Richard Campbell is an Advisor, Creator, and Storyteller. They dive into the fascinating world of writing a history book, navigating through different versions of events, and seeking inspiration from pivotal moments. They also explore Microsoft's surprising involvement in large language models, the impact of the iPad on the tech industry, and the ongoing quest for effective client-side development. Additionally, they discuss the evolution of artificial intelligence and its perception in society. 

Shawn Clabough (00:02.071)

Hello and welcome to another episode of Adventures in.NET. I'm Sean Claywell, your host and with me today, we've got a full panel. We've got Mark Miller. Hey Mark. We've got, hey. We've got Christian Wentz. Hey. And we've got Adam Fermanich. Hey Adam, hey. Hey. Thanks for staying up late for us guys. You know, I know it's your bedtime. You're kind of getting old over the hill, you know.

 

Mark Miller (00:10.186)

Hey! Hey, Sean!

 

Christian Wenz (00:16.282)

Hello Sean, and hello everybody.

 

Adam Furmanek (00:22.555)

Hello folks, good to see you.

 

Shawn Clabough (00:31.927)

You're probably real tired, but thanks for staying up. Hehehehe.

 

Mark Miller (00:33.59)

He's talking to you! He's talking to you, Adam!

 

Adam Furmanek (00:33.692)

and agree more.

 

Richard (00:36.774)

Mm-hmm.

 

Adam Furmanek (00:38.885)

Thank you, glad you noticed. Yes, I am a little bit sleepy now. I'm a dinosaur, so that happens.

 

Shawn Clabough (00:45.399)

Yeah, yeah. All right. Let's bring out our guest. This guest was last on in February of 2020. And let's see if I remember who it was and how to say his name. Richard Campbell. Hey, Richard.

 

Richard (01:03.449)

Hey, how you doing? It's not late here at all. It's like mid-afternoon on a Friday.

 

Shawn Clabough (01:08.947)

Yeah, you're the same time zone as I am. So I am, I'm doing just fine. But I just had lunch. So I've got kind of that little lunch hangover.

 

Richard (01:10.918)

There you go.

 

Richard (01:14.468)

Awesome.

 

Richard (01:19.645)

I try and take it easy on Fridays, you know, catch up for the week and mostly plow email, like don't usually do shows on Fridays, but for you guys.

 

Shawn Clabough (01:28.784)

Good.

 

Christian Wenz (01:29.05)

Yeah, we are honored and indebted. So thanks for being here. So I got a personal question, actually, because it's legend that you are researching the history of Microsoft all the decades. And so you are the go-to reference, right? So about, I don't even know when it was, 10 years ago, maybe even longer, I was on vacation. And

 

Richard (01:35.746)

Mm-hmm.

 

Christian Wenz (01:57.914)

I also stopped in China. And so even Shanghai or Beijing, I went to the supposedly largest bookstore. And being the person I am, I just went to the IT department just out of curiosity. And what did I see? One of my books. And that was a book that I wrote in English. And a few weeks later, I just hoped that they kind of sold or burned.

 

Richard (02:10.307)

as you do.

 

Christian Wenz (02:23.246)

all of the existing copies. I didn't even know it was that the rights were sold for the Chinese language, nor did they actually translated it, nor did they actually put that in print and sold it there. I mean, I bought it much to the surprise of everyone in there. So far, great story. It's getting a bit sad now because it was my essential silver light book. And I mean, I was kind of proud when it came out for the first three or four days. And then I started to reconsider.

 

Richard (02:24.585)

Hehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe

 

Richard (02:43.858)

Wow.

 

Christian Wenz (02:53.41)

and somehow that book didn't do really well and they didn't ask me to do a new edition for Silverlight V. And since you know everything, I mean, what... It was one and then I think I upgraded it to two, but I think... And that was my mistake, the version two book was basically the version one book with updated listings, so maybe that wasn't such a good idea, but yeah.

 

Richard (03:01.777)

So it was a Silverlight IV book. It was, like it was.

 

Richard (03:16.925)

Yeah, because Silverlight 1 didn't even have.NET in it. It was just a JavaScript hosting environment. Yeah.

 

Christian Wenz (03:20.862)

Exactly. It was all JavaScript. So yeah, but the book didn't do really well, to be honest, if I remember correctly, it's been a long time, except for in China, supposedly. I never got a royalty check for that. But.

 

Richard (03:28.253)

Because in early 2010, yeah, I'm just wondering if it was actually a real book. Like it wasn't just a pirated version of it. It is China you're talking about. Yeah.

 

Christian Wenz (03:38.202)

Yes, it looked legit, I mean real legit, and had the logo of the publisher and everything.

 

Richard (03:44.781)

Yeah, I understand they have Rolexes there too.

 

Christian Wenz (03:47.986)

They have. It did look legit. I mean, you know, big bookstore and all of the other books next to it looked like legitimate translations of US books, I knew. But why didn't that book do well? Okay, because of me maybe, but why did Scylla do so well? I mean, in retrospect, the idea sounded great, but I mean, you talk to the people, I'm pretty sure about that.

 

Richard (03:48.985)

Hehehehehehe

 

Richard (04:06.861)

Hmm. Oh, I think so.

 

Richard (04:13.157)

Well, people are, nobody would be angry about it if it didn't do well. People are so upset about Silverlight because they bet a lot on it, and were encouraged to.

 

Christian Wenz (04:18.242)

Of course. Oh yeah.

 

Richard (04:23.185)

You know, the hairy moment around Silverlight is that you went from April of 2010, when Studio 2010 shipped, and Silverlight is literally front and center in the keynote as like, this is how you do enterprise development. This is C Sharp all the way down, it's MVVM, it works on a Mac, it's now, that was the announced version that ran out of browser. So, I mean, it was a big deal. And then fast forward six months,

 

and there are no Silverlight sessions. That's when Mary Jo Foley asks Bob Mugley, hey, how come there aren't any Silverlight sessions? And Bob says, not knowing he's the first Microsoft person to talk about Silverlight in six months, well, our strategy has shifted.

 

and you know, cue the explosions and people freaking out and serious folks wondering if they've destroyed their careers because they have pushed their company along the path of using Silverlight for everything. You know, the importance of the question is like what happened in that six months? Because by the way, Bob was talking and I've interviewed Bob since then as part of trying to finish this book. He didn't realize either, but it all right after

 

2010 was launched and Silverlight 4 in April of 2010, the iPad had been announced, followed by thoughts on Flash. Right, the great letter from the late great Steve Jobs. Now Steve knew two things, really he knew one thing. The main thing was that Flash was murdering the battery on the iPad, right? That.

