazor and how bUnit can support those changes without having to rewrite tests - even .NET 8 shouldn't be a huge problem! The conversation also digs into the different sorts of open-source projects out there, including tooling like bUnit. Not all open source is created the same! Great thinking from an experienced builder of testing tools to make it easier to build reliable Blazor applications.

What is data sharding, and why do you need it? Carl and Richard talk to Oren Eini about his latest work on RavenDB, including the new data sharding feature. Oren talks about the power of sharding a database across multiple servers to improve performance on massive data sets. While a sharded database is typically in a single data center, it is possible to distribute the shards across multiple locations. The conversation explores the advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches, including that you might not need it today, but it's great to know it's there when you do!