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Speaker 1: this is Carl Franklin.
Speaker 2: And this is Richard Campbell.
Speaker 1: We've got two special shows coming up soon, episode nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety nine and two thousand.
Speaker 2: For episode nineteen ninety nine, we're collecting people's y two
Speaker 2: k stories what did you do to help the Y
Speaker 2: two k event not actually happen?
Speaker 1: And for episode two thousand, we're going to be sharing
Speaker 1: stories about how dot net shaped your career.
Speaker 2: We have a special page at dot netroocks dot com
Speaker 2: slash voxpop where you can record messages for us that
Speaker 2: we can play on these special episodes.
Speaker 1: So tell us what you did for Y two k
Speaker 1: and what dot net means to you, and of course
Speaker 1: how long you've been listening to dot NetRocks.
Speaker 2: So go to dot netroocks dot com slash voxpop now
Speaker 2: and leave us a message before the thought of operates
Speaker 2: like whiskey left in a glass overnight.
Speaker 3: Do it?
Speaker 1: Hey, welcome back to dot net Rocks. I'm Carl Franklin.
Speaker 3: And I'm Richard Campbell.
Speaker 1: Richard, do you realize we've been doing this show for
Speaker 1: almost two thousand episodes?
Speaker 3: Getting there? Yeah, two thousand is approaching.
Speaker 1: And you know you probably just heard the bumper where
Speaker 1: we're going to be at the MVP summit or right
Speaker 1: before at party with Palermo doing our two thousandth show,
Speaker 1: and we ask people to call in with our voxpop.
Speaker 1: Go to dot nerocks dot com and look for voxpop
Speaker 1: at the menu or just slash vox pop. We only
Speaker 1: have three messages. Come on, people, come on, and they're
Speaker 1: from old friends, right, you know, but that's not what
Speaker 1: we want. We want to show, so come on, give
Speaker 1: us some anyway, Let's start with what happened in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety three, and Mike and Matt you can join in
Speaker 1: if you want to. Bill Clinton was inaugurated, The World
Speaker 1: Trade Center was bombed for the first time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was that was the truck bomb in the underground.
Speaker 1: Yeah, didn't really do anything, So make a mess.
Speaker 3: Blue three floors out of the base Bend. Well, a
Speaker 3: lot didn't bring the building down. It's only because eight
Speaker 3: years later what you know that you would think of
Speaker 3: it was huge at the time.
Speaker 1: You're right, you're right about that. The Branch Davidians were
Speaker 1: invaded in Waco, Texas. That wasn't bad. Major global events
Speaker 1: included the Storm of the Century blizzard, and from what
Speaker 1: I'm hearing, that was nothing compared to what we just
Speaker 1: went through in the northeast.
Speaker 3: No, that storm killed a lot of people, Like I
Speaker 3: hope there's not a lot of fatalities out right now.
Speaker 3: You guy's kind of what you're doing up there when
Speaker 3: it comes to bad winter storms.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yep. Let's see, the Storm of the Century hit
Speaker 1: the East coast in March, massive flood effected the midwest.
Speaker 1: Czechoslovakia peacefully split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia on
Speaker 1: January first, and the Brundian Civil War began.
Speaker 3: Yeah, as opposed to what was happening south of there
Speaker 3: in the former Yugoslavia where everybody was killing everybody.
Speaker 1: It was terrible. Yeah, So what happened in science and space, Richard.
Speaker 3: Well, I'd also throw in in June of nineteen ninety
Speaker 3: three was when Kim Campbell became the Prime Minister of Canada,
Speaker 3: first time a female prime minister in Canada, although admittedly
Speaker 3: she was put in place after Brian mulroney resigned, so
Speaker 3: she was really just sort of interim from June until
Speaker 3: the federal elections in December when Jean Kreshen will be elected. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Starting on the space side, so we have seven shot missions.
Speaker 3: Most are not particularly interesting, three Space Lab missions, a
Speaker 3: few satellite launches. But in December the first hubble repair mission,
Speaker 3: so arguably the most complex Space Shuttle mission ever. I
Speaker 3: had a opportunity to actually have dinner once with Story
Speaker 3: Muskrave who helped architect that mission. The guy just astonishing, person, Wow,
Speaker 3: this is done out of the Shuttle endeavor. Remember hubble
Speaker 3: Ed launched in nineteen ninety and then after checkout they
Speaker 3: realized the mirror had been miss ground and so.
Speaker 1: Didn't they fix it with software rather than attempt to
Speaker 1: do some process to the mirror itself.
Speaker 3: Now they absolutely put in new optics as well as
Speaker 3: software upgrades. They also replaced all the gyros and upgraded
Speaker 3: a bunch of instruments and changed out the solar panels.
Speaker 3: It had already been up for three years at this point,
Speaker 3: so it was sort of an opportunity. And this is
Speaker 3: the first time ever to do this kind of repair.
Speaker 3: The Shuttle had been designed to retrieve satellite to prepare
Speaker 3: them and relaunch them, and it had done a bunch
Speaker 3: of that, but most of them were fairly straightforward. This
Speaker 3: was a crazy repair and you and I saw the
Speaker 3: test articles for the optical correction when we went to
Speaker 3: the Goddard Space Center to see the James Web, if
Speaker 3: you recall. So, yeah, a very complex mission, but ultimately successful.