 

You know, this is the era of Strongpad and all the flash animations and things and flash is built for PCs. It's not built for mobile devices. It's not good to mobile devices and it's not efficient. It consumes a lot of power. And so when you throw it on a mobile device, you get problems. But the other point about flash was that it was a browser plugin. And we forget because I think this is a natural insanity that we have working in the tech industry

 

Richard (06:35.085)

Every Christmas, you went to your folks' places, your extended family's places, and all you were doing was replacing their address bars. Because every single family member had sooner or later downloaded a plugin, some kind of malware that replaced the address bar in their browser. It was just a constant problem. And so when you read Thoughts on Flash, Steve's very much focused on, hey, plugins are a plague. They're creating huge problems for us, and we're getting rid of plugins.

 

And that was his explanation for why he was not gonna let Flash run in Safari. And that's all he was really saying, is like going forward, no more plugins in Safari. And since Silverlight was dependent on a plugin as well, so at that moment, Silverlight's got a problem. It's not gonna run on iOS. And...

 

Christian Wenz (07:21.91)

I mean the Android situation was not much better, right? Wasn't there a beta version of the plugin or something? I mean, you still had to install it, what was super uncommon on mobile phones, right? But, yeah.

 

Richard (07:31.333)

Yeah, well, and at that point in Android, this was before Chrome was on Android. So this was the Android browser, which is a particularly nasty piece of code. And so it was not easy to make plugins work on that browser at all. And it was a modified version of WebKit. You could make it run, but the average mortal wasn't gonna make it happen.

 

And you know, the smartphone was still pretty young then. People liked them, but the office largely hadn't embraced them yet. If you think about what really accelerated the bring your device to work thing, it was the iPad.

 

because the iPad was this luxury device. What happened to me as the run as guy is I started to have a lot of system in saying, so my CIO showed up today, showed me his iPad and says, I expect to do all my work from here. Like, what am I supposed to do? You can't join that thing to a domain.

 

But that whole movement towards mobile device management and so forth, it's the iPad that kicked that off. But this is 2010. It's just starting. None of this has happened yet. We're not ready for it. We have no ability to deal with it. We just have this note from Jobs that he's not going to let Flash run on iOS.

 

And instead of Microsoft, they're like, fine. Now, this is not Microsoft's fault. In normal procedures, if you think about the way Microsoft has always dealt with these things, what happened when Sun got the injunction against Microsoft for Java? Because at the time, Microsoft made a version of Java, J++, they had a couple of versions out. Anders Halsberg is working on it.

 

Richard (09:04.825)

So what did Microsoft do? Well, obviously they went to C sharp and they also made J sharp and they created a bridge so that anybody who'd committed to the Microsoft version of Java had a path that lasted until 2008, like 10 years you had a bridge that can migrate your Java code written on the Microsoft stack over to.NET and the CLR. So why didn't that happen for Silverlight? And that's the great question. And the issue again is the iPad.

 

So when Microsoft rolls, when Apple announces the iPad, Microsoft sees it as an existential threat. And specifically, Steven Sinovsky sees it as an existential threat. Because Steven Sinovsky has just shipped Windows 7, and he's a god, right? He's rehabilitated Windows from the Vista debacle.

 

and now he can do no wrong. He made the office clock, the office clocks running right on time and they loved him over there. And now he's fixed Windows with the favorite version of Windows, Windows 7, and one would argue still in one of the most favorite versions of all time. And here comes the iPad. And so he pulls the Andong cord, he rings all the bells. It's like, this is an existential threat to the company and we need to address it.

 

and he's got a vision about how he's gonna go about it and he wants to make it a big splash. And so he basically locks down communications for Microsoft. Now he had a couple of vision things going on here. The original version of XAML, the project Avalon.

 

that was initially part of Vista and then got pushed out in order to deliver Vista on time and became Windows Presentation Foundation because the rule is if you have a cool code name, you have a terrible product name. Which is why they called, why the code name for Silverweight was WPFE because calling a code name W, Windows Presentation Foundation everywhere means you get to have a cool product name. So.

 

Christian Wenz (10:59.234)

Always, always.

 

Richard (11:13.297)

They shove all that stuff out and it lands on.NET. And one of Sanofsky's goals coming out of Windows 7, now that he's rethinking Windows and wants to address the iPad, is that he wants XAML back in the OS. And so he's now poaching people out of the Silverlight team as quickly as possible. He needs them to start implementing XAML for the OS because we've got to respond to the threat of the iPad.

 

At the same time, we've got Windows Phone running full bore.

 

and they're in phone eight at this point, and they have now abandoned the subset of Silverlight that was WinPhone 7, and they're now gonna redo the operating system for the second time, but don't worry, there'll be a third time just to really demolish the developers' hopes and dreams. And so they're poaching XAML people as quickly as they can too. So by the time you get to the BDC in 2010, there's essentially nobody left in the Silverlight project.

 

They've either been pulled into the Windows team or they've been pulled into the phone team, like the place has been gutted. So why were there no Silverlight sessions in the PDC in 2010? None were submitted. There was no conspiracy, just nobody had the cycles left to actually do that work while the team was being dismantled because they saw the writing on the wall and they were needed elsewhere. The...

 

Christian Wenz (12:34.414)

If I recall correctly, the Silverlight One plugin, wasn't that even developed externally by an external company? Do I remember that correctly? So the team was probably built too late and then disbanded too early, right?

 

Richard (12:48.537)

Well, the team was around for quite a while. There's a bunch of motivations for how Silverlight got created. On one hand, you have the Netflix issue. So Reed Hastings gone to Microsoft. He wants to get away from the red envelopes. He wants to start streaming on the internet, but the internet's awfully young. Still, there's not enough bandwidth for this. So he wants the variable bandwidth ability. He wants the ability for a client to understand the current rates and be able to drop down to lower resolutions of video and keep functioning, right? Do you remember this demo, this media services demo with IIF?

 

the original client was the thing they bought that became Silverlight One. And so that's why it didn't have anything to do with.NET in it, it was really about trying to manage this problem of dynamic variable rate streaming.

 

Christian Wenz (13:32.486)

So basically it was a video player with a JavaScript bridge.

 

Richard (13:35.553)

Yeah, and JavaScript was your interfacing part so that you could connect into it and so forth. That's what it was initially intended for. But in the fallout of Vista, which is all in that same timeframe, you have all these other bits and you have this odd version of.NET that's been generated, the pseudo.NET 3, that was the catchall for the fallout from Longhorn so that Vista could go on to do its thing. And so as they're cleaning that up, they see this opportunity.

