The Tablet Show

The Tablet Show interviews can now be heard every Wednesday on .NET Rocks! at http://dotnetrocks.com. Same great content, different website. This show is a five minute explanation by Richard and Carl.

Carl & Richard talk to Rocky Lhotka about the latest incarnation of CSLA - version 4.5.5. The conversation starts out with a thorough refresher on CSLA, building business objects in portable, maintainable ways. Really portable - the objects even on run on phones! Rocky talks about making CSLA run on Android phones via Xamarin, but not on iOS - because of specific Apple rules. The conversation also dives into CSLA on tablets and tablets in the enterprise in general. It's a cool time to be a developer!

While at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, Carl and Richard sat down with Todd Morrison to talk about his experiences building sophisticated media apps using HTML, CSS and Javascript. The conversation starts out on HBO2Go, a Vertigo project to provide a 'second screen' experience around HBO on the XBox. From there, Todd digs into the continued evolution of web technologies, how responsive web design goes beyond dealing with different screen sizes and into different input options like touch and gesture, as well as screen distances - how does the ten-foot experience of the XBox change your interaction with the application? Lots of great thinking from someone at the leading edge of web apps!

Carl and Richard talk to Greg Shackles about his experiences building Olo - an online ordering platform for restaurants. Greg starts the conversation talking about the decision to move from a different mobile platform over to Xamarin so that they could provide support for the largest diversity of devices with the largest common code base. The conversation also digs into MvvmCross, a library for utilizing the MVVM pattern across multiple platforms - Greg takes advantage of MvvmCross to minimize the amount of unique code for each platform. Great case study of the potential of Xamarin!

Carl and Richard talk to Jacob Rossi from the Internet Explorer team about his experiences helping to develop HTML standards like Pointer Events. Jacob talks about how the HTML standards continue to evolve to deal with the changes in computing, including the diversification of input devices - how do you deal with mouse, pen, touch and gesture in a uniform way, while also taking advantage of the distinctive capabilities of each input method? The conversation digs into how the various browser makers, including Chrome and Mozilla (Firefox) work together to develop these standards, creating implementations in the browsers to test in the field, and then carry the learnings back to the group. We may only hear about how they compete in the market, but at the same time, they all work together to make the web a better place!

Carl and Richard talk to Justin Esgar about everything that goes into building a successful mobile app - not just development! Justin talks about his experiences building a variety of different mobile apps, mostly on the iOS platform. He digs into the challenges of getting a good idea together, outsourcing various services (including development), how to get your app accepted in the AppStore, how to actually market your app effectively, and what success looks like. Much of what Justin has done is in his book Appitalize on Your Idea, links in the show notes!

Carl and Richard talk to Domenic Denicola about his experiences taking HTML beyond HTML 5. The conversation starts out talking about Domenic's experiences getting WebKit working inside the Nook to implement the reader. Then it moves to WinJS - Domenic worked on a textbook reader for Windows 8 using WinJS. Domenic talks about the challenges of the 1.0 version of WinJS, working around testing limitations, and the open source libraries that Barnes and Noble built to solve the problems. And then the conversation digs deep into the next generation of HTML - Domenic talks about dynamic elements and how HTML continues to evolve. Great thinking about how to keep HTML technology moving forward!

At the Portland stop of the ModernApps2013 road trip, Carl and Richard talked to Shawn Wildermuth about his experiences building mobile apps across multiple platform (iOS, Android, Windows). Shawn talks about the advantages and disadvantages of straight native development, native development with tools like Xamarin, and hybrid development with PhoneGap/Cordoba/Icenium. Having customers with every solution, Shawn digs into the nitty gritty details of each development approach. There's no one right way!

While at the San Francisco stop of the ModernApps2013 road trip, Carl and Richard talk to Beth Massi about building mobile apps with LightSwitch. The conversation starts out with an explanation of Microsoft LightSwitch, which is part of Visual Studio and focuses on making data-over-forms apps really easy to build. Beth digs into how LightSwitch creates HTML 5 clients and now has an option to create a responsive web design client using jQuery mobile, so that you can automatically make great mobile clients for your apps. The conversation digs into a variety of cool features of LightSwitch, including its ability to work with Azure, SharePoint, Office 365 and more!