Speaker 3: Of course they didn't know at the time. You know,
Speaker 3: they figured all this stuff out, but then you have
Speaker 3: to put it all together, relaunch, and then it takes
Speaker 3: months to actually complete the testing to resolve that. Also,
Speaker 3: in human spaceflight T sixteen from now, the Russian Federation
Speaker 3: flies to Mirror and put some new satellites up, put
Speaker 3: some new astronauts or cosmonauts up on the Mare space station.
Speaker 3: The Shuttle Mirror relationship is in negotiations, it hasn't started yet. Well,
Speaker 3: we'll talk about that in future shows. And one more
Speaker 3: thing on the space side, which I talked about last show,
Speaker 3: but let's go a little bit of detail on it,
Speaker 3: which was Mars Observer. So Mars Observer was launched on
Speaker 3: Titan three in nineteen ninety two. That's what we talked
Speaker 3: about the last show. It originally was supposed to be
Speaker 3: launched by a shuttle, along with many other kinds of satellites,
Speaker 3: but the Challenger disaster had created a huge number of
Speaker 3: delays when they started prioritizing satellites. There were satellites that
Speaker 3: really could only be launched by a shuttle like Galileo,
Speaker 3: Magellan and the Ulysses, so they got priority. So there
Speaker 3: was a rethink around Mars Observer, and it was a
Speaker 3: big satellite. This was an over a one ton orbiter
Speaker 3: based on a bus that was really meant to be
Speaker 3: around Earth or they're going to fly it to Mars.
Speaker 3: So instead they launched on a Titan three, in fact,
Speaker 3: the last Titan three, and then three days before it
Speaker 3: was supposed to start its burn to go into orbit
Speaker 3: around Mars, during the checkout sequence where they were pressurizing
Speaker 3: the fuel system and so forth to get ready to
Speaker 3: do that, something went wrong and they abruptly lost contact
Speaker 3: with Observer. The guess is, and it's a pretty good guess.
Speaker 3: The fuel system, which wasn't designed to be turned off
Speaker 3: for six months during the cruise phase, the seals had
Speaker 3: froze and so as they repressurize system, it leaked hypergolics
Speaker 3: into the chassis, which then would combine and burst out
Speaker 3: in any direction they could so suddenly spun the satellite
Speaker 3: out of control and so lost it. Now being a
Speaker 3: large satellite, it had a lot of instruments on it,
Speaker 3: and there were test articles of these same instruments. So
Speaker 3: over the intervening years after the loss of Observer, all
Speaker 3: of those instruments were ultimately flown. So five of the
Speaker 3: eight were flown as a Global surveyor. In nineteen ninety six,
Speaker 3: or literally the next opportunity to fly, they took five
Speaker 3: of those instruments on a smaller spacecraft that would last
Speaker 3: for ten years. The gamma y spectrometer w we'ld end
Speaker 3: up on Mars Odyssey we had flew in two thousand
Speaker 3: and one, and then the infrared radiometer flies on reconnaissance
Speaker 3: Order in two thousand and five. So ultimately they got
Speaker 3: all the same science, just much later, and really since then,
Speaker 3: other than the perseverance and curiosity the big landers, we've
Speaker 3: never flown anything that big to Mars. Again, it's just
Speaker 3: it's tough to fly big vehicles that far, and you
Speaker 3: have to do very specific designs.
Speaker 1: I remember they really changed their approach to those rovers,
Speaker 1: you know, wrapping them in balloons, that kind of you know,
Speaker 1: all kind of low tech solutions for getting them there.
Speaker 3: You know, the original Viking missions were stunningly expensive. Right
Speaker 3: to land a large vehicle on Mars where it has
Speaker 3: just enough atmosphere that you can't just maneuver down, but
Speaker 3: not enough atmosphere to really slow you down, it's a
Speaker 3: it's a tough balance. And so to reduce costs, they
Speaker 3: use they said, the inflatable approach, so hypersonic parachute to
Speaker 3: do the initial breaking any heat shield. And then this
Speaker 3: set of balloons allow you to bounce to landing. But
Speaker 3: that will only handle like one hundred kilos.
Speaker 1: And we'll talk about that more in a couple of months, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, when we get we get to those missions. But
Speaker 3: and then ultimately the largest system we have rush now,
Speaker 3: which was for those two big rovers which are our
Speaker 3: e metric ton, is what they call the sky hook system,
Speaker 3: which is insanely complicated, but it's a precise landing system
Speaker 3: for more than a ton on the Mars, and it's
Speaker 3: the best we've got.
Speaker 1: Mike is nodding. Do you remember that all that stuff?
Speaker 4: No, I'm just the sky hoof.
Speaker 5: I've been watching YouTube videos when the wie's away. I
Speaker 5: get to watch really nerdy things and watching about how
Speaker 5: we land stuff on Mars, and I find all of
Speaker 5: that very fascinating.
Speaker 3: Precision landing is bloody hard because you don't know how
Speaker 3: much atmosphere you're going to hit, so you don't know
Speaker 3: how much you're going to slow down, and so there's
Speaker 3: a bunch of moments you have to decide to do
Speaker 3: some maneuvering to get where you're planning to go.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it's not like you can just tweak like
Speaker 4: in real time.
Speaker 5: A message from Earth to Mars to adjust courses got
Speaker 5: to be thought about ahead of time.