 

Now, they'd also been experimenting with runtimes on other platforms, because the other thing you think about when you think about Silverlight is the fact that it ran on a Mac. And it did use.NET 3, although.NET 3 was a very odd version of.NET. It was really the CLR 2, and they made an implementation that ran on Mac OS. So it was a cross-platform product. Long before anybody wanted to talk about a cross-platform product. The other thing that was very important about Silverlight, culturally, was that...

 

DevDiv, largely driven, especially the website driven by Scott Guthrie, really wanted to get out of the 18 to 24 month cycle that was Studio. Up until that point,.NET had shipped with a version of Studio every time, 2002, 2003, 2005.

 

and that cadence was too slow. They couldn't respond to the market. They had gotten web forms squared away finally in 2005. Like it was genuinely good, right? With CLR2, the membership profile, all of that good stuff. And folks could really build, especially internal enterprise class apps that would work reliably and run on service for an extended period of time.

 

And now Ruby on Rails comes on the scene a big way. And it's very dynamic and it's very rapid to build. And it's where web people are happiest, being able to go quickly. Now, we can debate how well that software scaled over time the way that it was built. That's always a challenge with dynamic languages, but it had a lot of strength. And taking two to three years to ship a new version was just not gonna cut it on the Microsoft side. So part of...

 

Richard (15:38.929)

Guthrie's response was CodePlex, creating a repository place where he could push out code to more folks and going out of band, starting to press out versions of software, including Silverlight, through the CodePlex channel, independent of shipping new versions of Studio. And so he put out three versions of Silverlight in less than two years. That was a demonstration inside of Microsoft to say, we can ship software faster.

 

But in.NET Rocks at that time, we also did a show called, Is Software Development Getting Too Complex? And we were talking about how hard it was to assemble a stack these days, where there was all these different places that we could download bits, like trying to build a new machine to do Silverlight development, meant you had to get code from three or four different locations. This is before package managers or any of those things in the.NET world. So it was really a challenge to make any of that work as he was going out of band.

 

But these were all the sort of political forces at work between trying to innovate at a higher rate, trying to defend the Windows empire, respond to the iPad, lots of different folks acting at once that literally nobody built a bridge for Silverlight. There was never even a consideration for it. And that's really why folks got so angry. You had, they had told their best customers, those large Fortune 500 companies, you can bet on Silverlight. And then they left them hanging.

 

Now, one would argue they moved it over to a maintenance team eventually, and in late 2011 they put out version five, which would be the last edition, and it was supported for 10 years. It only went out of support in 2021. At that point it was hard to get it to run on any browser. Like you pretty much needed to do the special IE 11 tricks to make it work, but...

 

doesn't matter, you still had the same problem of, you had committed a lot of development resources, a lot of training and so forth to work on a stack that was no longer to be worked on. And it kinda came out of the blue.

 

Shawn Clabough (17:42.675)

In some ways, I consider myself one of the lucky ones, somebody that's been in.NET since the beginning that never worked with Silverlight. Yeah, I was excited and I wanted to learn it, but I was stuck in a web forms world, and unfortunately, I'm still stuck in the web forms world.

 

Richard (17:51.514)

Never took a bet on it. Yeah.

 

Richard (18:01.733)

Well, and now a web forms has been left behind in 4.8, right? Like we, although they've still done, I think a bit more graceful of care and feeding for web form folks for no other reason, irrespective of if it's the right thing to do, 4.8 is still important in Windows.

 

Shawn Clabough (18:06.819)

Exactly.

 

Richard (18:18.501)

Right, like the Windows team hasn't gotten off the standard framework and there's no sign that they will. So it's going to continue to get service, service security patches and so forth. And there's no sign that I will ever stop. You know, it's only going to be after major players are off. Remember that US Navy has not moved off of XP. They still continue to pay Microsoft to maintain security patches for XP. Microsoft will do what you want. All you have to do is pay them enough money.

 

Shawn Clabough (18:46.815)

Yeah, I would feel better if I could use the more recent versions of C sharp. You know, I flip it over so I can go to C sharp eight, even though it's really not fully there for C sharp eight. But, you know, now I'm missing out.

 

Richard (18:52.019)

Yeah.

 

Richard (19:01.457)

And now, we did that show on Don and Rox back in the day where Mads was just admitting, like, it's just getting too expensive to develop two versions of C-sharp, one that'll run on the standard framework, and the one that takes advantage of what was once known as core. And some of the tricks they were doing depend on the architectural differences in core and just were gonna be impossible to implement in standard.

 

Shawn Clabough (19:22.835)

Oh yeah, I understand it. It's just as the developer, and you want to be able to use those in those older projects, and you can't, and you don't have, I know, well.

 

Richard (19:29.225)

Things are shiny on the core side, Sean. It's very fun over there. And it is interesting to see what does it take for an organization to be willing to commit to the effort to switch off of standard. And you're seeing Microsoft trying to facilitate that with the new upgrade wizards and things like that. There's a real strong case as a conservative IT guy to say, the longer you wait, the easier it gets.

 

because they will keep building tools to make the bridges easier, and there will be classes that map across and so forth. So there's a strong incentive to take your time there.

 

Shawn Clabough (20:08.363)

Yeah, I've been reading lately about using a reverse proxy against the Webforms project and having something out front, in front of it that's more modern and just pass through and just kind of, they call it the strangler pattern. I don't know if I care for that name, but the strangler pattern is what they call it.

 

Richard (20:14.541)

Mm-hmm.

 

Richard (20:23.068)

Right.

 

Richard (20:27.389)

that it's a way to wrap up that code and keep it in a safe place. I keep wondering if the Power Apps guys aren't going to eventually, because the Power Apps guys already have a form analyzer. Like you can take a paper form, scan it, feed it this thing, and it'll spit out a Power App that has that form on it. Like tell me the difference between that and a web form. It just doesn't seem like it would be that hard to screenshot everything in a web forms app, feed it through the same mechanism, and suddenly you've got the prototype of a Power App to replace that app. As long as it's an internal app, because of the way they're doing it,

 

for power apps. Like there's a bunch of ways to bridge forward but I see a lot of web forms app as internal only.

 

Adam Furmanek (21:05.217)

I remember first days of migrating.NET Framework apps to.NET Core back then. I remember the decisions that were later on reversed, like the change of.csproj file to something, I think it was JSON, and they reverted that and other stuff around. I remember trying to push it hard, you know, to move on to.NET Core 1 and 2. As you're saying, the longer I waited, the easier it got, actually.

 

Richard (21:19.697)

Yep. Yeah.

