The Static Void Podcast

Chris, Jess, and Todd chat about enterprise messaging patterns. Is it a good practice to put a message bus or a queue in between your web server and your middle tier services? Can message buses be overkill? What's the best way for your loosely-coupled containerized services to communicate with one another? Did Todd actually say that there's some benefits to building a monolith? We asked all these questions, but you've got to listen to see how many of them we actually answered... or how many answers we actually got right.

Jess and Chris chat about not just using NuGet to download Microsoft's and other Open Source libraries from NuGet.org, but creating your own custom NuGet packages to help version and distribute your own components, without ever leaving your firewall! Links Microsoft: Creating and Publishing a NuGet Package Microsoft: Creating NuGet Symbol Packages Microsoft: .nuspec File Reference SemVer.org: Semantic Versioning guide SymbolSource.org: The public symbol server MyGet.org: Host your own (private or public) NuGet feed ProGet NuGet feed source JFrog Artifactory: Artifact repository with NuGet support

Todd, Chris, and Jess chat about using Git in their day-to-day lives. Jess thinks it's the best thing since the CPU, but Todd thinks it's just the shiny new toy that's no better than TFS. Meanwhile, Chris thinks that GitFlow is the most overly-complicated process he's ever seen. What do you think? Links Think Like (a) Git GitHub.com: Understanding GitHub Flow Vincent Driessen: A successful Git branching model (GitFlow) Atlassian: Comparing Git Workflows

What's the best way for a developer to provide true "value"?   Join our panel of experienced developers as they discuss their patterns, practices, methodologies, frameworks, tips and tricks that help them reach their maximum productivity. Whether it's solving customer problems (usually with code), contributing to or running open source projects, or even curating online content like video training courses, these panelists tell you their secrets of how the "get stuff done."   Panelists Scott Allen Stephen Bohlen Damian Brady Suz Hinton Oren Novotny

What does "DevOps" really mean when you're not up on stage demoing the latest DevOps product or working at Netflix, Etsy, or Facebook?  To find out, we ask Andy Schwam (@schwammy), a development manager, architect, and coder who has lived and breathed the concepts of "DevOps" in the real world... and lived to tell about it. What's myth and what works?  What's hard and what's easy?  Andy takes us behind the scenes and tells us what it takes to transform an existing error-prone manual deployment to a highly-reliable, repeatable, and automated process.

Razor Pages is a brand new feature in .NET Core 2.0 that brings the Page Model back into .NET Core, providing developers a simple, effective, and above all, easy way to create dynamic web pages without having to get into the details of the Model-View-Controller (MVC) approach.   Or is it?   Join Jess, Todd, and Chris as they try to make sense of that one last .NET Core 2.0 feature that they left out in the last episode, Razor Pages.  What exactly is it?  Is it actually simple?  Is it really easier than using ASP.NET Core MVC?   Show Notes and Related Links Razor Pages - Official Documentation Razor Pages - Getting Started with the Preview (Mike's DotNetting) Razor Pages - Understanding Handler Methods (Mike's DotNetting) Model-View-Presenter (MVP) Design Pattern MVC or MVP Pattern - What's the Difference? (Todd's blog post)

In anticipation of the up-coming .NET Core 2.0 release (and the preview currently available), Todd, Jess, and Chris offer their answers to some of the frequently asked questions around .NET Core, such as: Does .NET Core 2.0 have all the namespaces/APIs as .NET 4.6? Does .NET Core support Visual Basic (VB.NET) yet? What about SignalR - is that available? What options do I have when running my ASP.NET Core applications?  Do I have to use IIS?  What about Docker? What is .NET Standard (and should I care)? What's the best IDE to use when building an ASP.NET Core application? And, of course… Should I start moving from .NET 4.6 to .NET Core now?  Is it ready for prime time?   Links and References Webinar courtesy of PostSharp: Who needs Visual Studio? A look at .NET Core on Linux Build 2017 Sessions online An overview of .NET Core, discussing the approach, features, and goals Visual Basic in .NET Core announced with .NET Core 2.0 Preview 1 (It's there… search for "Visual Basic is now Supported" on the page) Visual Studio 2017 Preview (Includes tooling for Visual Basic in .NET Core and .NET Core 2.0 / ASP.NET Core 2.0) ASP.NET Core SignalR at Build (video) ASP.NET Core SignalR Repository ASP.NET Core Roadmap Socket.io - Real-Time Web in Node Anders Hejlsberg: What's New In TypeScript (video) (This turned out to be a good introduction to TypeScript and how it can help you in different ways, you can choose what you want to adopt) Kestrel in production (internet facing) and using a reverse proxy "If you expose your application to the Internet, you must use IIS, Nginx, or Apache as a reverse proxy server." Matt Watson from Stackify has some plain english on this on the Stackify blog (Thank you Matt!) You will need the "ASP.NET Core Module" to run Kestrel behind IIS Introducing .NET Standard (blog post) .NET Standard documentation Visual Studio for Mac

Join Jess, Todd, and Chris as they discuss "The Twelve-Factor App": a set of patterns and practices that are crucial to building modern, scalable, and "cloud-ready" applications. The 12 Factors will help you build web applications that: Use declarative formats for setup automation, to minimize time and cost for new developers joining the project; Have a clean contract with the underlying operating system, offering maximum portability between execution environments; Are suitable for deployment on modern cloud platforms, obviating the need for servers and systems administration; Minimize divergence between development and production, enabling continuous deployment for maximum agility; And can scale up without significant changes to tooling, architecture, or development practices. Show Links: The Twelve-Factor App: The site that started it all Beyond the Twelve-Factor App: (free eBook) The follow-up book that expands on the original 12 Factors and adds some great real-world advice