While in Los Angeles for the ModernApps2013 tour, Carl and Richard talked to Lino Tadros about building tablet and phone applications across all the platforms. Lino talks about the different cross-platform choices, including Xamarin's technology, as well as the HTML-driven PhoneGap/Cordova technology. What's the right way to build your app? Lino discusses the advantages and disadvantages of each of these approaches, as well as some deeper concepts on what it means to build a quality application.

At the San Diego stop of the Modern Apps 2013 road trip, Carl and Richard sat down with Tony Surma to talk about his experiences building mobile and tablet apps for disaster relief organizations. Tony talks about Humanitarian Toolbox and it's efforts to build open source software for disaster relief. The conversation digs into the right way to build mobile software across all the platforms, and the specific changes needed to make apps work effectively in disaster scenarios. And a big shout out to all developers, testers and designers to help save the world at Humanitarian Toolbox!

At the Austin stop of the #ModernApps2013 road trip, Carl and Richard chat with Phil Japikse about building Windows 8.1 applications. But first, a serious conversation about disaster relief and the Humanitarian Toolbox - Phil talks about leading one of the open source projects for helping disaster relief professionals get up to speed on a given disaster site. Then the conversation turns to how organizations are building Windows 8.1 apps. What are the differences between 8.0 and 8.1? What are the breaking changes, and how do you get up and running in the new model? Lots to think about here.

While at the Dallas stop of the #ModernApps2013 road trip, Carl and Richard chat with Chris Love about all things mobile... this is a wide ranging conversation about the things that Chris is most concerned about in today's modern app world. Chris digs into how enterprises are (or are not) dealing with mobile development, where tablets fit into the equation, and how big an impact the diversity of OSes is having on development. And what about mobile first web design, anyway? Lots of great thinking!

While at NDC in London, Carl and Richard talk to Brandon Satrom about building hybrid mobile applications and their advantages and disadvantages around native apps. Brandon digs into the different deployment models of mobile applications, as well as the challenge of keeping many mobile platforms up to date at once. Lots of comparisons of apps between all the platforms - iOS, Android, Windows Phone and more!

While at NDC-London, Carl and Richard talk to Jon Skeet about his experience using C# everywhere - including mobile development! The conversation starts out talking about Jon's top topic of the past couple of years, Async and Await. Jon then digs into developing noda-time, a .NET implementation of Joda Time. This leads to a great conversation about Xamarin's tools for building iOS and Android apps and how C# can live everywhere. Jon talks through the fun parts and the hard parts of building mobile apps and his plans for cool new cross platform development. It's a different side of Jon Skeet!

While at the Philly Code Camp at Penn State, Carl and Richard talk to Atley Hunter about how he gets users to use his mobile apps and how he keeps them - and gets them to pay!

In between #ModernApps2013 Road Trip legs, Carl and Richard got a chance to chat with Glenn Howes about his experiences building children's applications for the iPhone. At the Apple World Wide Developer Conference in 2013, Apple announced a kid store for iPhone and iPad. Glenn talks about trying to get his app into the store when it launched - but discovers a number of poorly defined hurdles that Apple added to create a sense of safety for parents.

At the Philly Code Camp stop of the ModernApps2013 Road Trip, Carl and Richard talk to Jeff Fritz about building mobile web apps using ASP.NET web forms. No, really! Jeff talks about how with some simple changes, ASP.NET web forms works just fine on smartphones, so that you can keep the goodness of web controls in your app while getting rid of the evil of postbacks and the like. The conversation also digs into SignalR, jQuery and the latest round of devices... lots of mobile geekiness!

While on the ModernApps2013 Road Trip stop in Raleigh-Durham, Carl and Richard talk to Aaron Bockover about his experiences building multi-device, cloud centric applications - aka, modern apps. Aaron talks about being part of the rdio team, a music streaming app available for variety of platforms that allows you to move your music stream from device-to-device, controlling one device with another. Working with multiple devices is a hallmark of modern apps, and Aaron digs into what looks easy on the outside, but is deadly hard on the inside.

On the Hybrid US Tour, Carl and Richard talk to Chris Hardy about using Xamarin tools with Visual Studio 2013. The conversation starts out around the Xamarin announcements with Visual Studio 2013, including deeper integration within the Studio environment and a price break for MSDN subscribers. Chris also digs into some other important details related to the Studio 2013 launch, including the change of licensing for the Portable Class Libraries so that they can be used on iOS and Android devices. Lots of discussion around the kinds of mobile apps to build, comparing games to productivity, B2B and B2C. With Xamarin, it's a C# World!