 

Richard (21:31.121)

Sure, well because the core team made mistakes too and the JSON project files were one of them, that they simply couldn't do all the things that the standard project files did and represented too large of a breaking change. You're just separating the clients and so they ultimately backed off from it. So there's something to be said for letting a couple of versions go by and letting somebody else knock those bugs out. You know, as the admins say, change is good, you go first.

 

Adam Furmanek (21:58.477)

Yeah, another issue I remember was around like config files back then in.NET Framework you had config and next to your exe file, then in early.NET Core it was like, idea is cool, just read any JSON but how do I know where this JSON is and how do I load it automatically, right?

 

Mark Miller (21:58.601)

Ha!

 

Richard (22:13.777)

Hehehe

 

Richard (22:17.169)

Well, the funny part is that a lot of those project files were all just text in the end anyway. They're just not really pleasant to read. But then when was Jason ever pleasant to read?

 

Mark Miller (22:28.298)

Hey Richard, I've got a question about your book. I want to say like, I think for about four years I've heard you talk about this, I think working on this. And I'm interested to know, are there heroes and villains in your book? Do you have a sense of the tone? Is it like a dark comedy like Weekend at Bernie's at times? I'm just, do you have, have you decided any of this? I'm curious about that.

 

Richard (22:36.263)

longer.

 

Richard (22:52.404)

Hehehehehehehehehehe

 

I mean, I've written a few versions of it along the way. My biggest problem right now is that I don't know how to write history books, and I've been learning, and I've made some mistakes that have forced me to tear it apart a few times. The big thing I've come to appreciate now is that I really do have to write it backwards. I have to start with

 

the things we know the clearest now and then fit the narrative going backward. Because when I went forward, I got into a corner where it's like, this book no longer makes sense. You know, I'm asking people to remember meetings from 15 or 20 years ago. And I even have three or four versions of that meeting, having talked to so many people about it. None of them are the same.

 

Everybody's a hero in their own story, that's inevitable. And so trying to pick a set of pieces that fit together has been challenging. And there was a dozen or so pivotal moments over the 20 something year history. And so I'm just trying to get all of those to hold together. And the pandemic was not good for me for this kind of focus work. This was supposed to be the summer to finish, but then life's gotten in the way, we're selling the house and shuffling everything around.

 

this winter will be more helpful for me to do the long focus I need to finish getting this together. But I played with versions of this story where each chapter was actually the narrative of an individual who has a pivoted moment at that time in the history. There was...

 

Richard (24:24.625)

The problem with the heroes and villains scenario is that real people have good days and bad days. I don't think that anybody went to work thinking today's the day I'm gonna screw the company up. I think when you start painting people's motivations, clearly you get a better idea of why things were happening the way they were.

 

Mark Miller (24:39.702)

That's because I wasn't working there, man.

 

Shawn Clabough (24:42.868)

Yeah, I...

 

Richard (24:51.461)

but it is absolutely a story of a group of people with a variety of goals and a variety of intents that end up there. Remember that.NET's not an intended product. It's an emergent product. They were solving a set of different problems and essentially ran into each other.

 

Shawn Clabough (25:08.599)

Yeah, for your picture on the book, I think you should try to replicate Bernie's little smirk that he had throughout the movie. Hehehe. Just don't take a boat ride with you and fall off the back. You'll just hit all these dinghies along the way.

 

Richard (25:14.9)

Yeah, it's quite a smile for a dead guy.

 

Richard (25:21.797)

I mean, I've battled over the title for this thing for a long time. And even though overriding theme, like what do we learn from this history? To me, the thing that's really emerged from this that's astonishing to me is that we're still, the skills you learned in 2005 using Studio are still relevant in 2023.

 

I mean honestly, I know most people I see, many people I see using Studio at least 2019, use it like it's 2010 because there's so little. Fundamentally, it hasn't changed. There's lots of new features and lots of new capabilities and the language has gotten better. You know, this is something I argue with mads all the time. It's like you've built these great new language constructs, but why is anyone gonna use them when the code they wrote for C-sharp 3 works fine?

 

And this is where we get into some of these new co-pilot tools and things like this, like encouraging to use new language constructs should be an interesting part of all of that. But the idea that we fundamentally replaced a framework to go from something that was built to build enterprise apps for Windows to a framework that's cross platform and open source and kept the dev tools over top of it the whole time, that's an extraordinary achievement.

 

while also completely pivoting the business model. They went from closed source patented licensed code to open source, as long as it runs on Azure, everybody's happy code.

 

Mark Miller (26:49.578)

Yeah, that's clever people with power, with agency, right? You can't do that without smart people that have power within the company.

 

Richard (26:53.979)

Mm.

 

Richard (26:58.597)

Well, and are able to affect all the way up and down too. There's a really interesting moment that you'll have in the book that I'll give away at this point where the senior leaders have figured out that.NET needs to be open source. But it's not up to them. The team that's running it has to decide that this is something they wanna do. And the team that's running it also knows what we're doing isn't working.

 

But open source is an impossible idea. Microsoft is fundamentally hostile to open source. For crying out loud, the CEO said just a few years before, Linux is a cancer. And so they present a sort of halfway idea to the leaders saying, hey, we're thinking about doing this and opening up this way and trying this and so forth. They're like, we know you're on the right path, but we think you need to go all the way. Like think bigger. And they're actually timid to finally say, you mean we could.

 

Open source? You know, like, yeah, that sounds like a good idea. I think you guys should work on that.

 

Mark Miller (27:59.646)

Nice.

 

Richard (28:00.529)

But there was also the statement that says, you only get to reboot a platform once. So be very sure you really wanna do it.

 

Adam Furmanek (28:09.101)

Well, people still don't know that.NET is open source. Like, that is because the long history of Microsoft, as you said, being hostile to open source. So many people are still surprised that.NET Core is like, for what, 10 years now? Maybe a little shorter.

 

Richard (28:22.797)

And not to just be adversarial, like Mark, but they also changed open source to do this. One of the themes we've had on Don and Rox for a long time now is the impact of the tech giants living in the open source world. Like just how hard it is to have written a tool because you wanna use it at work and you put it up on GitHub and some other folks liked it too.

 

Everybody's a fan and they use it themselves and they all contribute together. And then a couple of Microsoft FTEs are assigned to it by a PM because Microsoft thinks it might be useful to them. Now you have two people who can work 40 hours plus a week on this project and they'll bury you in PRs. You've still got a real job. Now, not that happens much, but the disparity we have here is that

 

in the social coding concept that was GitHub back in the day, we were all peers. We all had regular work and we were contributing to other things and these were our hobby projects and we were enthusiasts. We were equally knowledgeable. We were there for the same reason. And again, I might be painting a bit of an idealistic view of early GitHub. And now we have, you know, I've talked to...