In this episode, Chris, Todd, and Jess discuss how awesome Visual Studio Code is while Todd defends the relevance of the full-blown Visual Studio "Classic Cadillac" IDE. What's the difference between an "IDE" and the new breed of powerful and extensible "text editors" such as Notepad++, Sublime Text, and now Visual Studio Code. Oh yeah, and Jess gets yet another reason to talk about how great TypeScript is, too. Show Links Extending the Visual Studio IDE ("classic Cadillac") Extending Visual Studio Code Jess's VS Code NuGet Reverse Package Search extension (Source Code)

Several episodes in to the ".NET Core RTM" series, Jess, Todd, and Chris finally get down to the specifics of how to use .NET Core. Starting with File > New Project all the way down to View Components, they talk about what it's like to actually use ASP.NET Core to develop real web applications.

Jeff Fritz from Microsoft joins Jess, Todd, and Chris to talk about .NET Core and we challenge our discussion of .NET Core RTM in the previous episode. Now that you've heard several sides of the story, what do you think? Let us know at staticvoidpodcast.com!

In this episode, Jess, Todd, and Chris talk about the fact that .NET Core (and ASP.NET Core) have been officially released, and contemplate what that means and how it might (or might not) affect .NET developers. Some links to content discussed in the episode: .NET Core home page ASP.NET Core Documentation .NET Core Documentation Blog Post: Announcing .NET Core 1.0 Blog Post: Announcing ASP.NET Core 1.0 Blog Post: Announcing Entity Framework Core 1.0 Blog Post: .NET Core RTM Announced at Red Hat Conference Videos about ASP.NET Core RTM ASP.NET Community Standup Conference General Session including announcement Conference General Session including announcement (Scott Hanselman's presentation) ASP.NET Core Kestrel: Adventures in building a fast web server - Damian Edwards, David Fowler ASP.NET Core 1.0 Deep Dive - David Fowler & Damian Edwards Benchmarks for ASP.NET demonstrating Kestrel performance Introduction to TechEmpower benchmarks

In this episode, Jess, Todd, and Chris debate the merits and the suitability of using the browser as an application development platform. From memory management, to the DOM, to deployment, to Todd wishing that Silverlight never died, we touch on a variety of aspects involved in working in the browser.

Chris, Todd, and Jess welcome their guest Matt Hornsby to discuss a concept he calls "Code Sprawl" to describe the evolution and decay of software systems over time.  Relating the growth and aging of a software project to the growth and decay of urban areas, he draws parallels to identify what goes wrong.  He also presents hope that we can learn from urban renewal as well.   About our guest Matt Hornsby is an experienced principal software engineer who has led teams building Internet scale applications such as healthcare exchanges and retail websites that are among the largest in the world. This led Matt to develop a passion for guiding his teams to build maintainable systems and write quality code. Related Links Sprawl Repair Manual The Design of Everyday Things The Dunbar Number Christopher Alexander: A Timeless Way of Building A warning to last ten thousand years

Microsoft offers two frameworks that both allow you to create fully-functional web services and HTTP-based "web APIs". Which one should you choose? Join Jess, Todd, and Chris as they debate the merits and "proper" usage of the two most popular Microsoft frameworks for creating web-based services: WCF and Web API. Show Links ASP.NET Web API Microsoft WCF (Windows Communication Foundation)

Chris, Todd, and Jess discuss the cool new features available in C# 6. Some will save you keystrokes, some may save you bugs, and some... well, some you may never actually use (but why not find out about them anyway?). Show Links New language features in C# 6 (Rosyln GitHub wiki) Roslyn GitHub site Essential TypeScript by Jess Chadwick Steve Michelotti’s Code/Slides on C# 6

In this episode, Jess, Chris, and Todd share their thoughts on the announcements and presentations that happened at Microsoft's BUILD 2016 developer conference. The biggest question is: how much of this is (or will be) actually relevant to us?

In this episode, Todd, Jess, and Chris chat about automating developer testing. Some call it "TDD", some call it "BDD", but we just call it a good topic for a show! Join us as we talk about our varying experiences with creating, modifying, getting rid of, or even completely avoiding automated unit tests and how it's affected us. In this episode, we mention the following great resources: Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers FitNesse - wiki and acceptance testing framework SpecFlow - BDD testing framework And, here are some other great resources that we didn't happen to mention but you should check out anyway! Test-Driven Development on Wikipedia (yes, it's a great resource!) NUnit - .NET unit testing framework xUnit - .NET unit testing framework Selenium - Browser automation (acceptance testing) framework Nightwatch.js - Write your Selenium tests in JavaScript (Node.JS) (works great for any web application - even if it's written in .NET!) Learning TDD with Katas

Join Todd, Chris, and Jess as they wade through the waters of the "new" (but not really new) Microsoft frameworks, .NET Core 1.0 and ASP.NET Core 1.0. What were the motivations for the name change? Was it a good move? What the heck is .NET Core and ASP.NET Core, anyway?

In this episode, Todd, Chris, and Jess embrace the holiday spirit and share the stories that have molded them into the hardened code slingers they are today. Did Chris actually meet the real, live Batman while on a job in the middle of the night in Disneyland? Will Jess ever actually get fired - or even scolded - for deleting production databases and bringing production websites to a grinding halt? Why does Todd carry around 4 laptop power adapters to this day? Listen to our stories and decide for yourself. If you enjoy the show, please let us know by leaving a comment on iTunes or on our website: http://www.staticvoidpodcast.com. We're dying to hear what you think!