In this episode of Adventures in .NET, Richard Campbell, podcast manager, conference creator and author, joins the panel to share the history of .NET. He starts by explaining his background, his father was an electronics engineer and his mother a fictional author. Richard tells a great story and has a great passion for technology. 

Reminiscing about the days when he started programming, Richard explains the simplicity of the tools and the excitement of watching technology change so fast. The panel considers how this time compares to our own. While out tools have gotten more advanced, the problems developers solve are now more diverse. He discusses the frameworks and tools that lead to the current .NET frameworks. Richard explains the cycle of frameworks. The panel considers the future of technology and .NET. They discuss .NET 5 and Blazor. 

Richard tells the panel what it’s like to manage conferences. His goals for conferences are to answer the questions people come with and to help them find something they weren’t looking for. The panel shares their experiences at Richards conferences, they discuss some of his other work, including podcasts he creates and the book he is currently writing.

Hello, and welcome to another Adventures in dot net episode. I'm Sean Klaybe, your host. And with me today on the panel is Caleb Wells. Hey, William. And Wailu?

How you doing? Hey. I'm doing doing good. And we have Charles Max Wood. Hey, everybody.

And our guest today is someone I think a lot of you know and probably love. His name's Richard Campbell from dotnetrock. Hey, Richard. Hello. Hey.

Hey. Hey. I like this job where I don't have to do any of the organizing and planning. I just have to answer. That's cool.

This is a fun seat to sit in. Just so you know, we really don't do any organizing and planning either. I was gonna say, I've I've been a victim of Richard's. I mean, a guest on dotnetrox and, that was a while ago. Chuck.

Boy oh boy. I'm trying to think back. Is that the panel show we did in Vancouver? No. That's that's where we met.

Right. Right. You you had me on to talk about finding a job and stuff. Oh, wow. Okay.

Yeah. Cool topic. Oh, yeah. Your new book. Yes.

Right? Yes. The book is now out on paperback. Right. By by the time this goes live, the audiobook will probably be available too, which I keep getting asked about.

So Did you voice it? I am going to read it myself. Yes. Mhmm. As well you should.

I have all this audio equipment from this hobby of mine. Yeah. Well, you know, it's never gonna amount to anything, but at least you can invoice it up a, an audiobook or 2. Yep. And I I don't I don't care for podcasting myself.

I find a goat. Well, I was gonna say podcasting has not done anything at all. No. Oh, man. So, Richard, you know, thanks for for taking the time out of your Oh, no.

My my pleasure. And and you got yeah. Your timing was great. You've got one of the busiest schedules, I think, you know, I can think of. You've got multiple podcasts.

Mhmm. You've got conferences that you organize. You've got a book that you're writing. You've got the humanitarian toolbox. You know, what else can you put on your plate?

Yeah. Well, I'm I keep thinking of more things. You know, if you look at it, it all sort of holds together the same way, which is thinking about and and helping the developer community with what's next, the next 3 to 6 months. The nice thing as a PodScratch creator perspective is I get to talk to everybody in advance. I get to talk to the best and brightest all the time and help put those stories together.

And the conference is very much the same concept. Right? It's well, we're planning these things 6 months in advance. What are folks gonna need to know 6 months from now? And HD box was just an outgrowth of that in a sense that I became very aware that the software developers were struggling to contribute their skills to charity and that we could we could build an infrastructure to make it easier for them to do that.

Very cool. You know, where did developing and exposure to dot net start for you? Very early on. My father is an electrical engineer electronics engineer, really. He built cash registers.

And so I electronics is in my blood. Right? I my my so my earliest memories are are soldering iron in hand. And I stumbled, after school at at tender age of 10. I went into a RadioShack, and I was actually buying parts for an electronic rocket countdown timer because I liked model rocketry.

But that whole 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, way too much work. Couldn't do that. So, I was actually I had a little device using a 5 by 5 timer that was gonna count down for me with an LED display because that's how lazy I am. And there was a TRS 80 Model 1 in the corner of the store. And this is 1977.

Right? As I found out years later, the Tandy Corporation that owned RadioShack at the time did not think the machine would sell. And so they literally only manufactured enough machines to put 1 in every store. So I was literally fiddling around with 1 of a few thousand of these Terrace 80 Model Ones. And it had me from that moment.

I didn't know that would become my career. I was 10, but I wasn't interested in anything else after that. And so that was after school every day. And I think the store tolerated me mostly because if a 10 year old can make this work, then why can't this executive make it work? And so it was it was very it was mutually beneficial.

My first job at 12 was working at a company called HMS Microsystems, and we were repairing TRS 80s. That was also that was the hobbyist era of microcomputers. We did upgrades for them. The the Terrace AD did not come with a lowercase. There was a lowercase kit you could get and install or you could have us install it for you.

And we did memory expansions and that sort of thing. So, I mean, I've really done nothing else than work in the computer industry in one form or another. About the same time that, yeah, that I started I started in 79. I think it was the model 2 was at that time with TRS 80. Yeah.

Model 2 had a bug in it. And that you could actually poke a port on the model 2 that would pop the power supply for the electron deflector. And I only know and I remember this because we fixed them. The the the h and s it was literally a command you could issue and it would damage the screen. The screen would shut off and would never come back on again.

And so the guy Neil, the guy who ran that shop, one of the things I did as the kid was make a parts kit. So he would order we sort of guess how many model twos were gonna come in in the next 3 months. He would order the parts in bulk because they were so much cheaper. And then I would spend my days with little plastic baggies putting the parts set together. And so when you got out with a bad when a model 2 screen pop came in, you grabbed the little baggy off and you went to a workstation and you installed that repair as quickly as possible.

You know, that's how we made money. Yeah. I think we have more problems with the cassette tape drives than than the machines themselves. But, yeah, that's another story. Yeah.

I had 3 jeweler screwdrivers sort of stuffed into my cassette tape layer so I could continuously adjust as if as necessary. So it sounds like where you get all the geek out, you know, abilities from your dad. Well, my mother is the is a fiction author too. So you figure it got a storyteller on one side and an engineer on the other. I really had no chance.

Yeah. No chance at all, man. That's how that's gonna go. Well, you turned out well. Right?

You've got the you're a good score storyteller, and, you're obviously very good with computers. You make me feel bad. My first job was, you know, picking up carts at the grocery store and putting them back. So But a very normal job. Right?

And and, look, I I don't, for a moment, say anything other than I got lucky. Right? Like, I just right place, right time, whatever reason this engaged my brain and kept it. Like, it's just good luck. It sounds like, which, you know, you obviously, everything you're you're doing so much and it's all got to do with dot net.

Have you, like, previously worked for Microsoft learning? Or I've never worked for Microsoft, although I've done number of different kinds of contract gigs over the years. I was adjacent to Microsoft for a long time. Right? I mean, if you think back to the seventies eighties, Microsoft was just a language company.

