.NET Rocks!

The Open Source Maintenance Fee is more than a year old now - how are things going? Carl and Richard catch up with Rob Mensching to discuss the OSMF and its success in supporting Rob's WiX Toolset project. Rob talks about the key aspect of the OSMF - making it part of the licensing, so that it isn't optional. Of course, you can download the source from GitHub and compile it yourself without violating any license terms, but if you're that engaged, you can contribute too. The goal with OSMF is to have folks who want to use the product have a reason and method to pay - check it out!

Have you checked out Azure Container Apps lately? Carl and Richard talk to Paul Yuknewicz and Jan Kalis about how they have sped up startup time with Container Apps using a feature called Express, and then on to the big news - Sandboxes. Sandboxes let you experiment with Azure Container Apps with managed identity to access Azure Connectors to all sorts of resources, both within Azure and outside it - Salesforce, SAP, etc. It's an effective and secure strategy for building applications, but also for experimenting with agents - at no point does the agent actually have control of any credentials. If you haven't looked at ACA lately, you need to check out these latest features!

DNSimple has a CLI! Carl and Richard talk to DNSimple CEO Anthony Eden about the evolution of the DNSimple CLI in today's software market. DNSimple provides DNS, domain registrar, and certificate services - so why does it need a CLI? Anthony talks about earlier experiments with CLIs for folks who didn't want to use the web interface. But today, large language models change the game and work best with a CLI - those specific commands mean more accurate results from LLMs, which make for a powerful natural language interface experience. The conversation covers the new tooling around LLMs, how the registrar market has evolved, changes to certificates, and ICANN's recent announcement of new gTLDs. DNSimple continues to evolve with the times! Check the show notes for a link for ten dollars off anything at DNSimple!

Do data centers in space make any sense? Time for a rare summer-time Geek Out! Richard chats with Carl about all the hype surrounding building orbital data centers for AI workloads. Richard points out that enthusiasm for this idea surged in the fall of 2025, when the backlash against ground data centers peaked. But could you actually make the orbital data centers work? The conversation works through a reasonable satellite design, covering off the details of power, cooling, communications, and satellite management. But how many satellites would be enough? This leads to an exploration of Kessler Syndrome, where orbital debris gets out of control - and what we can reasonably do about it. Which leads to another idea - how do we make ground-based data centers not suck?

Can tooling make event sourcing implementations easier? Carl and Richard talk to Einar Ingebrigsten about his work on cratis.io - a set of open-source tools for implementing event sourcing in your application. Einar discusses the foundational elements of event sourcing and the common implementation patterns he developed at Cratis. With extensive support for .NET, Cratis provides tooling for data storage, event response, replay management, and much more. Also in development is Cratis Studio for collaborating visually on an event model - and generating the code in the process.