.NET Rocks!

68:04

RockBot with Rocky Lhotka

.NET Rocks! ·

2026/09/23

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 orchestrator. Cloud architecture without the requirement of the cloud! The conversation dives into how to give

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57:25

OpenClaw with David Guttman

.NET Rocks! ·

2026/08/12

What can OpenClaw do for you? Carl and Richard talk to David Guttman about his work on OpenClaw, and helping others be successful with it.OpenClaw was one of the first personal agents released and has continued to evolve with the industry. David talks about controlling access to OpenClaw, and controlling what OpenClaw has access to. The challenge is managing prompt injection, and the agent can be manipulated by others to share information inappropriately. But it can also be a time saver for routine

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56:01

Commercial Open Source Update with Jimmy Bogard

.NET Rocks! ·

2026/07/23

Last year Jimmy Bogard released commercial licensed versions of AutoMapper and Mediatr - how's it going? Carl and Richard chat with Jimmy about the decision to go commercial and what he's learned after a year. Making customer transactions is part of the process for sure, as is a new array of issues and ideas. But for the most part, Jimmy says it was the right decision and has been a good experience. Another great story of sustainable open source!

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53:17

The Role of AI in Testing with Debbie O'Brien

.NET Rocks! ·

2026/07/16

How has testing changed in the era of AI? Carl and Richard talk to Debbie O'Brien in her new role at Zephyr about using LLMs to help build and validate tests - and much more. Debbie talks about joining Zephyr and using testing tools like Playwright to validate application workflows and generate documentation. This leads to a discussion about documentation being more important than ever, since LLMs will actually read it! Maintaining quality is a challenge with LLM-generated code and tests, so there's

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58:01

Open Source Maintenance Fee Update with Rob Mensching

.NET Rocks! ·

2026/07/08

The Open Source Maintenance Fee is more than a year old now - how are things going? Carl and Richard catch up with Rob Mensching to discuss the OSMF and its success in supporting Rob's WiX Toolset project. Rob talks about the key aspect of the OSMF - making it part of the licensing, so that it isn't optional. Of course, you can download the source from GitHub and compile it yourself without violating any license terms, but if you're that engaged, you can contribute too. The goal with OSMF is to have

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58:58

Azure Container Apps with Paul Yuknewicz and Jan Kalis

.NET Rocks! ·

2026/07/02

Have you checked out Azure Container Apps lately? Carl and Richard talk to Paul Yuknewicz and Jan Kalis about how they have sped up startup time with Container Apps using a feature called Express, and then on to the big news - Sandboxes. Sandboxes let you experiment with Azure Container Apps with managed identity to access Azure Connectors to all sorts of resources, both within Azure and outside it - Salesforce, SAP, etc. It's an effective and secure strategy for building applications, but also for

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58:42

DNSimple CLI with Anthony Eden

.NET Rocks! ·

2026/06/24

DNSimple has a CLI! Carl and Richard talk to DNSimple CEO Anthony Eden about the evolution of the DNSimple CLI in today's software market. DNSimple provides DNS, domain registrar, and certificate services - so why does it need a CLI? Anthony talks about earlier experiments with CLIs for folks who didn't want to use the web interface. But today, large language models change the game and work best with a CLI - those specific commands mean more accurate results from LLMs, which make for a powerful

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55:55

Ten Things Scott Sauber Does On Every .NET App

.NET Rocks! ·

2026/05/28

What settings, configurations, and workflows do you use for every .NET app? Carl and Richard talk to Scott Sauber about his list - from organizing folders by feature, to logging, security, and testing. Scott talks about enforcing rules like treating warnings as errors so you won't ignore important warnings, and validation in the build, to make applications more reliable. Each of these items represents some work, but in the end, your application will be higher quality and more reliable. Which ones

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64:24

Agentic RAG with Ed Charbeneau

.NET Rocks! ·

2026/04/08

How do you make your agents more knowledgeable about your company data? Carl and Richard talk to Ed Charbeneau about Progress Agentic RAG-as-a-Service, using NucliaDB as a vector data store to organize your company information into a form an agent can work with efficiently. Ed talks about the various approaches available today for providing timely company data to agents and the power of a dedicated data store and service model so that you spend less time on plumbing and more time building a great

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60:19

ASP.NET Core in 2026 with Daniel Roth

.NET Rocks! ·

2026/04/02

ASP.NET Core continues to evolve in 2026! Carl and Richard talk to Daniel Roth about all the goodness in the ASP.NET Core space, including MVC, Razor, and Blazor! Daniel talks about the publicly visible ASP.NET Core Roadmap on GitHub - where you can support ideas, add your own, and debate implementations! The conversation dives into the focus on Blazor - MVC and Razor aren't going away anytime soon, or perhaps ever. Still, the energy is definitely on Blazor, and its potential to provide a great