 

a young developer who's been assigned to an open source project as a contributor by his PM and just say like, I paid full time to contribute to this. Like how could the project lead keep up? He's got a job that isn't this.

 

Adam Furmanek (30:00.537)

I think Google also had this similar stuff, right? There is this Google Summer of Code and many projects they participated in was like GitHub or open source projects, but it was never like full time around the clock.

 

Richard (30:15.365)

Yeah, and of course it's a dream for a lot of folks of, could I turn my hobby into a job? Which by the way is a great way to screw up a hobby. And, but.

 

You know, we have a recurring theme now of talking to folks who have, you know, quit the job and now turn the open source project into their job. And what that's necessarily like and how to go forward on that. I don't know that it's the rule, you know, lots of people want to become consultants. It's always a grasses greener thing. Every consultant I know wants to make a product and every product guy I know wants to be a consultant.

 

Shawn Clabough (30:49.803)

So do you think the bright future is Blazor, or is it gonna be MAUI, or what's the adoption do you think is gonna be for those technologies?

 

Richard (30:58.833)

Well, let's talk about why Blazor's popular. And I think one of the main reasons that Blazor's popular, besides C Sharp all the way down, and the version coming in.NET 8 is especially impressive because now I don't have to decide on WebAssembly and all that complicated thinking, is that it's a flashback to the old ecosystem we love. You know, the halcyon days of.NET development where you had sets of component suites from various vendors,

 

Richard (31:28.829)

I mean, that was your business, right? Is that you had a control suite you could work in and you would do your thing. And it hadn't been like that for a long time. You know, Microsoft is sort of as they're turned towards Azure, they kind of turned away from the broader development ecosystem.

 

and kind of left those people feeling a bit loose. And then came Blazor and an opportunity for those developers that liked that ecosystem to work in a new environment that was contemporary, modern, and Steve Sanderson approved, and could benefit from that extended ecosystem providing additional tooling and capabilities, so forth. So Blazor feels very familiar to a group of developers who were worried that they were left behind.

 

and now can work on the new bits and be comfortable. But Blazor's also on.

 

Christian Wenz (32:19.69)

if you're a.NET developer, right? Or do you see many people from other communities kind of suddenly switch over? I mean, the niche is pretty well defined, right?

 

Richard (32:28.165)

I really don't see that. Yeah, I mean we definitely are living in our bubble, for better or worse, and our bubble just got nicely reinforced. But it's also hitting V3, right? NET 8, the universal blazer, that's very much a V3 blazer. No wonder it's good, because that's the rules. Where Maui's just barely out of one.

 

Now I appreciate that Microsoft is trying to clean up its act on client side development. I think that's important. It's been a problem for a while. And unifying all of these bits and pieces that they've had for the Xamarin acquisition, migrating win forms and so forth over to core, like they've done a lot of parts simultaneously, trying to build a unified story around that is compelling and smart and really, really hard. And so...

 

folks like Matty and David and all of the folks, and it's part of my challenge now having done DNR for as long as I have is like, these are my friends. I've known a lot of these people for a long time. I know how hard they're working on these kinds of problems. It's not trivial. So I mean, I come with a ton of bias and a deep appreciation for them, but the problem they're trying to solve is a righteous problem. We should have a great client stack that it doesn't matter where you go, that it should work. It's also very quixotic.

 

We're the only ones who care about cross-platform development. The customer just wants it to work on their device. They couldn't give a crap about any other device. So we're busy solving a problem for us that, for the most part, our customers don't care about. And that's challenging to do well and hard to justify.

 

but they've got the momentum behind them. They own the whole stack. They seem to have done the political thing inside of Microsoft to get everybody on board with this so that they should be able to get enough versions out that we can finally see some real value from it. Right now, it's still tough, but it was always tough.

 

Christian Wenz (34:29.942)

I think historically developer experience has always been pretty good. But you know, then there's always that point where you have to decide whether you, you march on or you let, how, how does Spolsky always call this, uh, architect astronauts take over, right. And then make, make things pretty, but you know, more, more complicated. Yeah.

 

Richard (34:33.883)

Mm-hmm.

 

Richard (34:45.594)

Yeah.

 

but nobody's gonna actually use them. It helps to have a product like Flutter out in the world. To me, Flutter is a remarkable achievement, at least unifying Android and iOS development. We can debate whether it's gone further than that. They're now struggling to be on more platforms of that. But if you looked at how tidy the implementation was, and I can live with Dart, me and like three other people apparently,

 

Christian Wenz (34:53.526)

Oh yeah, absolutely.

 

Richard (35:18.521)

it was a really nice unified experience. And that, you know, Microsoft's better when they're chasing. I think Flutter came along and really helped unify the problems that Maui could address.

 

Christian Wenz (35:31.758)

That's a remarkable product. I mean, just that they managed to have great front-end performance, but they are drawing all of the UI elements themselves and are not reusing the ones from the platforms. That is pretty, pretty amazing. And yeah, I think competition is healthy, unless you work on the Internet Explorer team. Right? That's it.

 

Richard (35:42.258)

Mm-hmm.

 

Richard (35:54.371)

But it also makes what's happening with large language models so bizarre, because how did Microsoft end up being the lead on this? I've got to think it's accidental, and yet they've also embraced it.

 

Richard (36:09.305)

I'm used to Microsoft wanting to come in second. It's safer, right? They don't want to be, even with Blazor, like they sat on Blazor as an experimental project until the week that Golang shipped in WebAssembly.

 

They continued to work on it, it was just a beta project, they weren't gonna push it out, they weren't gonna support it, just ticking around like that, until Golang went first and didn't get crucified. I think they were really afraid to be seen as folks that were attacking JavaScript, going into JavaScript's domain, and so they just kind of waited. And as soon as Golang came down the pipe and went, okay, well, they know they were the pioneer, not too many arrows in the back, maybe we can go that way too. And unfortunately, they'd actually had a lot built, so when they landed initially with Blazor, they landed with a pretty big bang, like that was a,

 

working on it for a while. And I thought that would be a pattern for them going forward is like, take your projects, keep them experimental, be upfront about it, but only commercialize it when you see that there's a market in place that you can run to and try and catch up on. But that's not what happened with OpenAI, Chatt GPT and now the co-pilots.

 

Christian Wenz (37:19.622)

So what's your... Yeah, sorry Mark, you go first.