Speaker 3: Yeah. The entire event of entering the atmosphere and landing
Speaker 3: happens before the first signal arrives at Earth's incredible, right,
Speaker 3: It's seven minutes from arbitilator face to landing, and it's
Speaker 3: eleven minutes to transmit data.
Speaker 1: One way about that the next time you don't get
Speaker 1: a text answer right away.
Speaker 3: Yeah, has to go to space. But now think about this,
Speaker 3: knowing that they were still able to take pictures of
Speaker 3: the re entry and ultimate landing of Perseverance with the
Speaker 3: Odyssey orbiter purely by timing, to say, basically, time that
Speaker 3: Odyssey was in the right place to take pictures in
Speaker 3: the right location downward and gut shots of the parachute
Speaker 3: and the heat shield ejection.
Speaker 1: Like, that's cool.
Speaker 3: All but all done. All of it had happened before
Speaker 3: we knew any of it. It's all maths just had
Speaker 3: to do to maths. Yeah, okay, should we talk about
Speaker 3: computing because an I three was a very good year
Speaker 3: for computing, Yes, at least for the Internet side, So
Speaker 3: cern that's our friend. Tim Berners Lee releases the source
Speaker 3: code for the first web server, the one that ran
Speaker 3: on the next, which makes it a whole lot easier
Speaker 3: to build web service because as of the beginning of
Speaker 3: the year in nineteen ninety three, there's an estimate exactly
Speaker 3: fifty web servers in the whole world. Don't worry, but it.
Speaker 1: Was it was written in a different language, though it
Speaker 1: wasn't like C.
Speaker 3: It was written Yeah, I was written an objective C
Speaker 3: because that was the language of the next right, that's.
Speaker 1: Job objective cy, so you had to figure that out first.
Speaker 3: But meantime, there are other tools on the Internet to
Speaker 3: use the Internet. Right this is before the Web, and
Speaker 3: the most one of the most profita onest one called Gopher,
Speaker 3: written by a group at the University of Minnesota, and
Speaker 3: literally it was for you go for info, and it
Speaker 3: was widely used by academics in the universities. It was
Speaker 3: also used by the Library of Congress, like it was
Speaker 3: the way at the time. I remember surfing Gopher, however,
Speaker 3: and they and they were talking about incorporating features that
Speaker 3: were webbish, like hyperlinking and so forth. And then I
Speaker 3: decided it was getting popular enough that they wanted to
Speaker 3: charge for a server for it, and oddly enough, nobody
Speaker 3: wanted to pay, and so everybody just switched switched to
Speaker 3: web technologies. Which is useful because over in the University
Speaker 3: of Illinois, Urbana Champlaine, they are just releasing a browser
Speaker 3: called Mosaic. This is also the year that Windsock comes
Speaker 3: out for Windows. So that's remember that Windows at this
Speaker 3: time does not use TCPIP by default. That uses net buoy,
Speaker 3: and so if you want to get on the Internet.
Speaker 3: You need to use CCPP, so you use windsof.
Speaker 1: There are all sorts of ads in the back of
Speaker 1: you know, PC Week and all those magazines for TCPIP libraries.
Speaker 1: I remember at that time because there wasn't anything in Windows.
Speaker 3: And O'Reilly has a web page up already and they
Speaker 3: are the first to sell ads on it. In nineteen
Speaker 3: ninety three. Wow, yeah, yeah, other computing stuff besides windsock,
Speaker 3: we have a good operating system year. This is the
Speaker 3: year that free bsd gets released. Microsoft puts out m
Speaker 3: STAS six NT three one, the original NT without a Guy,
Speaker 3: and Visual Basic three. One of the best proof points
Speaker 3: that the third versions of things made by Microsoft are
Speaker 3: the best ones. Yes, the first Intel Pentium ships, they
Speaker 3: didn't want to call it the five eighty six because
Speaker 3: they've been doing the two eighty six, three eighty six,
Speaker 3: forty six things. They pent as in five and it's
Speaker 3: a whole three million transistors and three hundred megahurts.
Speaker 1: Had a hard time keeping that thing cool, didn't they.
Speaker 3: The later pen the first Gigaherts pendiums are the ones
Speaker 3: that were really tough to cool.
Speaker 1: But wasn't that the thing that sort of triggered the
Speaker 1: more process or more CPUs on a core, more cores
Speaker 1: on a CPU.
Speaker 3: We're a few years away from that, yet this is
Speaker 3: the beginning of that problem that as you research of density,
Speaker 3: the temperature gets up too high, so and they can't
Speaker 3: keep the cycle rates increasingly. We're three hundred mega hurts.
Speaker 3: We're going to keep running up over at gigahertz and
Speaker 3: so forth. We're going to peek around three or four,
Speaker 3: and then we're going to back off because it's just
Speaker 3: so much electron erosion and problems. And now now we're
Speaker 3: starting to creep up again because new designs are working better. Yeah,
Speaker 3: a couple of last things and we'll move on. Two
Speaker 3: important games in nineteen ninety three. One of them is
Speaker 3: missed by broder Bond first real multi media game, So
Speaker 3: am be in such experiential Yeah, I loved it, really
Speaker 3: set the class and it is a you know, not
Speaker 3: just gave me the year, but al eamn, a game
Speaker 3: of the decade or more. And the story was it
Speaker 3: was all about the story, right totally. It was like
Speaker 3: in this slow discovery playing a movie. No narration, Yeah right,
Speaker 3: you just had to figure it out. It was great.
