The Tablet Show

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!

Carl and Richard talk to Greg Levenhagen about Windows 8 development. Greg digs into the concept of contracts in Windows 8 and how they different from an API call, providing better control over how Win 8 applications work with services and resources of the OS. There's the obligatory debate over what Windows 8 Apps formally known as 'Metro' are now called... Windows 8 Store Apps? Modern Apps? Sigh. Greg also talks about how developers can get a handle on the user interaction side of Windows 8 Apps, life without a designer and his experiences interacting with the Windows 8 Store folks.

Carl and Richard talk to John Sonmez about MonoGame. MonoGame is an open source implementation of the Microsoft XNA 4 framework for building cross-platform games. How cross-platform? XBox 360, Windows, Mac as well as iPad, Windows 8 and the phones - iPhone, Android, Windows Phone. That's pretty cross-platform! The conversation digs into the skills you need to build games, whether these tools could be used to build non-game apps and more.

Carl and Richard talk to Rocky Lhotka about his experiences building Windows 8 applications. But first the conversation takes a digression with a reader email about the challenges of dealing with the inplace upgrade of .NET 4.0 to 4.5 alongside the migration of Windows XP to Windows 8. Rocky then digs into the projects he's been working on in Windows 8. He compares the jump from .NET 4.0 on Windows 7 to .NET 4.5 on Windows 8 to the jump from Visual Basic 3 on Windows 3.11 to Visual Basic 4 on Windows 95. If you're following modern development practices, migrating to Windows 8 applications is pretty easy. If you're bringing a lot of old apps along, you're in for some challenges.

Carl and Richard talk to Lino Tadros about his work building tablet applications. Lino compares and contrasts the experiences of building iOS, Android and WinRT applications.

Carl and Richard talk to Dan Wahlin about his current projects, including a web application running on desktops, laptops, tablets and mobile phones.

While at PWOP Studios in New London, Carl and Richard sat down and chatted with each other about the leak of the Windows Phone 8 SDK. No one is certain if the SDK is final, but it must be close. The boys dig into the key points of what was found in the SDK - some new features not found in WinRT for Windows 8 (but perhaps coming in later versions), how the programming models shake out, and the requirements for the development platform. The conversation also digs into how 100,000 Windows Phone 7 apps are going to be moved to Windows Phone 8. Crazy times!

Carl and Richard talk to Jeff Fritz about doing unit testing of WinJS in Windows 8. Jeff talks about QUnit, the JavaScript testing framework built by the JQuery folks for testing JQuery. There are some interesting challenges for JavaScript testing, especially around automation. To deal with the complexities of working with WinJS in Windows 8 Jeff has forked QUnit to create QUnit-Metro. The conversation also digs into the challenges of working in WinJS, where tablets appear to be going and the what its like hopping between two flavors of JavaScript.

Carl and Richard talk to Jason Follas about building geospatial apps in Windows 8. Jason focuses on building using HTML and taking advantage of the advance Javascript libraries available today to manage geospatial data. He provides some awesome insight into how external libraries can be used inside Windows 8. The show may be about geospatial, but you're really going to learn about how the HTML/Javascript side of Windows 8 works!

Carl and Richard talk to David Bates about the state of Flash. But first, the boys geek out on David's hacking exploits with Arduino and Kinect. Then the conversation gets a bit more serious, talking about the destiny of Flash - which David points out is Adobe Air. Adobe Air is able to compile ActionScript from Flash into native code on iOS and Android. Flash isn't quite dead!

Carl and Richard chat with Aral Balkan about mobile application design. The conversation starts with a discussion of Aral's keynote at NDC and the design thinking that went into it - avoid cognitive dissidence, clutter, etc. Aral then dives into the dangers of hybrid apps: how combining HTML 5 and native wrappers does not make cross-platform development free. And finally the show wraps up with a great discussion on design as a whole. Just the show you need if you're debating how to build your mobile applications!