You know, I I remember seeing a young Bill Gates at Heathkit in Vancouver. When the Heathkit started making their PC, the the Heathkit company was a kit company. So you you bought your your machine unassembled. You had to put it together yourself. And Bill was pitching hard when the Heathkit PC came out because the basic unit used a quick basic, which was really small.

But if you bought the upgrade created, if you bought the advanced one, you could use a Microsoft basic and it was vastly superior. And so Bill was literally hawking it himself. And that's gotta be maybe 1980 that he came up to do that. So that was an interesting experience. Yeah.

That's about right. Yep. When the IBM PC came out, I was with the CPM at the time. I found when I wanted to own a computer, a lot of those prebuilt machines, they were just too expensive and I was good with the soldering iron. So I bought an s100 bus chassis and put together the parts on an on an 8080 machine myself, the largely kit parts.

And so I was that was those were mostly CPM machines. So I I was working in CPM and programming in, 8080 assembler. And, there was a couple of flavors of basic and stuff out there at the time. So when the IBM PC first came out, it came with CPM. You know, they this MS DOS version 1, it wasn't going to amount to anything.

So we you know, I was happy to work in in CPM and that do the programming that way. Is there a, a period of Microsoft, right, where we'll discuss your book and you've done several videos on the history of dot net, but is there a period that you that you really appreciate or that you have really good memories from? You know, it was a challenge to win me over to Windows. If you're an old school computer person, you're worse used to working on the command line. I was writing a lot of software in dBase or the compiled version Clipper, you know, using 80 by 25 screens efficiently.

Right? Largely monochrome screens. I guess I saw no reason to go to color screens. They were awful and ugly anyway if you're just trying to get work done like this was efficient. And along comes this GUI.

I'm like, but the mouse is the thing that appalled me. Like, you're gonna take your hand off the keyboard? Like, what what are you thinking? That's insane. Because, you know, at that time, we're I'm working in automation.

I'm helping people enter more orders and so keystroke efficiency was everything. That's what we cared about. And so taking a handoff keyboard just seemed like like plain foolishness. Did you figure a way to do that? What won me to Windows?

The first time I'm like, alright. You can stay, was the driver model. You know, I was making money as a consultant, and this is in the eighties at, you know, 20 something years old doing the intersection of drivers. So I'm sitting with a client who's gonna run Symphony, right, which is 5 different products, and it's got a set of printer drivers in it. And they're gonna run the this accounting package, and it's got this set of printer drivers on it.

We're literally trying to figure out out of the half a dozen pieces of software they're gonna use, what printer appears in all of their driver sets? Ouch. Not all of them do. And and and so and then you sort it out, and that way to help help them source the printer. It's like, okay.

Well, here here's a half dozen printers that will fit in this set. They were mostly line printers of various kinds. Which one has the features that would make sense for you? And then then we could actually configure it. So when Windows comes along and it takes over the driver problem, I was working with a company at the time that was doing automated faxing, everybody's favorite technology.

And working with faxes was a pain in the butt. And then when I looked at the way Windows did it where it was just a print context that you could code against this print context, there's no difference between a printer or a fax machine except a couple of additional parameters. I'm like, well, that's genius. Then I started programming in c plus plus on Windows, and that is not genius. The the c plus plus the Windows, or both?

Well, just, you know, you you run the you run your code. It's you UAC the machine before, you know, the b saw. The the original hanging of Windows was called the UAC. And it would hang, and then you're like and you have to reboot the machine, and you don't know what the heck happened. I eventually invested in a device called a periscope board.

They were expensive. They're almost as much as the PC because they essentially were a PC that lived inside of your your IBM PC. They they were an 8 bit ISA card, and it had a big red plunger on it. So when Windows hung, and I'm saying when, not if Mhmm. You'd hit the plunger.

And literally, what it did was it dumped memory into the card. It would take a a stack dump there. Then you could reboot the machine, the mem the the the card still got the memory buff, and then do your stack traces, try and figure out what went wrong. Wow. Fair cool.

It was hard. Yeah. I can imagine. And I had a VGA screen, and then I also had a Hercules card. So I had a a monochrome screen as well.

And that because it used different memory locations, I would use the Hercules card as the debug screen so I could dump stuff in my code to the Hercules card independent of the VGA, which was shown in Windows. Anyway, it was it was an interesting time. But the productivity, when you got that code to work, it was profound. And then when I I found Visual Basic in, like, 1992, then that changed everything because v b suddenly I could program against Windows to have the advantage of all those drivers, but you weren't hanging the machine anymore. I'm not saying the program worked.

I'm saying when it failed, you weren't actually hanging the PC anymore. And that was a huge I switched instantly. Like, this is it takes too long to code to c plus plus and VB does. We're still building forms over data. Right?

And, it worked against SQL Server like it was this is even before ODBC came along. It was very powerful. Like, this our ability to get work done, it just leveled up. Those were fun times, like, very interesting market. Before 32 bit really took hold with that 16 bit era, Visual Basic had this great ecosystem around it.

There was all kinds of component vendors of that made stuff for that VVXs for VB. And I really enjoyed myself then. We were doing LANs, but the Internet really wasn't public and it wasn't for that sort of thing anyway. Like those were pretty happy simple times and you were you're improving the performance capabilities of your company hugely. Like, it it made a big difference what we what we were building.

A small team, 3 or 4 people. We get a lot done. So looking back, do you think it's, it's easier to be a developer now or in the past? Or like, it sounds like it was really difficult in the past, but now that it's it's easy to become a developer, but, the problems are more complex. I think they're more diverse.

A lot of low hanging fruit has been picked too. But, you know, we you think about the complexities. You come into the nineties when the Internet becomes a public and commercial thing. We're introducing a whole new wave. Right?

Like, we're really thinking differently all of a sudden. We've gotten our PCs connected together inside of our offices. There are a few online services that the the CompuServes and Genies of the world, which are all getting mowed down when the Internet turns public in the ISP, so it show up. But most of that happens after the dotcom. You know, the dotcom boom was this period of insanity.

And so, you know, as it come out of that, we start rationalizing what's the web really gonna be about, where we're gonna go with it, we think very differently. What gets hard for a developer is the diversity part. You know, it was fun to code when all the screens were 80 by 25. We knew the constraints we were living in and you could sort of make that work. You were living in that constraint.

Then along came Windows. And while it added a, you know, for the most part, the screens were 10 24 by 768. Right? That'd be that's what you coded to. Mhmm.

You weren't worried about higher resolutions. For the longest time. Yeah. Yeah. And Visual Basic had a a UX language that was the MDISDI form where, you know, file is on the left and help is on the right.

And so you were guided as to what the UI would look like. So that's it. Things are fairly simple even if the programming tools are not that sophisticated. But as the Internet comes into play and HTML becomes a thing and how you build web pages, well, boom. Hey.

My logo is on fire. Right? Like, you you suddenly have all this insanity, and that diversity has only grown. Right? After the Internet came mobile.

