Daemonic AI with Emmz Rendle

Is it time to build your own agent harness? Carl and Richard talk to Emmz Rendle about her work on Daemonic AI, which gives you more control over which models and tooling you use to build software with agents. Emmz talks about the upcoming rug pull in AI software development tools, where prices are rising, and services are being restricted. Having enough control to choose when to run locally becomes key to being productive at a reasonable price. Being able to pick-and-choose what agents and configurations to use for each of the agent roles you want to implement is super powerful - check out the GitHub project and take it for a spin!

What settings, configurations, and workflows do you use for every .NET app? Carl and Richard talk to Scott Sauber about his list - from organizing folders by feature, to logging, security, and testing. Scott talks about enforcing rules like treating warnings as errors so you won't ignore important warnings, and validation in the build, to make applications more reliable. Each of these items represents some work, but in the end, your application will be higher quality and more reliable. Which ones are you already doing?

Large Language Models can generate a lot of text - but is it any good? Carl and Richard talk to Vishwas Lele about his ongoing efforts at pWin.ai to build tools for responding to government RFPs. Vishwas focuses on the quality problem - both the quality of the incoming RFP and the quality of the responding proposal. How do you determine the key requirements of an RFP reliably? And when it comes to the response, how do you provide measurable results for a response? The conversation digs into a change in workflow that benefits the RFP process regardless of tooling - and gives hints to the patterns of success with LLMs!

Use What Works! Carl and Richard talk to Dylan Beattie about the Use What Works movement, encouraging developers to use well-maintained open-source projects available today rather than rolling their own. Dylan explains how folks go down a path of believing a library is simple until they learn enough to realize that every bit of software is more complicated than they realize. And the less code you own, the happier and more productive you are. Adding AI to the mix only makes it clearer: you need some stability in development. If you're changing every layer of code, you'll spend even more time and frustration chasing problems. Make getting results easier - use what works!

Ready to go nano? Carl and Richard talk to José Simões about the open source .NET nanoFramework - a community-driven project to provide .NET for embedded systems. José talks about the evolution from the .NET microFramework, to something even smaller, while at the same time, microcontrollers have gotten much more powerful. The conversation looks beyond the hobbyist and educational uses of these systems into commercial IoT applications. The development cycle is one you'll recognize, working in Visual Studio (or Visual Studio Code) and executing against an emulator, or to the actual controller via USB. And yes, you can set breakpoint in the controller!

Recorded live at the Tavern Hall in Bellevue during the Party with Palermo for the MVP Summit, it's episode 2000! Carl and Richard take questions from the audience and play clips from past guests and listeners about their experiences with .NET, and the role that .NET Rocks has played in their careers. After two thousand shows, there are lots of stories, and plenty to celebrate. Thanks for listening!

The Y2K bug turned out to be a non-event on January 1, 2000. How did that happen? Carl and Richard bring together a number of stories from folks who were there, fixing the software and updating systems, so effectively that, ultimately, nothing much happened when the clocks rolled over. It was common practice with early software to only store two digits worth of year - back then, storage space was at a premium. For years, there had been warnings about fixing these problems, but by 1999, it was essential. These are the stories of how some folks did those fixes so effectively that when Jan 1 2000, came around, nothing bad happened.

How are LLMs changing software development? Carl and Richard talk to Rob Conery about his experiences as a consultant bringing the new AI tools and techniques into companies. Rob talks about focusing on the most painful problems first to show the team quick results and make their lives better. The conversation digs into how these tools seriously change the way developers work and what it takes to embrace those changes. Lots of good thinking from a very experienced developer on how to do more than ever before!

How do you make your agents more knowledgeable about your company data? Carl and Richard talk to Ed Charbeneau about Progress Agentic RAG-as-a-Service, using NucliaDB as a vector data store to organize your company information into a form an agent can work with efficiently. Ed talks about the various approaches available today for providing timely company data to agents and the power of a dedicated data store and service model so that you spend less time on plumbing and more time building a great agentic app. The products are open source and have great .NET SDKs - check them out!

ASP.NET Core continues to evolve in 2026! Carl and Richard talk to Daniel Roth about all the goodness in the ASP.NET Core space, including MVC, Razor, and Blazor! Daniel talks about the publicly visible ASP.NET Core Roadmap on GitHub - where you can support ideas, add your own, and debate implementations! The conversation dives into the focus on Blazor - MVC and Razor aren't going away anytime soon, or perhaps ever. Still, the energy is definitely on Blazor, and its potential to provide a great development experience that scales effectively and provides the features your applications need. And Daniel reminds us that the teams all work closely together, including the broader .NET and language teams, so new features are in the right place and available to everyone!