.NET Rocks!

Dylan Beattie, consultant, .NET developer, and creator of the Rockstar language, champions the Use What Works movement. He explains why preferring well-maintained OSS and buying proven tools beats rebuilding everything. He discusses open source sustainability, how AI affects rebuilding decisions, and when rebuilding is useful for learning rather than shipping.

José Simões, founder and core lead of the open-source .NET nanoFramework and CEO of Eklosolutions, brings embedded systems and IoT expertise. He discusses why nanoFramework evolved from .NET microFramework. He covers running C# on modern microcontrollers, hardware debugging from Visual Studio, real-world commercial and educational uses, and roadmap items like generics and improved tooling.

Live celebration of two thousand shows with audience Q&A and memorable clips. Stories range from a wartime call-in and early podcasting history to moments that shaped careers. Reflections on community impact, music and jam sessions, AI in development, and practical advice for teaching and launching podcasts.

First‑hand stories about frantic fixes and mass audits that cleared critical systems before January 1, 2000. Tales of rewriting legacy code, shipping floppy patches, and auditing SNMP and university infrastructure. Accounts of using Y2K budgets to tackle long‑standing tech debt and the orchestration of shutdowns, tests, and contingency monitoring that made the rollover a non‑event.

Rob Conery, software developer, consultant, and author known for The Imposter's Handbook, reflects on bringing AI and LLMs into organizations. He describes focusing on the most painful problems to win trust. Conversations cover repurposing staff, AI as an architectural partner, new org roles, prompt strategy, and how teams can do more without simple replacement.

Ed Charbeneau, principal developer advocate at Progress who builds .NET SDKs and AI demos. He discusses making agents smarter with Progress Agentic RAG and NucliaDB as a vector data store. Topics include RAG basics, ingestion types (PDFs, audio, web), extraction of structured data, hybrid search techniques, monitoring quality, scalability, and .NET developer experience.

Daniel Roth, Principal Product Manager on the ASP.NET team at Microsoft, discusses the 2026 direction for ASP.NET Core and Blazor. Highlights include the public roadmap for .NET 11, modern-stack priorities like minimal APIs, Blazor, and SignalR. Conversations cover async validation, state persistence and pause/resume for scaling, WebAssembly workers, C# union support, and emerging AI and passkey integrations.

Chris Ayers, an Azure reliability engineer at Microsoft who speaks on cloud resiliency and security, breaks down the MITRE ATT&CK framework and why thinking like an attacker improves defenses. He covers logging and anomalous authentication, detecting data exfiltration, supply-chain risks from malicious packages, and using automation and tooling to drive detection and safer pipelines.

Brady Gaster, a software engineer and product lead behind GitHub Copilot and developer tools, created Squad to coordinate specialist AI agents for app development. He discusses building focused agents that scan repos, debate and reach consensus, manage memory and skills, and speed up demo app generation. The conversation highlights token costs, parallel agents, reuse across projects, and practical limits like latency.

Matt Lacey, a developer focused on Avalonia tooling and VS integration. Mike James, CEO driving cross-platform rendering and sustainability. They discuss Avalonia 12, the switch toward Google's Impeller renderer for better mobile and embedded performance, new Accelerate tooling and commercial offerings, and collaboration with MAUI and Flutter-related teams.