 

Mark Miller (37:20.214)

So Richard, no, I was just, you know, when I was a guest on.NET Rocks, we were talking about AI. And one of the pieces that came out that I found super interesting was you express, well, let me ask you, how do you feel about anthropomorphism and combined with AI? In other words, attributing good.

 

Richard (37:28.52)

Hmm

 

Richard (37:45.349)

Well, let me just look at the historical context on this. The term artificial intelligence is coined by Marvin Minsky in the 1950s as he's trying to get money from the military.

 

which he succeeds in doing and actually build some extraordinary stuff for the US military in terms of logistical management and capacity planning and so forth. To this day, the US military is the best logistical engine in the world for moving weapons and forces around and being efficient. That's what Minsky built for them and called it AI. He couldn't create the intelligence that anybody wanted, and so they went into their first AI winter, as of several. But knowing that the term is that old,

 

The first time it shows up in popular culture is in 2001, A Space Odyssey in 1968. It's Hal, and then Hal comes to kill everybody. Like, why are we confused about people's relationship with AI? The meta has been pretty solid for a long time. If you make an intelligence, it's going to kill everybody. So, you know, now you're gonna productize that? Like, how good of an idea is that?

 

And the stupid part is like, we've had machine learning for decades. The original papers for generative AI come out of Jeff Hinton in the 80s, where he really said, look, the hardware is not up for these kinds of deep neural networks, so I'm just gonna put this on a shelf, and it's his grad students that take it off the shelf in the 2010s that becomes this new wave. But we had machine learning well before that. We've been doing this stuff for a while. And one of the things I saw as a consistent pattern is,

 

As long as you're calling it artificial intelligence, it's because it didn't work. As soon as it did work, it got a new name. It became image recognition and voice translation and predictive analytics and large language models. So my instinct as someone who's invested in a lot of tech companies and communicated ideas like this is like, if you're calling it AI, it's because you don't know better or it doesn't work. It.

 

Richard (39:48.553)

Call it the product that it actually is. This is an umbrella term that has been steeped in anthropomorphic mindsets. It's prone to killing all of civilization. And so it might be good for raising money, but it's not necessarily good for making product.

 

Adam Furmanek (40:03.913)

I think we see this scheme many times, like drifting apart from AI for a bit. Like we had this object-oriented programming and then people started creating God objects, so we had to come up with different name, which is DDD now, right? We see that everywhere.

 

Richard (40:19.165)

Yeah, and also when a name is resonating and will be effective at getting results, then you tend to cast a lot of things in it. Remember when everything was ActiveX? Or everything is Azure, or everything is Agile. Like it's something you can get in a squirt bottle and spray things and it'll go faster, right? Hey, I squirted all the developers with Agile, they're gonna go faster now. Hey, same thing with AI. I squirted the whole company with AI, now we don't need employees.

 

Christian Wenz (40:49.21)

Wasn't there also a Windows.net server or something? Ha, back in the days.

 

Richard (40:52.869)

Yeah, no, we definitely dot netted too many things for a while there. You know, we tend to jump on the marketing bangwagon. Heck, I've been just making fun of the whole Visual Studio, Visual Studio code. They don't have anything to do with each other, right? But you gave them the name, and now it creates problems for everybody.

 

Richard (41:13.273)

I mean, I'm, that being said, Copilot's a great name, because it's got all the implications in it that you need. Right? It's you're the pilot. If this goes wrong, it's still your fault. I was, that was only the Copilot. You took the Copilot's advice? Well, silly you.

 

But also Microsoft didn't come up with it. It was GitHub.

 

Shawn Clabough (41:34.335)

Yes. It's not autopilot, it's copilot.

 

Richard (41:39.097)

Yes, yeah, I think a very clever name. And the folks at GitHub have, I mean arguably have the most significant LLM product running right now in the sense that, and I think there's a reason that GitHub pilots done well, not only the fact that it's the oldest, it's been around since 21, but that its customer base is good at reading code.

 

And so the code that it spits out, and even Microsoft admits, it's like 50% of the time that code's useful. But generally, if you refine the prompt, you can get it up to 60%. But at least it gets you thinking, or that creative juices thing, getting past a blank screen, always valuable. Like I think most of the time, large language models mostly spit out word salad, some of these things are code, but that word salad can stimulate stuff in your mind that helps you do a better job. And so the tool is beneficial.

 

But I also think from a co-perspective, IntelliSense and compilers help us a lot in managing what GitHub Copilot gives to us too. So, you know, it's a particular scenario that's better than most. I think we're gonna benefit quite a bit from it. I talked to a lot of developers who are getting a significant productivity boost from utilizing that tool.

 

I recently did an interview where we were talking to a fellow who says, you know, one of the big pluses here is that you don't end up in a browser. Because once you're in a browser, you're one click away from cat videos. You know, like staying in studio with copilot integrated means you're more likely to keep working and not get distracted. You know, in this ADD world, that focus is valuable. And so having...

 

a large language model assistant, fetching stuff from the greater world for you to stay focused on your code. Very, very powerful stuff.

 

Mark Miller (43:36.31)

You know, Richard, I find also that having a conversation with an LLM about code is often faster at getting me to the answer I want than search and being in browser.

 

Richard (43:52.657)

It's a different level of rubber ducking, isn't it? Like really it is. It's a rubber duck where the duck gets a say and is confident. It's wrong, but it's also confident.

 

Mark Miller (44:03.658)

Well, you know, I think going in, you know, I know for me personally, I accept the, I guess, a certain likelihood of either hallucinations or incorrectness. But I also see that it's effortless to guide it in the direction you want to go in, which is way different from working with a human. Humans to...

 

Richard (44:18.322)

bugs.

 

Richard (44:24.186)

Yeah.

 

Richard (44:29.541)

Well, and we're experienced developers, we're used to shepherding less experienced developers, and this can do a reasonable impersonation of an inexperienced developer, and it always agrees with you.

 

Shawn Clabough (44:42.683)

Yeah, I still have, you know, stack overflow is my backup to co-pilot. But you know, it's nice that co-pilot has never once said, have you tried searching first before you, you asked the question.

 

Richard (44:53.371)

or this would be better in Ruby on Rails.

 

Mark Miller (44:58.275)

That's awesome. Just let me Google that for you, Lynx. It gives you.

 

Shawn Clabough (45:01.957)

Hehehe

 

Richard (45:04.012)

No. I think that's a April Fool's Day joke I've gotta do on GitHub Copilot, is replace the interface with something that says, if we wrote this in Scala, we wouldn't have these problems. That's the only thing it ever says, no matter what you ask it.

 

Mark Miller (45:11.917)

There you go.