Right now we're suddenly living in a world where you're you're now coding on a very different machine than what your code's gonna run on. And now the cloud where okay. Well, there's still computers. It's just not yours. You're buying them you're using them by the minute, and you don't necessarily know where they are.

So, you know, I think the iPhone singularly, more than anything, caused the average consumer to have much higher expectations for what software could do. The expectations of the customer have changed dramatically and the diversity of the input and output devices have changed dramatically. That's the harder part for a developer today. The programming languages are hardly the problem. They've only gotten better.

Our tooling's gotten better. But the problem space we're tackling is vast in comparison to 30 years ago. As technology continues to evolve, we come up with new ways of of doing things or handling things or how to write this or code that. It's a lot these days. I I will agree with that.

Yeah. And and I think people carbon off niches for themselves. You know, if you can find a space where somebody's gonna keep you employed to work in a particular tool set or a particular set of problems, you know, I don't blame anybody for hunkering down to that space. I have the good fortune of spending most of my time being told what everybody's working on and trying to make good stories around that. There's a lot of people working on a lot of things, like the diversity is only getting larger.

We may look back on this particular period as kind of a calm time in software development. Whatever technology looks to replace the smartphone, and I suspect it's gonna be some kind of visor, that's gonna be a gold rush of epic proportions. And, we we're we're going to be in huge demand, but, boy, we're gonna have a big tooling shift when everybody's wearing their computer on their face. So you can sign Google Glass is is the next thing, like like a better Google Glass, you think? Well, you look at what what Microsoft's doing with HoloLens 2 in the industrial spaces right now.

Mhmm. It's literally a hard hat with a pair of goggles strapped to it and some battery packs and things. I feel like we're in the BlackBerry phase of the the visor of, augmented reality where certain large enterprises are building certain class of applications for certain workers. In the early days of the BlackBerry, we're very much like that. It was an enterprise only product.

And for for putting email into certain key people's hands, it was expensive and complex. It took a team to operate, but it began the smartphone movement even if they didn't realize they were beginning a movement. And we're we're sort of in that stage right now. The first industrial implementations of augmented reality are coming true. There were sessions that ignite this year that were about ERP and augmented reality.

Like, that to me is pretty cool. Like, we're starting to see the first examples of that. The consumer product is further away. But nobody in the nineties playing with a Blackberry can predict the iPhone, least of all, Blackberry. Yeah.

A few years ago, I actually, tried the, the whole lens. It's the first one. And, you know, I've tried different various VR things. And all works well. It's really cool.

But I think at the when at at the stage where you can literally just put, you know, they're small enough to be put into a pair of glasses or whatever and the average consumer can just put it on whenever. I reckon that's when it will become really, really accessible. Yeah. I don't think the form factor is gonna matter that much. It used to be the carrying around a slab of black glass was inappropriate in society as well, but society changes when the capabilities are compelling enough.

If it's still a pair of ski goggles but it's compelling enough, people are gonna wear it and not care what you think. In fact, you won't care either because you'll probably have your own pair. Yeah. So I'm curious. The number of frameworks and languages and ways you can develop stuff today is massive.

Right? There's there's there's probably too many options. Right? And it's a blessing and a curse. You you can pick and choose what you want, but but, you know, is that what you want and gonna be there next year?

Do you see that compacting and having fewer frameworks languages, or do you see it just exploding, you know, like you said, when we get to the point maybe when we're doing, Vysor? I think it's a cycle. Right? You see a massive array of frameworks when there isn't a good answer to a problem. When a good answer emerges or several good answers, then you consolidate.

So the diversity of tooling around mobile development is a clear indicator that none of them are great. They all come with a certain amount of pain. And so you choose your pain. Right? And and the grass is always greener on the other side kind of thing.

JavaScript where, like, I don't know, maybe like 10 years ago, we had, like, a different framework popping up every couple of months. And now it's kinda consolidated to just merely being, like Angular and and React and and Vue. Yeah. So you and you see that that stability now has come from we have 3 distinct philosophies of front end web development now that are crystallizing around Angular, React, and Vue. Right?

Right. But That's and that's interesting. Yeah. But even then, you saw Angular adopt a lot of the ideas out of React because they are good. Right?

And so, you know, yeah, there's a difference of philosophy, but a lot of the basic concepts are the same because it's still consolidated around the ideas that work. And then it was kind of the way that we put some of it together varies. Right? Yeah. Well, look at at asynchronous programming with a wait in and and and sync.

Right? Yeah. If you go back to before that stuff shipped, there was the Task Hello library. Like, there was a dozen different approaches to trying to do utilize more cores in your code. Why do they think and await win?

And I and I say you think in a way to 1, not only because in the dot net community grabbed it, but for crying out loud, they implemented it in the latest versions of c plus plus It's showing up in all sorts of languages. When the other languages grab syntax from you, it's a pretty clear sign. You found the best way. And so it'd be the same sort of thing. You're you're watching these last three planet sized libraries.

Not the so the weight, but the number of people using them orbiting each other, grabbing each other's best bits. You know, is there a consolidation? I don't know. Does it matter? Not really.

You know, when there's 20, we have a problem. When there's 3, they're pretty okay. That sounds like a settled sort of space. Even in the mobile space, you say, hey. If you're programming c sharp, you're probably using Xamarin.

If you're programming mobile in the Java space, you're probably using Ionic. If you're not, you know, concerned about a super popular language, just looking for an interesting philosophy, go look at Flutter. You know, you are starting to see it settle out a bit in the mobile space now as well. This is the normal cycle of us having new technical problems that need to be resolved. We get a plethora of attempts and we watch where we consolidate, and then we put more energy into those things.

I actually think that that makes perfect sense, and it makes me think of what you've done with the history.net, both the, presentations in the book you're writing. Seeing that you'd think about it. You can see that cycle, for Microsoft and dot net. Absolutely. Yeah.

I mean, dot net started out as a tool for enterprise developers, largely have an alternative to Java because Microsoft wasn't allowed to make Java a version of Java anymore. They did for several years, but then there was a a court injunction that made it you know, they weren't allowed to do that anymore. And it was centered on Windows. Right? When when it shipped in 2,002, it was 22 languages, one platform, which was literally a direct mockery of Java's language.

And and they and I would argue they manifest that dream successfully, that vision by 2,005. By dotnet2, they've gotten there. They've made a really robust set of enterprise class tools and a and a platform for building web and client side apps. But Right. The market was changing.

Mobile was becoming huge, and desktop operating systems were becoming less relevant. And Microsoft had bound themselves to Windows. They didn't think any other way, and so they couldn't see the the sort of the gradual decrease in the significance of an operating system. It was an Internet world. And what OS you ran?

Who cared? They tried to make a cross platform. Right? It was lots of efforts on the x l front with the various w s star standards, but that was just too brutal for people to use. And it ultimately, you know, turns itself into JSON and HTTPS endpoints.

Right? But those are all that twists and turns. So did you start, developing in dotnet before you joined Carl on dotnetrogs? Yes. I I I remember, I was already a, speaker and a book author, interior architecture guy.