Speaker 3: And the other game for mid software Doom. Yeah, first
Speaker 3: person Shooter. Yep. And that's what I got, all right.
Speaker 1: Before I move on to Better Know Framework, let's just
Speaker 1: quickly go over the top ten selling albums worldwide nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety three. The hits the B sides by Prince Key
Speaker 1: tracks are seven and Cream if you remember that one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the chronic by Doctor Dre Nutting, but a g thang
Speaker 1: Let Me Ride. We talked about that last show because
Speaker 1: it's still going on. Eric Clapton Unplugged is still there.
Speaker 1: Number eight, Tears in Heaven and Laila Versus Pearl Jam,
Speaker 1: Number seven, Daughter Go and Animal The big hits there
Speaker 1: Janet Jackson estimated sales fourteen plus million. That's the Way
Speaker 1: Love Goes If and Again, ten Summoners Tales by Sting,
Speaker 1: If I ever Lose my faith in You, Fields of
Speaker 1: Gold in Shape of My Heart, Great songs Aerosmith puts
Speaker 1: Out Get a Grip Number four estimated sales twenty plus million.
Speaker 1: Tunes like Living on the Edge, Crying Crazy and Amazing
Speaker 1: Number three, Bat Out of Hell two Back into Hell
Speaker 1: by meat Loaf. I do anything for love, but I
Speaker 1: won't do that. You had such a great sense of humor,
Speaker 1: and then rock and roll dreams come through. Number two
Speaker 1: The Bodyguard. We talked about that, Whitney Houston. I Will
Speaker 1: Always Love You, I Have Nothing and I'm every Woman.
Speaker 1: Number two in nineteen ninety one, forty five plus million sold,
Speaker 1: and the number one selling is Music Box by Mariah
Speaker 1: Carey twenty eight to thirty two million, Dream Lover, Hero,
Speaker 1: Without You and Anytime You Need a Friend. And that's
Speaker 1: it for our nineteen ninety three review. I guess now
Speaker 1: it's time for better, no framework, awesome.
Speaker 3: It's.
Speaker 1: A man.
Speaker 3: What do you got?
Speaker 4: Well?
Speaker 1: Last week I talked about t unit.
Speaker 3: Yes, remember yep, Simon Krapp.
Speaker 1: Well, no, he didn't write it, He just brought it
Speaker 1: to our attention. And then he went on to write
Speaker 1: a tool called t unit migrator. Oh, that's a dot
Speaker 1: net tool that migrates test projects from MS test and
Speaker 1: unit x unit and x unit v three to t
Speaker 1: unit because he really loves t unit. Well, this is
Speaker 1: who wouldn't love t unit. This is the classic developer
Speaker 1: open source project. You need it for yourself and you
Speaker 1: think other people would benefit from it, so you make
Speaker 1: a tool and happily share it. Yeah, and that's what
Speaker 1: it is, it's cool and of course t unit is
Speaker 1: a modern testing framework for dot net that uses source
Speaker 1: generated tests in parallel execution, native AOT support and it's
Speaker 1: all good stuff and it's the new hotness and unit
Speaker 1: testing and that's it. Richard, who's talking to us.
Speaker 3: Today grabbing comment off a show seventeen eighty five which
Speaker 3: you did back in twenty two talking to Dan Walmsley
Speaker 3: about Avalonia one point zero because I know we're going
Speaker 3: to get a little chance to revisit Avalonia and we
Speaker 3: have comment on the show from Aaron Stalisbury this a
Speaker 3: few years ago where he says I've been using Avalonia
Speaker 3: for desktop and it's been a pleasure. It's one project
Speaker 3: and everything just works. It might help people to know
Speaker 3: that they getthub repo Avalodia community slash awesome. Avalonia curates
Speaker 3: a great collection of add ons. I love the air
Speaker 3: awesome lists. Yeah, thanks for your info. Hope it helps people,
Speaker 3: though committedly it's a few years old. And a copy
Speaker 3: of music codey is on its way to you, and
Speaker 3: if you'd like a copy of music Cobey, I write
Speaker 3: a comment on the website at dot at rocks dot
Speaker 3: com or on the Facebook's publish every show there, Andy
Speaker 3: comment there, I'll read it on the show was at
Speaker 3: your copy of music O Music.
Speaker 1: To Code by Still Going Strong twenty two tracks, twenty
Speaker 1: five minutes each designed to keep you in a state
Speaker 1: of flow while you're writing code. You can get it
Speaker 1: at music toocode by dot Net. All right, so I
Speaker 1: guess it's time, after this horribly long introduction to introduce
Speaker 1: Mike James and Matt Lacy. Mike is the CEO of
Speaker 1: Avalonia UI. He has spent his entire career focused on
Speaker 1: crossplat development, starting as a developer building with QT before
Speaker 1: joining Zamorin and subsequently Microsoft. He has dedicated his career
Speaker 1: to enabling developers to build apps for every platform. He's
Speaker 1: now focused on continuing the mission with Avalonia UI. And
Speaker 1: Matt Lacy is a software developer at Avalonia, building software
Speaker 1: since the late nineties and has worked on more platforms
Speaker 1: and in more languages than he can remember over the years.
Speaker 1: I don't know, does say something about your memory or
Speaker 1: about the number of platforms.