 

Adam Furmanek (45:14.433)

Well, on the other hand, when talking about Googling and AI, like last week, I was doing something in Go, I think. And I was not aware they have this approach over that, that if you name your variable with like lowercase letter, then those variables are private.

 

And it took me like 20-25 minutes to figure out why I can't access this variable from some other class, right? I finally found the Stack Overflow topic that covered that nailed my question, right? And then I asked ChatGPT, hey, why doesn't it work? And it immediately said lowercase letter. And I thought, like, now I knew the answer. But normally I would think, OK, you're hallucinating. So why do you think so? Show me a link.

 

to a proper explanation and he gave me exactly the same link that I found via Stagover from

 

Richard (46:00.754)

Right.

 

Richard (46:06.085)

And that, what a great confirmation, right? To say, I see how you've built your information set, it's the same mechanism I would use. So now you can treat it as the automation it is, to say, yeah, you search the same way I search, awesome.

 

Adam Furmanek (46:22.029)

Yep, and you can always try asking it, hey explain where you found it, right? And maybe it will spit out the URL for you.

 

Richard (46:26.344)

Yeah.

 

Richard (46:30.833)

Yeah, I mean, not that I'm keen on Bing AI, but its default behavior of giving it, producing footnotes for everything it said, showing the links that it came from, just saving a step. Like I do think there's refinements that can happen in this space, the same way that I really appreciate the edit tab on Wikipedia.

 

You know, it's one thing to read an article, it's another thing to see how that article got built and the debates around that, that when you see the effort involved, the quality, you can get a sense of the quality of the answer, where if it was produced by one person once, you can be far more suspicious. I think as LLMs improve, one of the things that's gonna happen is we're gonna have that tab.

 

Do you wanna see how I came to this paragraph? Well, here you go. Here's the places I looked, this is the data connections that I had. I'm hoping we start to get into more automated fact checking, that the moment it's producing a sentence it thinks it'll appeal to you, it's also validating that sentence separately. I'm kinda shocked sometimes when it's spitting out code that simply won't compile, like that seems like a step it could take.

 

Shawn Clabough (47:34.987)

Well, at least it always apologizes when you tell it, hey, this code you gave me, you just gave me an error.

 

Richard (47:39.717)

that's yeah.

 

Mark Miller (47:40.999)

It's the fastest apologizer I've seen on the internet

 

Richard (47:44.994)

Well, you understand it's led by Jeff Hinton, who's at least a temporary Canadian, so of course it says sorry very easily.

 

Mark Miller (47:51.442)

I got it. Okay, that makes sense.

 

Richard (47:58.809)

Anyway, I do think it's an exciting time. It's fun to have these new areas. Clearly, the crypto boys weren't having any fun, so they've all jumped on the AI bangwag, and we have a lot of corrupt ware kind of offers, and that's fine. Those who wanted to get rich quick on this stuff are gonna lose a bunch of money, and they deserve it. Better that we have a few folks that are focused seriously. We see the limitations of this particular model. The AGI folks have moved on.

 

and I don't see that as a bad thing. Go find a better algorithm. In the meantime, the engineering folks are busy implementing these tools in specific areas to try and get some more value from them.

 

Shawn Clabough (48:44.323)

So one quick tangent on something that I think you're also very involved in is, what's kind of the status? How's things going with the humanitarian toolbox?

 

Richard (48:55.037)

You know, the pandemic was tough on HTBox. In 2019, we were typically at three or four events a year, and we'd be alongside the workshops. Like, we don't wanna go to a workshop when you come and contribute to a code that we get as few contributors to different projects. When the conference is all wound down, we try to do some of that stuff online, but it was very challenging. So it's been hard to get contributors, and even now, sort of post-pandemic.

 

Folks don't have a lot of cycles to volunteer right now. Like it's just been very challenging to get folks on board with different projects. That being said, the need is there.

 

We're certainly experimenting with different approaches. I've been working with some students and things on other software to build. There's lots of great ideas out there, you know, in the in the area of disaster response and disaster preparedness, just applying mobile and cloud to things can help a lot of people. And, you know, back in 2012, we were first talking about just focusing on disaster response and preparedness for HD Box.

 

It was a little, you know, anticipatory of the fact that here we are 10 years later and the rate of natural disasters is only increasing. I mean, we're recording this a couple of days before the first hurricane to hit Southern California in 85 years is going to arrive. So, yeah, it's.

 

Shawn Clabough (50:13.823)

Then we just had the thing in Hawaii, so just crazy.

 

Richard (50:16.209)

Yeah, and tragedy in Hawaii. There's fires all over British Columbia. I think we're currently at 15 new fires of concern in 24 hours out of the several hundred that are burning. The city of Yellowknife has had to been evacuated. That's the capital of Northwest Territories. 20,000 people have been put on buses and airplanes to get them out of there. One of our wine district areas in Kelowna now is being evacuated for a different fire. It's challenging times and I wish we could have we could do more.

 

with the tools we have to help people respond more effectively.

 

Shawn Clabough (50:52.939)

Has the conference schedule picked back up with dev intersections and things like that?

 

Richard (50:58.001)

We're back in the swing of things. So the next Dev Intersection is the first week of December in Orlando. And I think we've got most of the structure of our schedule together. We might be doing a few additions.

 

Certainly there's other topic areas that are expanding, AI is huge. So we're co-loaded with the Azure and AI conference because I think those two go very well together, development on the cloud, development with large language models and the other tools. That's gonna be a great conversation for folks to have. And we're setting up other events for other stacks. If you're working in Power Platform, we've put together a Power Platform show. If you're part of the Teams ecosystem in the M365, we've now got a show in that space as well and more emerging.

 

Shawn Clabough (51:45.271)

Very nice.

 

Christian Wenz (51:46.983)

All right, should we move over to PIX?

 

Shawn Clabough (51:50.811)

I think so, unless anybody has a last question for Richard, we'll do picks. All right, Christian, why don't you go first with your pick?

 

Christian Wenz (51:59.254)

Yeah, so today I'm back to recommending something I saw on streaming services. So no tech pick today. And I was watching, and I think it was on Apple TV, I was watching Tetris. Because that's probably, I think that's the first and maybe only game I played on my Gameboy when I was younger. So you see how old I am.

 

It's kind of a movie, not a series. It's kind of on the game. But the game is basically used to describe the East-West conflict. So pretty interesting. Someone from the US travels to Russia to secure the rights for the Tetris game. So pretty nicely.

 

weaved into the story, into the narrative. There are some moments in the movie which I found kind of rather weird, but it was nice to see. It was also technically really, really nicely done, how they incorporated in some aspects the, I don't want to give too much away, the pixel era into the visuals. So really, I enjoyed watching that movie. So it's Tetris.

