.NET Rocks!

Large Language Models can generate a lot of text - but is it any good? Carl and Richard talk to Vishwas Lele about his ongoing efforts at pWin.ai to build tools for responding to government RFPs. Vishwas focuses on the quality problem - both the quality of the incoming RFP and the quality of the responding proposal. How do you determine the key requirements of an RFP reliably? And when it comes to the response, how do you provide measurable results for a response? The conversation digs into a change in workflow that benefits the RFP process regardless of tooling - and gives hints to the patterns of success with LLMs!

Use What Works! Carl and Richard talk to Dylan Beattie about the Use What Works movement, encouraging developers to use well-maintained open-source projects available today rather than rolling their own. Dylan explains how folks go down a path of believing a library is simple until they learn enough to realize that every bit of software is more complicated than they realize. And the less code you own, the happier and more productive you are. Adding AI to the mix only makes it clearer: you need some stability in development. If you're changing every layer of code, you'll spend even more time and frustration chasing problems. Make getting results easier - use what works!

Ready to go nano? Carl and Richard talk to José Simões about the open source .NET nanoFramework - a community-driven project to provide .NET for embedded systems. José talks about the evolution from the .NET microFramework, to something even smaller, while at the same time, microcontrollers have gotten much more powerful. The conversation looks beyond the hobbyist and educational uses of these systems into commercial IoT applications. The development cycle is one you'll recognize, working in Visual Studio (or Visual Studio Code) and executing against an emulator, or to the actual controller via USB. And yes, you can set breakpoint in the controller!

Recorded live at the Tavern Hall in Bellevue during the Party with Palermo for the MVP Summit, it's episode 2000! Carl and Richard take questions from the audience and play clips from past guests and listeners about their experiences with .NET, and the role that .NET Rocks has played in their careers. After two thousand shows, there are lots of stories, and plenty to celebrate. Thanks for listening!

The Y2K bug turned out to be a non-event on January 1, 2000. How did that happen? Carl and Richard bring together a number of stories from folks who were there, fixing the software and updating systems, so effectively that, ultimately, nothing much happened when the clocks rolled over. It was common practice with early software to only store two digits worth of year - back then, storage space was at a premium. For years, there had been warnings about fixing these problems, but by 1999, it was essential. These are the stories of how some folks did those fixes so effectively that when Jan 1 2000, came around, nothing bad happened.