Speaker 6: I'm going to say both.
Speaker 1: Over the years, he's created systems that have processed hundreds
Speaker 1: of millions of dollars in transactions and apps that have
Speaker 1: been installed more than half a billion times today. His
Speaker 1: focus is on helping other developers build software that generally
Speaker 1: genuinely delivers value to the people who use it. He's
Speaker 1: also an author and has been a Microsoft MVP since
Speaker 1: twenty fifteen. Welcome guys. Hey, I guess we're going to
Speaker 1: start with the state of Avalonia. We've talked to death
Speaker 1: about what it is, and if you don't know what
Speaker 1: it is, just go do that on your own time.
Speaker 1: We know what it is. What's going on with Abolonia, Well.
Speaker 5: There's so much going on with Ablonia. It feels like
Speaker 5: more has happened in the last twelve months than the
Speaker 5: last twelve years. We've got the open source which was
Speaker 5: created in twenty thirteen. That's been like a slow adoption
Speaker 5: over those initial years, and then the snowball is just
Speaker 5: picking up speed, and so we've seen just a huge
Speaker 5: amount of growth from the community just picking it up.
Speaker 4: It's all.
Speaker 5: People just recommending it to each other, which is lovely.
Speaker 5: We don't have any sales or marketing. It's all just
Speaker 5: natural word of mouth.
Speaker 1: Good time.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and then like the team is now seventeen people,
Speaker 5: so we've got a load of folks that's working on
Speaker 5: building this out to try and deliver on the goal
Speaker 5: of creating the best UI framework for donnet. So, yeah,
Speaker 5: there's just a ton of things that have been happening.
Speaker 5: It's difficult to know where to even begin.
Speaker 1: Matt, you want to throw in your two cents. It
Speaker 1: looks like you're smiling there, you've got an idea of
Speaker 1: how to begin.
Speaker 6: No, I'm smiling because I recognizing the size of the topic. Yeah, okay, Yeah,
Speaker 6: So I joined the company at the end of last
Speaker 6: year having been well aware of them for a long
Speaker 6: time and having seen that being one of a number
Speaker 6: of companies and projects in the same sort of cross
Speaker 6: platform dot net space. And when I joined, what really
Speaker 6: surprised me was the number of people who are using it.
Speaker 4: It's this.
Speaker 6: People have gone out and found it and fallen in
Speaker 6: love with it and just been using it and building
Speaker 6: really big projects and really sort of core and key
Speaker 6: line of business apps. And you know, the team's not
Speaker 6: been shouting about all they've been doing, but lots of
Speaker 6: people are using it to build some really powerful things.
Speaker 6: And there's all sorts of partnerships and other projects which
Speaker 6: have sort of come along in response to that, just
Speaker 6: as the wider ecosystem has recognized what's there and what's possible.
Speaker 1: Partnerships with say Google or Maui.
Speaker 4: Yeah, both of those.
Speaker 5: So the Google ones I think really interesting because so
Speaker 5: one of the things that we have to do as
Speaker 5: platform stewards is to think about the next five ten years.
Speaker 5: So we cater to largely speaking to enterprises. It's those
Speaker 5: line of business apps, and those enterprises want long term stability,
Speaker 5: so we have to kind of look out part the
Speaker 5: immediate horizon to decide where do we want to push
Speaker 5: the framework. A key part of that is performance and
Speaker 5: the rendering stack, and we've used skier Sharp for years.
Speaker 5: It's been the bedrock of how we've been able to
Speaker 5: go cross platform. But if you look at Flutter and
Speaker 5: their moves towards Impeller, which is much more performance for
Speaker 5: tiling based GPUs, which is what you're going to see
Speaker 5: on your phones, but also if you've got a modern
Speaker 5: Mac that's a tiling based GPU. So we're kind of
Speaker 5: looking at the border ecosystem and seeing these opportunities for
Speaker 5: improvements within Avalonia that aren't you know, an immediate win,
Speaker 5: but something to kind of aspire to be building. We
Speaker 5: create lots of experiments and one of those was around below,
Speaker 5: and the folks from Impella on the Flutter team reached
Speaker 5: out and said, is there any interest in a collaboration.
Speaker 5: Our minds were like, our minds were blown because number one,
Speaker 5: they were praising Avalonia and saying that they've been following
Speaker 5: the project for years from the sidelines. And it's like
Speaker 5: the fact that there's folks on the Flutter team that
Speaker 5: are even aware of Avalonia.
Speaker 3: Is that you even know my name precisely?
Speaker 1: Are you kidding me?
Speaker 5: Yeah, So there's a huge sense of pride in that.
Speaker 5: But we get on the call and we chat with them,
Speaker 5: and it's, you know, engineers to engineers, and there's this
Speaker 5: common goal of how can we take impeller and enable
Speaker 5: it to work for more than just Flutter developers, and
Speaker 5: so in our case, it's dot net, so we want
Speaker 5: to bring it toward dot net developers. But to do that,
Speaker 5: there's some difficult engineering work that needs to happen on
Speaker 5: both sides because it is designed very much for Flutter,
Speaker 5: it's not really designed to.