I've been a visual basic person for a while. I jumped fully on active server pages. I had written training materials and stuff around ASP because I thought COM against web made a lot of sense. Right? That that was a pretty cool way to go.

We had some threading problems and things, but that's fine. You know, that's what happens. And so I got included in the SDRs back when Microsoft did this. They called them software design reviews. If you would if you were sufficiently notable, they would invite you down to sort of show you what they were gonna do.

And I remember meeting a very young Scott Guthrie alongside several other folks showing off ASP plus. This was the prototype, and they hadn't come up with a dot net name at that point. They were talking about a very different way to build web pages. And so, and I thought it was a terrible idea, and I was wrong. You know, they that was the those early days.

Right? The the dot the gestation of dot net took several years. I mean, I saw that in 99, and they wouldn't ship till 2002. So there was a lot going on in that intervening period, not the least of which was the the whole job price. You know why they called it dotnet?

Is it because it was built for the Internet on the Yeah. I mean, that was part of it. And it was also, you know, the and I I talk about this a bit in the videos and things, and it's certainly a context in the book. They understand that by 2000, Microsoft has gone through this debate with the Department of Justice, that results in Bill Gates stepping down as CEO and Steve Ballmer taking over. They've been declared a pernicious monopoly and are being ordered to break up.

There's gonna supposed to be a company that does this operating systems and a separate company does everything else. And Balmer's first job, and it takes him almost 2 years to pull it off, is to get a consent decree to keep the company together by being a more open company. If you need access to the source code of Windows to understand how your software's behaving, we'll provide you access to the source code. And in the midst of all of this, this is 2,000, 2001. Right?

He takes over in January of 2000 to be CEO. He'll get his consent decree through by November of 2001. Right? 2 years worth of effort. In the middle of that, the thing that will become .net is being developed.

And so part and parcel of them showing the government, hey, we're a more open company now, is that they published the specification of c sharp and the runtime as ECMA specifications in public. And, yeah, the name dot net was part of that. It's that we're this is a a new way of programming the Internet with open standards. Right? We're an open company now.

So it was as much a positioning piece as anything else. But if they hadn't published those 2 ACMA specifications, there wouldn't have been a mono. I mean, that's where Miguel de Ataza jumps in. Right? And he Gotcha.

He does he at an O'Reilly open source conference. He says, hey. Look. I've been looking over this ECMA specification for c sharp. I think it's a brilliant language, and I'm gonna implement a version that we can run-in Linux.

Oh, I was just just refresh me on this. She says, mono is what dotnetcore is built on, on top of. Is that No. Mono is just completely separate thing. The new role of mono today is part of the Blazer project with the web assembly because it's still written in c plus plus.

Ever since, Roslyn came around where c sharp is written in c sharp, that wasn't gonna work for that. But, no, mono is a completely it was always a completely separate white box implementation of dot net. And, actually, I wanted to dig into that, and and I'm jumping ahead, like, 8 years. Mhmm. And one of your presentations, you actually talk about, right, late ops, Microsoft's not sure what they're gonna do and where c sharp is gonna go, and, you know, Mono gets sold, when when Novell, you know, goes away, basically.

Yep. And then they create Xamarin. Buys up the remains. Yeah. And they create Xamarin, and Xamarin and Mono, right, are are basically a way of showing, hey.

Look what we can do with this language in in all these different places. And it gave Microsoft some ideas of how they can move forward. Yeah. It depends on who you ask as you really look at it that way. It's it's the the inflection moment is in 2011.

Okay. And that's when when they also released mono for Android. Right? When what Miguel had done that was brilliant. Like, the mono the framework, I'd used it in some projects, but it was not particularly well known or particularly popular.

And Linux folks were always kinda suspicious of Microsoft technology and Miguel because of it. So it was it always sat in this weird area. But same time that Microsoft is struggling with the relevance of c sharp because JavaScript seems to be winning all the things, he's made versions of c sharp that compile into iOS and Android apps. So and it's, you know, almost exactly the same time. So they there's a serendipity about that.

I think it's it's delicious. But there's more things going on than that. I mean, the the biggest thing is when on the Microsoft side is when Scott Guthrie moved over to work on Azure, because Azure definitely needed his help, he brought a a dev team with him, the web team. And the web team then was essentially separated from dotnet. And so they were doing their own things under the guidance of of Scott Guthrie.

One of the things they were working on was tooling that was operating system independent because it was just going to run-in the Cloud. So they were taking cross platform bits and starting to experiment with them. One of the things to experiment with was what would become the Kestrel web server. And remember that dotnet already had cross platform bits out of Silverlight. So if you you know, going back to Wei's original question about dotnetcore, the original bits of dotnetcore are actually from Silverlight.

They made dotnet run on the Mac, and that meant they had a version of the CLR that ran on on an you know, under the hood, OSX is Unix, right, or version of a flavor of Linux. And so Right. They'd already solved that problem. That's where the that's where those bits actually come from. It's interesting to hear you talk about Flash and Silverlight and how Microsoft went away from it because of of Apple and how they were handling plug ins in their ecosystem.

Yeah. Well and and ultimately, I think Jobs was motivated by the fact that Flash murdered the battery of the iPad. Like, that's what he cared about. Right. And but he wasn't wrong when he talked about plug ins as a virus factor because it is.

Right? No no question that was an issue. He never mentioned Silverlight in his thoughts on Flash. He cares about Flash. And, you know, the the joke about the name Silverlight, it's not really a joke, but it's the argument that this is where the name actually comes from.

In the old flash bulbs, the mechanical flash bulbs for cameras, they have a filament inside them that you pump a lot of electricity to. It makes that bright flash. The debris that's left in the flash bulb is called silver light. Yeah. So silver light is what you're left with after flash.

Little bit streaky out there. I love that. That's that's very cool. Well, in the original version of Silverlight, when you look back at v 1, it didn't have dot net in it. It was a media player.

Right? They were working to do stuff for from companies like Netflix where they wanted a, variable speed media player. So it worked with a special version of IAS. You could make multiple encobements of your video files for different resolutions, different sizes, and the codec on the client side through that first version of Silverlight could detect the amount of bandwidth available. And so you could figure out what resolution are, of codec to run at any given time.

It's later on with dotnet3 that they introduce a version of the CLR, and they start going MVVM and including XAML and so forth. But the early editions were really about media. It was a competitor to Flash. Yep. So then in the last decade, you know, it it kinda seemed like it slowed down the evolution of dot net for a while there until Core kinda, you know, picked up their base again, I think.

Well and one of the things you have to argue is weren't they done? Didn't do what it was supposed to do? You know, it's one of the interesting problems when you're building proprietary software. If you don't ship a new version every year to 18 months, people start screaming about you being dead. There's no concept of being done.

But if you're open source, true open source, that is you're taking community participation, you know, you're part of the over all day abate. The way that c sharp is built today, You know? And they did it took them a while to get to that point. There is an argument by your customers. Hey.

