The Tablet Show

Carl and Richard talk to Robert Evans about his work helping get Windows 8 applications certified into the Windows Store. The conversation starts out talking about the Windows 8 App Labs, a roving group of Windows 8 professionals and tools that travel from city to city helping developers be successful building Windows 8 applications. Robert then digs into the most common reasons that applications submitted to the Store fail to get certified. This show is a checklist of things you need to take care of to be successful in the Windows Store!

Carl and Richard chat with the ever-prolific Atley Hunter about his Christmas break, where he built 40 Windows 8 applications in less than two weeks! Atley talks about building almost 150 applications in 2012, and the differences between Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 application design. Talk about an inspiration!

Carl and Richard talk to Rey Bango about the state of JavaScript, IE, tablets, Windows 8. Rey talks about the ubiquity of jQuery and how other libraries could have been as dominant, but for whatever reason are not. The conversation also digs into the movement against plug-ins, and whether or not plug-in free is really practical. Rey also discusses the challenges of anti-IE web sites, and how you can change your user agent to discover that many webKit only sites work just fine in IE10.

Carl and Richard talk to Wally McClure about building mobile applications for iPhone and Android using MonoTouch and Mono for Android (respectively). The conversation starts out with Wally's original interest in the Mono tools, being able to leverage his code and skills in C# for mobile development. From there Wally drills into the challenges of tooling across platforms (testing frameworks, etc) as well as dealing with fragmentation of operating systems and SDKs - a bigger issue in Android than iOS, but still an issue.

Carl and Richard talk to Luke Wroblewski about his experiences with mobile UI design. Luke talks about the fundamental changes going on with devices and UIs and how we need to stop thinking about keyboard and mouse interactions, and deal with large screen, small screen and short focus applications.

At the Sunnyvale stop of the .NET Rocks! Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Carl and Richard sat down with Mary Jo Foley to talk about the state of the tablet world. The conversation started out with a discussion about the sudden departure of Steven Sinofsky from Microsoft - good news or bad? Always controversial and outspoken, Mary Jo digs into the rumors and the facts around the changes at Microsoft, how things look for the future and how important the tablet is to Microsoft going forward.

While in Irvine, CA on the .NET Rocks! Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Carl and Richard talked to Paul Sheriff about architecture in a heterogeneous world. The conversation starts out digging into Paul’s long history of building software that can stand the test of time – being able to tolerate changes and add new features without having to do the ‘big rewrite.’ Paul discusses the various patterns of architecture that can handle a diversity of clients as well as the realities of unreliable connectivity and distribution.

While at the San Diego stop of the .NET Rocks! Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Carl and Richard talked to Beth Massi about the latest version of LightSwitch. With LightSwitch HTML Client Preview 2 you can use LightSwitch to build response web apps that scale automatically from smart phone mobile form factor up to full size large screen desktops. LightSwitch is getting more versatile with every update!

While at the Phoenix stop of the .NET Rocks! Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Carl and Richard talked to Shawn Wildermuth about his experiences with PhoneGap. The conversation starts out with a recap of his experiences around developing mobile and tablet applications on iOS, Android as well as WP7, WP8 and Windows 8. Shawn digs into the particulars about building common-source-code projects with GitHub and Adobe's PhoneGap-As-A-Service. He also discusses start-up strategies using PhoneGap as well as native development.

While at the Dallas stop of the .NET Rocks! Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Carl and Richard talked to Miguel Castro about what it takes to redesign applications to be Windows 8 Store style applications. Miguel talks about his experience redesigning UIs and looking at the way applications are going to function in the future. Combined with some great questions from the audience, this show gives you a look at what it takes to get your existing applications working in Windows 8 in the modern app style.

At the San Antonio stop of the .NET Rocks! Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Carl and Richard talk to John Sonmez about Service Stack and MonoGame. John starts off the conversation talking about Service Stack, an open source .NET and Mono REST Web Services framework, eventually moving back to the subject of MonoGame and the huge potential for cross-platform development. John also mentions MvvmCross, a cross-platform MVVM project where you have common code across all platforms except for views. Cool stuff!

At the Nashville stop of the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Carl and Richard sat down with Kate Gregory to talk about C++ in Windows 8. Kate talks about how C++ has evolved to be a much more pleasant language to work in than the old days, as well as exploring how you can take advantage of amazing C++ technology like AMP to harness GPUs to do parallel processing. The conversation also turns to Hilo, a sample C++/XAML Windows 8 project on CodePlex. There's never been a better time to be a C++ programmer!

While at the Albany stop of the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Carl and Richard talked to Mark Miller about modern UI design. Mark discusses the conceptual differences between mouse driven and touch driven interfaces, grouping using space rather than borders, and how to deal with your fingers getting in the way of what you're trying to touch.

At the Rochester stop of the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Carl and Richard talked to Brian Noyes about building line of business applications in Windows 8. Brian talks through the architectural differences in Windows 8 and how developers need to overcome certain design patterns to be successful building apps in this new world, even for line of business. No data grids, please!

At the Pittsburgh stop of the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Carl and Richard chat with Billy Hollis about the design concepts around tablet applications. Billy talks about the differences between graphical design and interactive design - including the idea that an experienced developer is the best candidate for becoming a great interaction designer! As always, Billy inspires everyone to build a better app a better way.

At the Detroit stop of the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Road Trip, Carl and Richard sat down with Jeff Wilcox of 4th and Mayor fame to talk about the role of the cloud in phone applications. Jeff talks about how his application works with the Foursquare services on the back end, but how he also needed to build his own services to complete the 4th and Mayor experience - not everything his customers wanted came from Foursquare! The conversation also digs into why he built those services in node.js and the serendipity that he ended up moving from the phone team at Microsoft to Azure - working on node.js!

At the Indianapolis stop of the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Carl and Richard talked to Atley Hunter about his near compulsive habit of building Windows Phone 7 applications. Atley talks about how he maintains a list of hundreds of application ideas and since publishing more than a hundred applications, is straining the ability of the phone store to organize all of his apps under a single account! The conversation digs into what makes a great application, the revenue models that work, design choices and a look to the future of the app store model in Windows 8.

While at DevReach, Carl and Richard moderated a panel discussion between Chris Sells, Brian Rinaldi and Jon Flanders about the current state of mobile development. The conversation first focuses on the ascendancy of PhoneGap, comparing its flexibility in doing partial native, partial HTML implementations, versus native apps with web browsers embedded. Look for mentions of MonoTouch and Mono for Android, as well as a couple of great lines about Flash!

While in Denver on the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Carl and Richard sat down with Tim Huckaby for a hilarious run through the various technologies that Tim's companies have been working with. Tim talks about how he's building tablet applications for businesses as well as all of the Kinect-based interactive systems.

While at the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip stop in Salt Lake City, Carl and Richard chat with Scott Stanfield about core design concepts for building modern applications. Scott talks about typography, negative space and other designer topics in a way that blows the audience's mind!