Speaker 3: Be used and Flatter has its own sort of approach
Speaker 3: to you I which I always thought was very mobile centric,
Speaker 3: that kind of flow design.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but even just at the Impeller level, it's made
Speaker 5: assumptions that it's a very different beast to Skier. So
Speaker 5: it's made assumptions that are challenging for us. So you know,
Speaker 5: we have to collaborate to to work out where do
Speaker 5: we where do we make those changes. Do we do
Speaker 5: it in Impeller where it's going to help other projects
Speaker 5: that might want to take on that dependency, or do
Speaker 5: we change our rendering back end to adjust to the
Speaker 5: way that Impeller works.
Speaker 4: So there's like this.
Speaker 1: One more time. Tell me more about Impala. You said
Speaker 1: you changed from Skia Sharp to impoler. Is Impala your
Speaker 1: thing or is it an open source project?
Speaker 4: You?
Speaker 5: Yeah, so it's from Google. It's it's their replacement to Skier.
Speaker 5: So ski has been around for years. If you use
Speaker 5: Google Chrome, that's powered by Skier. It's the two D
Speaker 5: graphics library. So you're drawing. If you need to draw
Speaker 5: anything in an app, you're probably going to use Skier
Speaker 5: set or ski sharp within the dot ecosystem.
Speaker 3: Right, this is from the Mano stack.
Speaker 4: Exactly that said Miguel created.
Speaker 5: I think did the first set of commits, huge, huge,
Speaker 5: number of commits, and then Matthew came in and took
Speaker 5: it over when we were at Zamarin, and it's allowed
Speaker 5: us to go cross platform. So we have this cross
Speaker 5: platform drawing functionality that works everywhere. But as I say,
Speaker 5: it's it's been replaced on the flatter side with Impeller,
Speaker 5: which is the new two D graphics rendering library that
Speaker 5: is much more optimized for modern GPUs.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 5: So, as I say, it's that tile tile based GPUs,
Speaker 5: which is what you've got on your phone, it's what
Speaker 5: you've got in your your max your modern desktop GPUs
Speaker 5: can you can still get some performance increase, but it's
Speaker 5: nowhere near as significant as if you were.
Speaker 3: Although to be clear desktop GPUs, you know you're not
Speaker 3: struggling to render on a desktob GPU.
Speaker 4: No exactly that. But you know I've got this.
Speaker 5: I mean, it doesn't help your podcast listeners, but I've
Speaker 5: got a little rasbry pie with a screen.
Speaker 3: Attached to it, right, great device, and it's it. I
Speaker 3: love these, Yeah, but.
Speaker 5: This is the kind of device where you want to
Speaker 5: extract as much performance out of it as possible.
Speaker 3: Yeah, cycles count in that little pie.
Speaker 5: Exactly that, And this is I mean, this pie is
Speaker 5: considered a high powered device for some of the things
Speaker 5: that we run on. Sure, you'd be surprised at just
Speaker 5: how low the hardware aspects for some of these devices
Speaker 5: that we support can go to ESP two's I don't
Speaker 5: think the oldest that we're running on in production. It's
Speaker 5: like a five hundred megahertz thirty two bit ARM CPU
Speaker 5: from two thousand and two.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 5: We spent a very very long time with that customer
Speaker 5: optimizing everything to make that work.
Speaker 3: Oh man, you got to call the ball on that
Speaker 3: one too, Like, is it worth it for such a
Speaker 3: one off?
Speaker 4: Oh, it was worth it. Yeah.
Speaker 5: It was an important customer and a relationship that we
Speaker 5: wanted to maintain core and that records through of course everything.
Speaker 5: If we can get those performance increases on.
Speaker 3: If you can optimized for a five hundred megahertz ARM device,
Speaker 3: my life's going to be pretty easy. Running around in
Speaker 3: my four gigar hurts, you know, Pentium or inteled Ultra
Speaker 3: of nine exactly that.
Speaker 5: So, yeah, Impeller is it's going to be the future.
Speaker 5: We think of the rendering stack for Avalonia right now,
Speaker 5: we're still using Skier sharp Avalonia twelve. We'll ship with
Speaker 5: skier Sharp as the default. We will bring Impeller probably
Speaker 5: within V twelve, so maybe zero point two, three point four,
Speaker 5: not sure when, but it will come when it's ready.
Speaker 5: And we're using V twelve as an opportunity to experiment
Speaker 5: with different back ends and different rendering technologies to see
Speaker 5: what works. And we're going to release various different proof
Speaker 5: of concepts as previews and see what sticks, what do
Speaker 5: people like, what's the most performant, and kind of us
Speaker 5: up for when we ship B thirteen that we can
Speaker 5: move stuff into stable and that can start to replace
Speaker 5: SKEA shop.
Speaker 1: Very good.
Speaker 3: How many apps out there running Avalonia are for mobile
Speaker 3: versus small form factor versus desktop?
Speaker 4: Yea. Mobile has historically not been our strength.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's my thought has always been you with the guys,
Speaker 3: you sold the WPF problem for me, right exactly.
Speaker 4: That.
Speaker 5: We can do mobile, but we've just never shipped like
Speaker 5: mobile focused controls. So we're fixing that with V twelve,
Speaker 5: people are shipping mobile apps. Is it comparable to Flutter, No,
Speaker 5: we are very much. Still the best experience is still desktop. Sure,
Speaker 5: but there's always been this dichotomy. If you're really good
Speaker 5: at mobile, you struggle mightily on the desktop, and if
Speaker 5: you're really good at desktop, it's tough to fit it
Speaker 5: in the marble.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's I.