Don't change that. Like, there's no reason to go further. Like, we that's what we wanted to do. Should this be separate? So I don't think I think you're only allowed to be done in the open source community.

You can't be done when it's proprietary software. Gotcha. And I do feel like I I guess, right, having that that option, right, to be done and look at something else has made a world of difference because dotnetcoreand.netframeworkare, you know, completely different ideas from different times. Right? How to approach it.

Sure. But and I and I think you're starting to see with the way they in dot net 3, they introduced the Windows SDKs for WinForms and WPF as sort of a path forward on this. You know, there was always an argument, the Windows argument as well as the dot net argument. If you make sure you put everything in the box so everybody has everything so they don't have to go and find stuff. But that just makes it all resonate as changes need to come along.

Now that we live in the new get app get sort of world where you can pull the bits together pretty much on demand, it makes more sense to break these things apart and ship them separately so they don't resonate with change. The show we did recently, I get goes goes back to November now on on dotnet rocks about WinUI 3. You know, towards the end of that show, they really are talking about the fact that they're gonna decompose pieces of Windows now, especially on the UI part because people don't want Windows to change constantly. They just want the UX stuff to keep improving. So why mess with the kernel and changing the, you know, big things like that when we could just be bundling these UX pieces as part of our app?

But isn't that a concern that some people, well, have voice that Windows as a service is going to end up being more expensive on the consumer? Similar to how Adobe went to the cloud, and now you can't purchase a version of the software and own it. You have to pay every year. Right. Well and and and Adobe is not a particularly innovative company.

Right? It's kind of where software goes to die or rather be bundled in your $100 a month package. But Microsoft seems to be resisting that. They've been far more decomposed. I think the push we're getting against Windows right now is shipping new versions of Windows every quarter is crazy.

Nobody wants to install them, and so we don't they don't get the good bits or the bad bits. That if you break these pieces apart so because the core OS doesn't need to change much. It's pretty good. It's just the new bit coming on top. I'm a dev.

I'm trying to build a client side app. You're trying to tell me I have to tell my customers they all have to be running Windows 10 version 18 3 to be able to use my app, I'm just not gonna use those features. But if I could bundle the 18 03 UI bit in my app so they don't have to care which version of 10 you're running, that makes my life a heck of a lot easier. How do you think dot net 5, I guess, right, is what it's gonna be? Mhmm.

We've had a couple of conversations on the podcast about how they're actually going to be taking the the very, different run times, right, in in different, ways of managing their code, and they're gonna build it into 1. So going forward, mono and dotnetcore and, you know, and, Xamarin, they're all gonna be running on the same base. How do you see that benefiting? Don't include Mono in this conversation because it's doing its own thing right now. Like Okay.

I I'm I won't talk. I you know, Mono is an interesting character. It's got an interesting life right now in the blazer scenario. Mhmm. So they are trying to maintain the standard so the feature set stays compatible.

Mhmm. But, you know, your first real break moment, they've they've been maintaining 2 copies of dot net. Right. I can never know how to call this sort of classic or standard version the correct name. I don't know what that what it's supposed to be, and core.

The break has come in 3 with C Sharp 8. Right? Because C Sharp 8 does not run on the standard framework. It only runs on core. Now why?

Why is this true? Because I think at some point, they're now building features in c sharp 8 that are dependent on features of core that don't exist in standard, and they're looking at what it took to implement them instead and going, this is too expensive. Too hard to do. And odds are standard people aren't gonna use it anyway. And so you see the real future that's coming up here, which is the part of dot net standard that is core.

Those sort of base libraries and so forth, that's going away from standard. That they're taking apart standard saying, what are the bits that are unique to standard that need to live on? And we'll bring those up into 5. And what are the bits that could all be run by core? So they start maintaining only one version of dot net core, and they change it to just calling it 5.

Is it gonna be a perfect lift and shift so that you can take your you know, what I the advice I've been given on dotnetrox is make sure you're up to 4.8 so that whatever comes next is gonna move the easiest for 4.8. Is it gonna be seamless the first time they push out 5? I'm betting no. But maybe a year after, you know, when they get more of the fixes in place, Microsoft is deeply incented to main 1 maintain one version of dot net. And the easiest way to do that is to allow people to move their software easily over to this merged version.

Gotcha. But there's clearly stuff that's been peeled off. Right? Web forms ain't gonna make it. Right?

WCF telling me. Ain't gonna make it. Right? There's a few good reasons for that. Right?

Fundamentally, both those products are bound to IIS. Yeah. Yeah. And that just isn't you you can't unbind them. Oh, yeah.

I totally understand it. Yeah. But Well, I was gonna say one of the things that Sean and I have talked about is, you know, while he's not gonna, have support for Web Forms or WCF or whatever, he's got his Blazor, and he's all about Blazor. He's he's already said he's gonna convert everything that he's developed into Blazor. Right, Sean?

That's you know? Well and I'm already running sessions like that inside of Dev Intersection. Right? You know, in in the spring show, you're gonna go we're gonna have a Blazor for web forms people because it seems like the first logical path. Right.

I I look at the way the dot net ecosystem has rallied around server side blades and said, okay. Every I'm not gonna we could say yes or no in terms of the quality of the technology one way or the other, but it clearly is a path forward where everything else was learn a new way. And so here is, you know, a very similar philosophy, the server side philosophy, and it is clearly a way forward. Right. And it's amazing how far it's come in just a few years.

Right? From Sanderson's just demo out of nowhere, just trying something different. But I and that's typical Sanderson. Right? The man thinks in a level beyond most people.

Anytime I sit and chat get a chance to talk to Steve, I'm in awe just the way that he thinks. But he was working on the WebAssembly technology. Right? Mhmm. The fact that he did it against Razor technology where the name Blazor comes from.

And then as the team worked on it, came up with this model that is server side because the WebAssembly stuff still has issues. So, you know, I'm not sure when the client stuff's actually going to show show up and just seem to light a spark. And again, I don't know that they knew this was the spark that was going to happen, but so many people reacted so sharply to server side, Blazer, that it just it has its own energy. And I I mean, I'm you know, I was surprised as everyone else. I'm happy to jump on board, but this is not what Sanderson originally built at all.

This is the razor team grabbing on to this, coming up with some server implements and folks going, wow. No. Love it. Let's go. And there are a ton of been benefits, just doing it from the server side.

Yep. Especially if you're talking about when I think about typical Web Forms apps out in the world, they're internal apps. Right? They're inside of your organization. They've been around for a while.

Like, the the main issue you always have with server side is scale. Right? It's, hey. If 10,000 people hit it, what am I gonna do? It's like, well, for starters, don't let 10,000 people hit it.

Right? Like, that's that's probably not what it's for. Although, at the same time, you've also got the cloud. You could dial the knob up fairly high. There is that option.