 

on Apple TV+.

 

Shawn Clabough (53:25.475)

All right, Adam, what's your pick?

 

Adam Furmanek (53:28.805)

So we need to have two picks for today. That's because it has been already told, I need to, I typically go with software. So my software pick for today is called API Monitor. Very fancy application for Windows that lets you basically attach kind of like debugger to other process and see what WinAPI methods it calls. Kind of like S-Trace on Linux.

 

Christian Wenz (53:31.497)

That's cheating.

 

Adam Furmanek (53:53.881)

but very nice GUI application for Windows. You can add breakpoints, you can override the function calls and basically hack the stuff this way. So that's the software pick. However, I have another pick, which is a book which is called Entertainment Science. So if you ever wondered whether, because you all talk about like shows, TV series, whatnot.

 

If you ever wonder whether changing like PG rating for a TV show increases or decreases the revenue, whether the piracy and like illegal streaming services actually bring benefits to the shows and or maybe on the opposite, this book answers.

 

of those questions. So I just finished that and I think I can really recommend if you are into shows, entertainment, books, games, whatever, and want to see how it's done behind the scenes, this is a very good position.

 

Shawn Clabough (54:55.903)

All right. Mark, what's your pick?

 

Mark Miller (55:00.546)

Named anonymous, or sorry, named pipes is my pick. This is, I think actually old tech, relatively old technology, but I discovered it just like in the last two or three days. And it started with a conversation with AI about how to have communication between two processes on the same machine.

 

What I needed to do is I needed to hook up one stream deck to multiple instances of Visual Studio because I have this idea of buttons that are contextually aware of what's happening inside of the environment. So my stream deck is gonna be, at least the stream deck plugin is gonna be the server. And then all the instances of Visual Studio will be my clients. And after the conversation with AI and about a couple hours of fiddling with it.

 

I actually got it so that a really nice demo up and running that was effectively sending messages between console applications where I could like start up or kill console apps all over the place and things would just connect and talk to each other and without a whole lot of work that I had to do. So that's my tech pick and outside of that, my wife Karen has been laughing like crazy.

 

like all day long and I asked her what's going on and she's watching a show called Platonic and The thing is Karen's a stand-up comedian or she's a she's got a comedic background She was a stand-up comic and so she laughs at very few things because she sees everything coming But the show she's really enjoying I saw a little bit of it Seth Rogen looks great in it. It's on Apple TV You might want to take a look at that

 

Christian Wenz (56:49.99)

By the way, Seth Rogen, I think, was also the guest in the first episode of the Bill Gates podcast, Unconfuse Me. So he's a great talker, apart from his TV work. So all right, over to you, Richard.

 

Shawn Clabough (56:50.122)

Okay.

 

Richard (57:01.885)

Hehehe

 

Richard (57:07.097)

So I've been doing, I joined Windows weekly at the beginning of the year. Mary Jo Foley changed careers around, she's now over at Directions for Microsoft and had to step away from the show and Paul and Leo asked me if I'd like to get involved. And Mary Jo used to always finish the show with her favorite craft beer, and she loves craft beer and I'm not a beer fan, I'm the guy who thinks that beer, you know.

 

Whiskey is what beer wants to be when it grows up So they said well, will you do a whiskey and I'm like sure let's do a brown liquor segment And as I started explaining like why I liked a certain whiskey I realized maybe I need to explain the whiskey process a bit more So over a set of shows at the end of each show I walk through how Scottish whiskey is made turned out to be eight parts The sum of the eight parts is two and a half hours

 

And the folks at Twit Network have now pulled all those out as a playlist they call Windows Whiskey. So if you search for Richard Campbell Windows Whiskey on YouTube, you'll find this collection of me explaining...

 

uh, Scottish whiskey step by step. And now we started adding the 20-minute pieces where it says, now let's talk about how American bourbon is different, or how Japanese whiskey is done, or even how the Canadian whiskey is done. So if you're, that's something that interests you. Uh, I didn't know I could talk about whiskey for two and a half hours, but apparently I can. So, the fun part about that series is that after I explained to you, you know, how it was originally done and how it's done today, then I introduce you to a whiskey that doesn't comply with any of those things.

 

Shawn Clabough (58:41.627)

Okay, so my pick this week is a product. When I first started working from home, I was just...

 

stand around and walk around just to my bare feet or socks and things like that. And my feet started to hurt really bad just because, you know, not having any support and things like that. So I went out and I bought Sketchers Arch Fit shoes and they work wonders for my feet when I'm just in the house. So my pick is a, you know, Sketchers Arch Fit shoes. So if you're working from home and you have bad feet, bad arches or anything like that, check these out. They're very comfortable. Lots of different styles.

 

things like that. Is that what you got, Mark?

 

Christian Wenz (59:25.204)

You're on mute.

 

Mark Miller (59:25.706)

Sorry, but yeah, I was like, where's my mute button? I gotta grab my mouse, no. Yeah, I think I got these. These are Sketchers and I love these. These are really awesome. I don't know if they're the same. I can't quite tell, but I love them.

 

Shawn Clabough (59:41.043)

Yeah, so there's lots of different styles for the ArchFit, but it's just one of the technologies that they have available. And the ones I have are just slip-on shoes, things like that, so I just wake up in the morning, get out of bed. My office is just the next bedroom over, so that works for me. Yeah, exactly. Okay, Richard, people wanna get in touch with you. I know they can listen to you on.NET Rocks and DevOps.

 

Mark Miller (59:56.034)

That's the commute I like right there.

 

Richard (01:00:09.49)

Yeah, I'm not too tough to find these days and at Rich Campbell on what the social media shell that remains of Twitter. I'm on mastodon at richcambl at mastodon.social and I've got a blue sky account and a threads account, you know.

 

Shawn Clabough (01:00:10.855)

Hehehehe

 

Shawn Clabough (01:00:22.399)

Yep, and you got run as radio. Yeah, yeah, OK, you know for listeners get want to get in touch with the show. They can find me on X aka Twitter. Or threads. I am at dotnet superheroes. So let me know what you think give some show ideas. We'd love to hear from you.

 

Thanks everybody. All right.

 

Christian Wenz (01:00:49.03)

Till next week, bye everyone. Thanks Richard for coming.

 

Mark Miller (01:00:49.218)

Thanks, thanks, thanks for a chart.

 

Richard (01:00:51.953)

You bet.

 

Adam Furmanek (01:00:51.981)

Thanks, cheers.

 

Shawn Clabough (01:00:54.079)

and we'll catch everybody on the next episode of Adventures in.NET.