Speaker 5: Mean, just look at mac Catalyst. If you take a
Speaker 5: mobile app and run it on a desktop, you're going
Speaker 5: to have some unhappy desktop users. And if you take
Speaker 5: a desktop app and try and strip it down into
Speaker 5: a mobile app, then you've got unhappy mobile users. You
Speaker 5: have to think a cross platform doesn't mean that you
Speaker 5: should be reusing one hundred percent of your code across
Speaker 5: every platform. You do need to be kind of cognizant
Speaker 5: of the different ux paradigms of each platform. Yeah, but
Speaker 5: we're strong on mobile from a technical perspective, it's the
Speaker 5: the controls that we're lacking. Performance is good, especially with
Speaker 5: the V twelve release, but our strength is really desktop
Speaker 5: and embedded. Embedded is really where we shine interesting business.
Speaker 1: Well, this seems like a good point to break, so
Speaker 1: we'll be right back after these messages don't go away,
Speaker 1: and we're back at starting at Rocks. I'm Carl Frank Glence,
Speaker 1: my friend Richard Campbell, and Mike and Mattner here talking
Speaker 1: about Avalonia and one of the things that I thought
Speaker 1: about when you said that we're not you know, we
Speaker 1: can do mobile, but that's not our main focus. Was
Speaker 1: that one of the was that an impetus to partner
Speaker 1: with Maui or how did that relationship come.
Speaker 5: I mean, I've always my background is zama and I
Speaker 5: joined zamoring in twenty thirteen. I stayed through the acquisition.
Speaker 5: When I joined zamorin, it was mono touch monodroid right.
Speaker 5: It was we had monotuchdot dialogue. I don't know if
Speaker 5: anyone remembers that, but that's how I got into the
Speaker 5: zamora and ecosystem was through mcguel's library, which was a
Speaker 5: precursor to zamor in forms. So I've always had good
Speaker 5: relationships and connections into the zamoring team and the Maui team.
Speaker 5: Once they did the rebuild.
Speaker 4: The Maui thing comes about.
Speaker 5: I was sat in a cafe with Joseph Hill, who
Speaker 5: was a co founder of Zamorin, and we were just
Speaker 5: chatting about Avalonia and what do we want to do?
Speaker 4: And I mentioned in passing that.
Speaker 5: It would be really cool if we could build out
Speaker 5: a back end for Maui based on Avalonia. It would
Speaker 5: solve some problems for Maui because it would give them
Speaker 5: Web and Linux immediately. I know that they've wanted drawn
Speaker 5: UI for a while as an option, So that you
Speaker 5: get native or drawn, you get to pick and then
Speaker 5: from outside. I mean it's not purely altruistic from our side.
Speaker 5: We've hired several folks from Microsoft that know that code
Speaker 5: based very well, and by doing this it helps us
Speaker 5: fill in the gaps on our mobile side. So you know,
Speaker 5: we're going to have the navigation control that's is working
Speaker 5: on at the moment and additional APIs that were missing
Speaker 5: in Avalonia that just make us a bit more competitive
Speaker 5: on the mobile side. So it's mutually beneficial for everyone.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's pretty obvious. And so you were mentioning drawing
Speaker 1: the UI, like, are we talking about visual basic style?
Speaker 4: So you mean like a rad where you're dragging and dropping?
Speaker 1: Yeah, is that what you mean by drawing the UI?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 4: So I mean, I mean this all gets a bit.
Speaker 5: It turtles all the way down when you think about
Speaker 5: it too deeply. But we draw onto a canvas. So
Speaker 5: if you think about how with wind forms you're effectively
Speaker 5: wrapping Win thirty two controls, but with WPF it's just
Speaker 5: a direct x canvas that you're drawing into.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So when you say drawing, you mean with code.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so it goes down to WPF.
Speaker 5: It's into mil core, which is a media integration layer,
Speaker 5: and that was onto directex canvas. So when you ask
Speaker 5: for a button, you're not getting a Win thirty two button.
Speaker 5: WPF is just drawing a button for you. We're the same,
Speaker 5: but we're not using directexs. We're using Skier, So it's
Speaker 5: cross platform. And then I think there's an interesting discussion
Speaker 5: there about what is native because lots of people will
Speaker 5: say that Avalonia isn't native, but WPF is, and then
Speaker 5: it's like, well is it? How are we divining native?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 4: So yeah, I could talk about that for hours.
Speaker 3: Well, the whole discussion of what is native is interesting
Speaker 3: or by itself.
Speaker 5: It really is, especially when you think how web technology
Speaker 5: as well is actually rendered and how you're getting down
Speaker 5: to pixels on the screen. Like, it's hard to argue
Speaker 5: that web isn't actually equally as native as WPF, so
Speaker 5: it all comes a bit blurry when you stare at
Speaker 5: it too long.
Speaker 1: Well, the whole I mean is that even a I
Speaker 1: don't know, that seems like it was more of an
Speaker 1: issue back in the VB days where you know you
Speaker 1: had interpreted versus native code, and you know that was
Speaker 1: so much faster. Now machines are so fast that does
Speaker 1: it matter?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Is that a plus an argument? Anymore?
