.NET Rocks!

Avalonia continues to evolve! Carl and Richard talk to Avalonia CEO Mike James & Matt Lacey about the latest version of Avalonia, the open source UI framework for building cross-platform applications with .NET. Mike's conversation with the Google Flutter team has led to replacing the Skia rendering engine in Avalonia with the newer Impeller Rendering Engine that Flutter itself depends on. This opens the door to excellent smartphone implementations with Avalonia, alongside its usual desktop and embedded roles. With enterprise editions and the new Avalonia Accelerate, there's more to come from the team!

Your first app interface should be a CLI! Carl and Richard talk to Kathleen Dollard about her experiences creating the .NET CLI - and how CLIs are only getting more important in the era of AI. Kathleen talks about working within the POSIX CLI standard for consistency's sake and to recognize that there will be many more CLIs in your life, so they should be as similar as possible. While CLIs may have started as configuration-as-code and DevOps practices, LLMs work well with them as long as consistency is maintained. There are several projects out there today to help you build a great CLI - check the links!

Artificial Intelligence is changing how software development happens - how is your team coping? Carl and Richard talk to Andrew Murphy about his work leading teams struggling with AI tools. Andrew talks about Nolan Lawson's blog post We Mourn Our Craft and his blogged response about dealing with grief. Some developers are embracing these new tools - perhaps they're new to development, or very experienced. But some folks aren't having a good time with AI and are wondering what has happened to their careers. How can you help?

It's always been challenging to make reliable software - is AI making it worse or better? Carl and Richard talk to Damien Brady about his experiences building software with AI tools and trying to bring that software up to an acceptable standard. Damien talks about leveraging LLMs' tendency toward detailed analysis to catch problems in code. It takes practice and experience to get good at using these tools, but they become more powerful over time!

How does Artificial Intelligence impact our approach to building secure software? Carl and Richard talk to Ben Dechrai about his experiences working with AI tooling and building AI apps, and how that impacts security. Ben talks about the concerns organizations have about using AI tools - what these tools might do with the code they are exposed to, as well as the code the tools generate. The conversation steers to local AI as a solution, although so far, the equipment and tools are very limited. Ben also talks about how AI tools are being used to both attack and secure software and the challenges of this arms race - hopefully the good guys win!