But more saliently, it's like you're talking about internal application that you it has been begging for modernization for a while, and here's all these modern tools following very much the same model. And I think a lot of this energy is coming from the developers in that have done dotnet in the past and now saying, okay. Now I can, you know, get my user experience in the rich model, and I don't have to learn Angular or React or JavaScript, anything like that. I can do Yeah. Something I can relate to.

Yeah. Oh, and, hey, Telerik's got a set of controls, and I my company already pays for those controls. In fact, I use them in my web forms apps. Yep. I think that's part of this particular energy is that it touches all the things that somebody who's been maintaining the software for a while knows.

And it look. If I'm the if I'm an architect, if I'm or if I'm the CTO and you're coming at me with a couple of dozen or a 100 web forms app saying, hey. I wanna reengineer these all in Angular, I can't justify the cost. Right. I'm not saying you couldn't do in Angular.

You absolutely could. But for what? Yep. More broadly, I think, like, WebAssembly when it does finally become more stable in itself, is that gonna be the the the future, I guess, of of the web? Not just for Microsoft Technologies but for for other companies as well?

Well, you hit a really interesting point, Wei, which is with what we happen in WebAssembly, we're suddenly saying, you know, JavaScript penetrated all markets because it had this unique market, the web market first, that you couldn't ignore. So you always had to have some JavaScript skilled people because you can't ignore web. And suddenly, the fact that you had, you know, Electron and could build client side apps with JavaScript, and you had Ionic, and you could build mobile apps in JavaScript and so forth. And then JavaScript's got its issues. Right?

There's no question you can build sustainable software around it. That's why TypeScript is so popular and the various testing frameworks and so forth. It's like how do you manage sustainable dynamic language code? It can be done. It's just a way of working.

But with WebAssembly, we suddenly penetrated a market that was JavaScript only. But what if you could code in the language you wanted and it ran in a browser too? Right? So now the browser is simply a host for code. Now if I put my IT hat on, right, like I'm the run as guy, I don't like when you need to install software on my desktop machines.

I just don't like it. It's a risk every time. Pareto's law applies, we roll out to a 1,000 desktops, 80% of them, 800 are gonna work fine, 20% of them, 200 are not. Right? Then there's gonna be some kind of fix, and we're gonna pick up 80% of that 200.

So a 160 are gonna be fine and 40 are not. We'll do some other fixes and we'll pick up the next 80%. 32 are fine and 8 of them are just really broken. And that's every flip and deploy. I've already given you a security context on the desktop.

It's the browser. That's why, generally speaking, in in IT controlled environments, we do browser based apps. Because we just avoid all those problems. Well, if you can now program in the language of your choice through into the browser and have the capabilities you need, awesome. Solved problem.

I I wanted to tell you that about 5 years ago, I was at a Dev Intersection conference, and it was at one of the panel sessions. And I asked a question, when is the day gonna come where we can write in the browser something besides JavaScript? And their answer was, no, no, no, no. Too many security issues, things like that. And it's like, I couldn't figure that out.

You know, it's like, you know, we've got c sharp and vb on the server. Well, that doesn't really make that much more security issues. But I saw a day where there was a demand for writing something besides JavaScript in the browser, and I asked it at one of your conferences. And the challenge now is you have to push the language down into the browser as well. Right?

We have a runtime space in in the form of WebAssembly, and your big complaint now is the footprint's just too large. And so they're doing everything they can to try and get that footprint down. Like, that's the race, is how do you get these other languages into browsers and their compiled pieces in the in the browsers, piece of the framework and things so that it's manageable. It's a reasonable size. Right?

The JavaScript and the DOM are already in the browser. Mhmm. And the other things are not. So that's gonna be the challenge. But you're right.

It's a it's a good security context. It's a place to write software from. It has a sufficient set of capabilities and everybody's got one. So it's not a bad way for us to do programming. The thing that gets interesting here is when a new context comes along, when the goggles come along and disrupt this model.

Then we're gonna need a web assembly for the goggles. I don't know. Like, that's part of the issue we're starting to think in terms of now is how how do we contain all these different, programming environments into the various platforms we need to live on. Well, I think it's a matter of if, or when, not if. And Sean and I have talked, you know, wouldn't it be interesting to write all your code in c sharp?

Right? Yeah. And do you think, you know, when they get there, that it will simplify for people who knew c sharp, but it will also allow other people to get into development easier because they have to focus on fewer things? I think c sharp certainly has its strengths in that respect. Right?

That that, people like programming in a typed language in this the the strengths that that c sharp brings to the table. But it does take time, and, you only so certain people see it. There there's also more contemporary language. C sharp's long in the 2. It's certainly Yeah.

You know, in a groove right now, and it's modernized itself very well. But, there's no guarantees that it's gonna dominate anything long term. Just and when it comes to statically type languages, they're clearly the winner at this point. One thing that I started out, you know, any dotnet language for one platform, and it's not going any dotnet language for any platform. Yes.

Well and and and you and you hit on an interesting point, which is when you start thinking in terms of something like f sharp and other does it make sense for other languages that would work against that runtime as well? One thing I'm wondering about too is that, I remember and it's still around, but it it never really, like, took off big was Meteor. And so, you know, it's not just I can do .net on the front and the back and kind of do the same kinds of things, but I may have an end to end system now that's designed to work together with, you know, Blazor or something like it on the front end and, you know, dotnetcore on the back end. Yeah. Well and the whole idea of generating client, right, of non coded client is an interesting one.

When you're talking about sort of standard metaphors, your forms of data models, like certain class of application, You can absolutely automate that. I mean, you know, or rest in peace, light switch. But I look over what's happening with Power apps in the Azure space, and it's very much the same thing. It's like, alright, generated client and certain generated pieces of back end, but you can custom code back end pieces as well. So we we certainly got energy and continue to have energy in that space.

It's it's an ongoing development standards. But I think if you really wanna be a coder, you're gonna be interested in what happens as these different client devices take off. And, obviously, the augmented reality one being one of the largest. Mhmm. So then how do how did you move into conference management?

I've always been in conference management. It's almost as long as I've been writing. The new intersection is Debit Debit Debit Debit Debit Debit Debit Debit Debit Debit Debit Debit Debit Debit Debit Debit Debit Debit Debit Debit Debit Debit Debit Debit Debit Debit Debit Debit Debit Debit Debit Debit Debit Debit Debit Debit Debit section. Yes. Debit Debit Debit section came along in 2012.

But it by the time by 2012, I'd already been making conferences for, oh, boy, you know, 15, 20 years in one form or another. Right? Of that I had worked with for years years that was being dismantled by its parent company. And you sort of get to a place where it's like, these are the people I like working with. They they're the people I trust that are competent, and they need a home.

And, also, the the issue of hypocrisy. You've been complaining that everybody does conferences wrong. Well, are you gonna do your own or not? And, I guess I said yes. And, it's a it's a remarkable source of stress.

There's nothing quite like, you know, signing a year a a contract a year in advance for something that would bankrupt you and then making sure it doesn't bankrupt you. Well, you're doing a good job there. I've been to Well, thank you. We appreciate it. All the time.

