.NET Rocks!

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.

Kathleen Dollard, experienced .NET engineer and former Microsoft contributor who helped build the .NET CLI. She argues CLIs should be the first interface you design. Short takes on POSIX conventions, OpenCLI and AI-friendly consistency. Talks System.CommandLine, Dragonfruit 2, scripting readability, deprecation strategies, and why CLI-first clarifies APIs and GUIs.

Andrew Murphy, a technology leader and coach who helps engineering leaders navigate change. He maps developers' reactions to AI to stages of grief. He talks about leaders' responsibility for AI-produced code. He contrasts how junior and senior engineers adapt and explores tooling, guardrails, and the future of local models.

Damien Brady, a developer and senior manager on GitHub's developer advocacy team with deep DevOps and .NET experience. He explores how generative AI is reshaping who writes code. Short iterative prompts, tests, and CI remain crucial. They discuss local LLMs for privacy, orchestrators and specialist models, and using AI as reviewers and automated PRs while balancing cost and trust.

Ben Dechrai, security-focused software engineer and AI tooling builder, discusses AI's impact on secure software. He describes running local LLMs and the hardware struggles. He covers organizational data and trust concerns, context leakage and model memorization risks. He explores AI used for both attacking and defending software and the rise of scoped, app-specific LLMs.

Jason Bock, Staff software engineer and Microsoft MVP for C#, explains modern .NET source generators and why you might generate code at compile time. He covers how they work with Roslyn, practical uses like replacing reflection and aiding AOT, Microsoft’s uses (regex, P/Invoke, logging), pitfalls to avoid, and tips for building your first generator.

Maddy Montaquila, Senior Product Manager at Microsoft who led .NET MAUI work and now leads Aspire. She discusses Aspire as a local-first, type-safe toolkit for building cloud-native, distributed apps. She covers multi-language support for Python and JavaScript, multi-cloud compatibility, new CLI and copilot features, versioning choices, deployment and CI/CD plans, and AI and Foundry integrations.

Gerald Versluis, a software engineer on Microsoft's .NET team, dives into the latest with MAUI and .NET 10. He shares insights on new features, performance improvements, and developments in XAML that enhance stability and efficiency. The discussion explores cross-platform challenges and compares MAUI's complexity to browser standardization. Gerald highlights partnerships with Uno and Avalonia to expand capabilities, along with the integration of Azure Aspire for seamless backend services. Expect exciting community events and a roadmap for future MAUI innovations!