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00:59:00

Building Software using Squad with Brady Gaster

.NET Rocks! ·

2026/03/19

Let the squad help you build your application! Carl and Richard talk to Brady Gaster about Squad, a tool for creating an AI development team using GitHub Copilot. Brady discusses creating specialist agents across various aspects of building an application to keep context as small as possible, along with token consumption. Often, agents communicate with other agents to work through project problems, generating persistent information about the project, including skills as needed. Squad continues to

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01:00:00

Avalonia 12 with Mike James & Matt Lacey

.NET Rocks! ·

2026/03/12

Avalonia continues to evolve! Carl and Richard talk to Avalonia CEO Mike James & Matt Lacey about the latest version of Avalonia, the open source UI framework for building cross-platform applications with .NET. Mike's conversation with the Google Flutter team has led to replacing the Skia rendering engine in Avalonia with the newer Impeller Rendering Engine that Flutter itself depends on. This opens the door to excellent smartphone implementations with Avalonia, alongside its usual desktop and

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00:56:00

CLI First with Kathleen Dollard

.NET Rocks! ·

2026/03/05

Your first app interface should be a CLI! Carl and Richard talk to Kathleen Dollard about her experiences creating the .NET CLI - and how CLIs are only getting more important in the era of AI. Kathleen talks about working within the POSIX CLI standard for consistency's sake and to recognize that there will be many more CLIs in your life, so they should be as similar as possible. While CLIs may have started as configuration-as-code and DevOps practices, LLMs work well with them as long as consistency

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01:03:00

Leading Teams in the Time of AI with Andrew Murphy

.NET Rocks! ·

2026/02/26

Artificial Intelligence is changing how software development happens - how is your team coping? Carl and Richard talk to Andrew Murphy about his work leading teams struggling with AI tools. Andrew talks about Nolan Lawson's blog post We Mourn Our Craft and his blogged response about dealing with grief. Some developers are embracing these new tools - perhaps they're new to development, or very experienced. But some folks aren't having a good time with AI and are wondering what has happened to their

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01:00:00

The Role of AI in Secure Software with Ben Dechrai

.NET Rocks! ·

2026/02/12

How does Artificial Intelligence impact our approach to building secure software? Carl and Richard talk to Ben Dechrai about his experiences working with AI tooling and building AI apps, and how that impacts security. Ben talks about the concerns organizations have about using AI tools - what these tools might do with the code they are exposed to, as well as the code the tools generate. The conversation steers to local AI as a solution, although so far, the equipment and tools are very limited. Ben

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00:53:00

.NET Source Generators with Jason Bock

.NET Rocks! ·

2026/02/05

Why would you write code to generate code? Carl and Richard talk with Jason Bock about his experiences using modern .NET source generators to optimize certain aspects of applications. Jason talks about treading carefully - while .NET source generation has been part of .NET since 5.0 and Roslyn, it is a special case approach to problem solving. But with specialized implementations for regex and P/Invoke, there is some huge potential in these coding techniques that you can take advantage of!

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01:00:00

Aspire in 2026 with Maddy Montaquila

.NET Rocks! ·

2026/01/29

What's coming for Aspire in 2026? Carl and Richard talk to Maddy Montaquila about her work as the product manager for Aspire, the tool that helps you build cloud-native, distributed applications in any language and on any platform. Maddy talks about moving beyond .NET, recognizing that modern applications are written in a number of languages, and the team has focused on ensuring excellent support for Python and JavaScript, as well as the .NET languages. The same is true for the cloud - Azure, AWS,

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00:58:00

MAUI in 2026 with Gerald Versluis

.NET Rocks! ·

2026/01/22

What's happening with MAUI today? Carl and Richard talk to Gerald Versluis about the latest version of MAUI - and what's coming next! Gerald talks about the release of .NET 10 and the new features that have come to MAUI, including improvements in quality, performance, and ease of use. The conversation also digs into adjacent technologies like Uno and Avalonia and how they are collaborating with the MAUI team to make development even easier!

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00:59:00

App Distribution on Windows with Shmueli Englard

.NET Rocks! ·

2026/01/15

How do you distribute Windows apps? Carl and Richard chat with Shmueli Englard about the power of distributing apps through the Microsoft Store. You package your app as an MSIX and can deploy it to the Microsoft Store, and then send updates through it as well. If you want to charge for the app, Microsoft will do the licensing and payment systems for you (for a fee, of course), but if your software is free, distribution through the Microsoft Store is also free! Want to do your own updates? You can do

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02:04:00

Energy Geek Out 2025

.NET Rocks! ·

2026/01/01

Happy New Year - let's talk Energy! Richard chats with Carl about the state of energy generation in the world today - and things are progressing! Almost every kind of power generation is expanding at the moment, whether you look at solar, wind, hydroelectric, natural gas, coal, oil, or even nuclear! The cost of batteries hits a new low, and new technologies being demonstrated today show that storage is only going to get bigger. And what about the impact of AI on power generation? There's a huge

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