You know, I like all the different variety of sessions and, you know, across between SQL intersection, Angular, dot net, everything there. So Well, and that's the intersection part. Right? Is that I I I mean, there's always certain that we build a kind of show that where we know the typical attendee is not paying their own ticket. They're they're taking it to their employer and saying, I wanna go.

And so I make sure I have the sessions in there that you can point at your employer and say, this is what you wanted me to learn. I can go get it here. But then I'm also hoping you're gonna taste the buffet. Right? You're gonna dip into some other areas and explore some things that you can bring back to your company and say, hey.

You know, we haven't thought about this, but I spent an hour listening to this brilliant person talk about this technology and I think it might be able to help us. Many times you don't know. You you know, lots of people come to a conference with a piece of paper in hand of questions I need answered, and then arguably the most valuable thing they bring back is something that wasn't on the paper. That to me, I've done my show well, when not only you got all your questions answered, we got 3 ideas you didn't know you should have. I think that's also just good advice for the for attending conferences.

Right? Is that you you kinda go with an idea of what you want, but be willing to go, yeah, try out something that isn't even in the ballpark of a list. Yeah. It's something I you know, I I I rarely speak at my own show. It seems a little weird to do that, but I I MC.

So I do the openings for the keynotes and things like that. And I'm that's when I would say that. It's like, listen, you know, you're at a buffet. I hope you'll taste some things you've never tried before. And don't feel bad.

Like, if the few minutes into the session, you realize it's not for you, nobody's gonna get angry with you if you leave. Like, go you're the customer here. We want you to be happy, but try some things. So many of the best ideas are stuff you've never seen before. So where are you normally, hosting these, Dev Intersection nonconferences?

Are they mainly in the States or They're they're in the US. Yes. So we do a a show in the fall in Las Vegas and a show in the spring in Orlando. And the reasons are they're big enough. They have sufficient space.

They're easy to fly into. They're nice places to go, but not too nice. You know, I've I've put on a conference in Hawaii. That's a separate set of problems. You know, we the it's the spring show, which is the 1st week of April, lines up with Easter and spring break for a reason.

Lots of folks come to Orlando, go to the conference, and they have their family there, and they go to Disney World and things like that. Like, I'm not I'm not avoiding those sorts of things to try and embrace that, that that we can work with people that way. Do you think you can, you can add one to New Orleans? You know, I love doing shows in New Orleans. I did all the Tech Heads in New Orleans.

We've looked at the location a bunch of times to see is there a way to make it to make it work. I'm certain certainly not outside of realms. It's like it's a cross between Disneyland and Las Vegas, honestly. Yeah. But, yeah, the next city I would add if I was gonna do another show in in the north in US would be New Orleans.

Like, it's it's a fantastic location. But, and we've experimented in Europe, but, you know, the Europeans have their own shows too. So, you know, we there's there's possibilities there. We've talked about spinning off verticals. Like, we've done it.

We did a dedicated Angular show for a while that drew a particular audience. I like that we do it in a hotel where largely we fill the place with attendees. So if you're down in the lobby bar, like, everybody in that bar is at the show. Talk to anyone. That's sort of our model, the approach we like to take for those those sorts of things.

And, in the same way, we try and spin off a vertical. It's like it's just got enough size that everybody here is focused on that thing. I like the diversity of topics, but I understand that people wanna talk to the people they know that that know the similar thing. Alright. Does anybody have any last questions before we get to pics?

Lots, but it would take us 2 more hours. So You haven't asked me about the Geek Outs yet. Yeah. I've mixed it a little bit there. You're gonna spin that off into its own podcast?

You're I I promised I would do finish the history of dot net first. Gotcha. People have asked me for ways to do to to to keep the geek out. I mean, when we're publishing 3.net or rocks a week Mhmm. I would do one show a month that was a geek out.

That was just whatever topic the audience wanted. I like to do the research. We're not doing making that many dinaros anymore, so it's been hard to put them in. I don't wanna take people away from the technical company they care about. It turns out I have a limited amount of research energy, and all of that is being consumed by the book right now.

But my passion for this array of stem topics doesn't doesn't stop. So when the book is finished, I'll I'll look at doing it as its own show, and and it'll it probably be a weekly, but probably one subject a month. It's just you need to do several shows on, again, a given subject to really explore. K. Are you doing any other shows other than Donut Rocks?

So you in the past, you've done a few other ones, haven't you? Well, I still do Run Ads Radio, which is the every Wednesday. That's an IT oriented show. That's every Wednesday since April 11, 2007. So we're at 667 episodes now.

And, yeah, Run Az is current or dotnetrock is currently at 1 a week as well, which is, you know I mean, you guys make podcasts. You know how much effort it is. And, and just Yes. So Chuck definitely knows. Yeah.

I have some idea. The thing with the Geek Out topic area is that I think it needs a certain amount of video as well. Like, there's often you're explaining a complicated enough subject that that having an animation would really help. So we're gonna have to play with format. Exactly.

That's way to communicate that. But only podcasts allow you to talk long enough to give you a long format that you can really dive into a subject. So I think they they they the various media all serve their purpose. Right. And it's still gonna be a while before you're out with the book.

Right? I'm expecting early the in 2020 to get a first draft together, and then we'll we'll probably do a kick starter and see how many copies we can sell. We'll make it a tour. So I'm I'm you know, unlike most book authors, I don't mind going on tour and and talking to developers. It's something I do all the time anyway.

Part of doing that Kickstarter will be, where do you want me to go? You know, what places do I wanna go to? If a company wants me to show up there and and talk about tell tell those stories, I'll do that as well. That'll sort of give us a shape of what that looks like, but I could easily see spending a year on the road just talking about the book and and sort of celebrating where dotnet, you know, dotnet has completely transformed itself in this past 20 or so years. That's a heck of a thing to pull off without we're redoing the tooling too.

I mean, you know, the normal cadence of software development is pretty straightforward. You build a platform, then you put tools on top of it. Then actually the platform hits its limits. You build a new platform and you set of tools. Microsoft redid the platform without replacing the tools.

Like, who does that? That's it's a unique moment, I think, in in history, and it's something I think we're celebrating. Absolutely. Yay. I get to keep my Visual Studio.

Yay. Alright. So, I mean, we've gone for, quite a while. I think we're a little over time. Mhmm.

Let's get into picks here. And I guess I'll start first because I wanna be the first one to pick the new Star Wars. So it's not out yet, but The Force Awakens. I signed up for for day 1, so I'm gonna go see it. Attack of the Clones?

No. The the Rise of Skywalker. Right? Yeah. Yeah.

So yep. So I'm gonna pick that. And I'm also gonna pick, you know, the Dev Intersection Conference this second. I said I went four times. I enjoyed it all 4 times.

If you wanna hear more stories by Richard, he's got a few more that he didn't talk about here, so go listen to those. Okay. I'll, I'll go next. Mine is it's actually has to do with Microsoft. When Google killed inbox, I couldn't go back to Gmail.

I just couldn't do it. So I went to Outlook and found a feature in Outlook where you can manage your subscriptions. Right? If it's spam or something that you're getting you don't need anymore, you can unsubscribe right there. And 80% of the time, it works.

Now one thing, go to dev dev chat dot tv and subscribe to our newsletter, and don't unsubscribe to it. But you can unsubscribe from all the rest of them. Alright. What's your pick, why? I couldn't actually think of anything I've done interesting recently.

This is a little bit depressing, but so I thought I'd give my pick, this week to to a status called, Let's Encrypt, which is a certificate authority that allows you to generate SSL certificates for free. So because, you know, it's 2019. Every website should actually have HTTPS, but True. But, like, it's just, you know, just not just because it's, if you don't have it, it'll be your traffic would be unencrypted, but just, you know, it'll affect things like SEO and things. But I think historically, a barrier from a lot of small business owners and stuff like that is just you just have to pay for the cert, you know.

But really, unless you're like a like a big bank or something and you need extended validation, you don't actually need to to pay for a cert. You can essentially just use like Let's Encrypt and, you know and I think the best thing is you can actually automate it. So it'll it'll just, like, reissue a cert for you periodically. So which is another reason a a small business might wanna use it, you know. You don't have to actually worry about it expiring.

So, yeah, I thought it'd be, good to remind people that it will you know, that that it's there, that that service is there. I don't think so. K. So I think we should all pick Chuck's book. Absolutely.

When is that out, Chuck? The ebook version is available now on Amazon. The paperback version came out on Tuesday, so you can get that, as well right now. The audio book is something that I'm gonna record over the Christmas break, and so it should come out the 1st part of January 2020. And it's the the Max Coder's Guide to Finding Your Dream Developer Job.

So yeah. So if you're looking for a job, I've had a few people contact me and say it's also really good for freelancers, which is kind of what I based it on, was just how I found clients as well as, you know, jobs that I liked when I was freelancing. I also had one person say, I read the book and then I realized that I needed to be in these couple of places in order to find the kind of people I wanted to hire. So Oh, yeah. I've talked to a few other people.

I was gonna do the next book on how to stay current in tech, but I'm really tempted after talking to a lot of people who have given me that feedback to write the book on how to hire developers. A lot of people are really bad at that. So Well, and they tie it ties your 2 books together well too. Yes. Yep.

And the book's totally affordable. So, yeah, go check it out. Yes. 2.99 on Amazon. It's 14.99 for the paperback.

I think both of those are less than a large Starbucks. Right? In north in New Orleans? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So do you have another pick, Chuck? Or or is that I was gonna shout out about that. I've got some other things in the works. So like Caleb said, get on the mailing list because that's probably where that stuff's gonna come out.

I'm not gonna go into it here just because I don't have enough information to really pitch it, but I have thrown this I an idea I'm working on. I'll probably do either do a Kickstarter or just allow people to pre order. But I've pitched it to a number of people and I've gotten an overwhelming, hey, when where is that? When do I get it? Kind of a response.

And the the handful of people that looked at me and said, I don't know if I would actually use a service like that. All of them have come back to me after like an hour or 2 and said, you know, the more I think about it, the more I want it. So Mhmm. Get on the mailing list and, you'll definitely start getting that kind of thing. I'm also going to be putting a lot of the advice stuff from the books that I am working on or fleshing out ideas for into the mailing list starting at the beginning of the year.

So if you're looking for career advice and things like that, I'm gonna start there, and then we'll kinda see where we end up. Alright. So, Richard, is there something you wanna let our listeners know about that you're interested in lately? Oh, I can't believe you guys didn't bring up the Mandalorian. Oh, so good.

Oh, good. Well, I think I think it's been brought up everywhere else. Right? Okay. So it's it's it's now in our our collective conscience, our consciousness, just like Frozen 2.

Yeah. Somebody has little kids. Yes. I do. And my friend with a little girl is cursing me because I said, don't worry.

When when your baby's born, Frozen will move on. There'll be something else. Nope. Frozen all the time. I just tell them to let it go now these days.

But, well, you know, for a texting, I hope you're playing with Poly. If you're a dot net developer, the Poly library on GitHub is part of the dot net foundation. That's something everybody needs. Just that they it's a set of of libraries for just dealing with failure, retry processes, and so forth, the polyproject.org. And and for a gadget, as a, a smoker of meat and and somebody who just, like, you know, likes to make food well, the meter probe.

I mean, perfect Christmas present for anybody who's a griller. M e a t e r, meter. They're they're a little pricey. Those. But they you know, it's got good software on your phone.

You plug it in, tell it tell it what you're gonna cook. It'll estimate the finish time. It'll it'll even it even figures out the right amount of time to rest, a steak afterward. Wow. Cool.

Can't recommend them enough, the meter probe. Okay. I think I need one of those. You inspired me so many years ago. So I've I've eaten Richard's smoked meat.

You know. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. You came to that party.

I came to that party. Oh, boy. If if you haven't moved, I've been to your house. So You've been to my house. I have not moved.

So yeah. The way that Richard and I met was I was invited to a conference called DevTeach. And I wound up being on a panel kind of in an impromptu way that .netrocks was putting together. We were talking about agile development. Mhmm.

And anyway, the the speaker dinner was at Richard's house, and Richard smoked a bunch of meat. I think we it was a catered dinner because there's enough people. It's just like too many, but there's enough people who said, like, you're gonna cook something. Right? So I used my big box smoker and I made 22 racks of ribs, something like that.

So everybody got a couple of rib bones because it was 60 or 70 people. It was a lot. Yep. That wasn't bear meat, was it? No.

It was pig. Bear. It was pig. Now we don't eat bears. Bears eat the bears around here eat garbage.

You do not wanna eat them. Yeah. But anyway, you've inspired me because I now have a box smoker that sits on my porch. I have a sous vide machine, and I've gotten really into the grilling and cooking of meats. By the way, there's little meter probes.

If you're careful with them, you can put them in a piece of meat inside a sous vide bag and they'll work because they're completely wireless. Yeah. Dude, it's a cool gizmo. I know what I want for Christmas. And we're the worst people to buy for.

I really should be doing a shopping list for the geek in your life. These are these are some things. But that yeah. I can't can't recommend them enough. Yeah.

I am hard to buy for. I yeah. My wife. My poor wife. Yeah.

Alright. Thanks, everybody. It was a great show, and thank you, Richard, again for spending the time with us. Yeah. Just enjoyable.

My pleasure. Yeah. Thank you for joining us. Yeah. This is a good talk.

Yep. And one last thing for our listeners, I will let them know that I recently changed my Twitter handle to make it a little more memorable. So if you're looking for me on Twitter, I am now dotnetsuperhero. So We'll have to get Sean a cape. Cape cape.

No capes are bad. Right? No capes. No capes. Alright, guys.

We'll check you out on the nep episode. Thank you. Bye.