Speaker 3: Native also means not compatible? Yeah, right, if you're poking
Speaker 3: into memory in a video card, you better be very
Speaker 3: sure of everything. There are distraction layers for a reason, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: But in terms of like the VB six drag and
Speaker 5: drop Brad style, this is something that Matt, Matt will
Speaker 5: know that we've we've talked about massively internally about what
Speaker 5: the the use of that is in the in the
Speaker 5: future of development. Maybe Matt wants to jump in with
Speaker 5: some of his thoughts.
Speaker 6: So, yeah, I want to avoid recovering topic you've covered
Speaker 6: many times on the show, but the idea of the
Speaker 6: transition between a single VB six drag and drop, I
Speaker 6: will drop my control here. It'll be fine, It'll be
Speaker 6: there for everywhere. It will always be that size screen,
Speaker 6: it will always be that aspect ratio. I don't have
Speaker 6: to think about, you know, thousands and thousands of potential
Speaker 6: different device permutations. That's easy, you know, it's how it
Speaker 6: needs to reflow and dynamic documents. And you think about
Speaker 6: web development and web development now is you expect the
Speaker 6: same website to work on the mobile and on a
Speaker 6: desktop and everything to reflow. And there's a reason web
Speaker 6: developers stopped using drag and drop. Yeah, it's because drag
Speaker 6: and drop is really hard when you have to account
Speaker 6: for all those different flows and layouts and variations.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we've talked about this to death on this show before. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's and it's not a pixel based world anymore.
Speaker 3: When the reality is that devs would use it if
Speaker 3: the tool has existed, But it seems like an impossible
Speaker 3: tooling actually making tools that would allow you to drag
Speaker 3: and drop to build a UI that would also then
Speaker 3: have that multimodal nature. There's just a lot of information
Speaker 3: you have to feed into that.
Speaker 5: We've used internally a tool for our marketing website called
Speaker 5: Framer so that our designer could work on it, and
Speaker 5: that works where you can set up breakpoints and then
Speaker 5: you effectively have different variants of your web page for
Speaker 5: each form factor and that's probably the best ux I've
Speaker 5: seen for it, but it's still infinitely more frustrating as
Speaker 5: a developer to use that ux and just go in
Speaker 5: and write code.
Speaker 3: Yeah. It seems to me that the Visual Basic sixth
Speaker 3: designer was a point in time when the variation of
Speaker 3: resolution of screens was relatively small. They were ten twenty
Speaker 3: four x seven sixty eight and we had to fix
Speaker 3: UI largely menu bar across the top, you know, file
Speaker 3: open help and dockable windows like that was a moment, Yeah,
Speaker 3: and that moment has passed, Like it's just the now.
Speaker 3: You expect the supercomputer in your pocket to work, and
Speaker 3: the tablet and you're in the insert sleeve in your
Speaker 3: bag to work, and the forty three inch four K
Speaker 3: screen and in front of you or the combination of screens.
Speaker 3: I've got to sit in front of me right now
Speaker 3: to work. We just live in a different planet. You
Speaker 3: can't build software this way that way anymore.
Speaker 5: I also think it went about my dead loop and
Speaker 5: how it's evolved in the last twelve to eighteen months
Speaker 5: of more often than not, if I want to change something,
Speaker 5: I'll open up clawed code and just prompt it and
Speaker 5: it will go off and it will tweet. So do
Speaker 5: I need a Dragon Drop designer When I can just
Speaker 5: ask ask my aide.
Speaker 3: We're spending most of our time describing our software now not.
Speaker 4: Writing precisely that I mean. I used.
Speaker 5: Google Stitch, their AI designing tool. They've got an MCP
Speaker 5: server for it. I connected that up to our dev
Speaker 5: tools MCP, and I prompted it in the morning to
Speaker 5: say I wanted to build a sample app for us.
Speaker 5: It used Google Stitch to design it. Claude then implemented
Speaker 5: it and used our dead tools to confirm whether or
Speaker 5: not what it had created matched the images that Google
Speaker 5: had provided.
Speaker 3: The testing was sort of user accepting, testing does this
Speaker 3: look like what you described exactly that?
Speaker 5: And when it didn't, it would just go back and
Speaker 5: keep editing that. I said to it that when you're
Speaker 5: confident that it matches, launched the app. So I then
Speaker 5: went back into spreadsheets and doing boring things, and then
Speaker 5: was greeted with the surprise of an app launching that
Speaker 5: looked really nice.
Speaker 3: I also noticed, like your Carousell scroll on the main
Speaker 3: page of Avalonia is mostly visualizations, because let's face it,
Speaker 3: that's what you want your screen to have on it
Speaker 3: these days, with new text interfaces and the change of
Speaker 3: the software anyway, what you're looking for now is visualizations
Speaker 3: of data that are that better suit you making decisions
Speaker 3: rather than clicking buttons and filling in textboxes.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean the the apps that are
Speaker 5: on the carousel. You've got things like Lunacy, which is
Speaker 5: a competitors to Figma, like a hugely complex application. So
Speaker 5: it's it's incredible. Matt mentioned earlier, it's incredible what people
Speaker 5: are building with Avalonia. If we were I think, if
Speaker 5: we were better at marketing and enjoyed that, then we
Speaker 5: would probably have significantly more GitHub styles and you know,
Speaker 5: more blog posts and things. But we ought to focus
Speaker 5: on the code instead of the flashy marketing.
Speaker 1: Are you finding a lot of your customers using the
Speaker 1: l m's, the cloude code and the co pilots to
Speaker 1: completely build out Avalonia applications?
Speaker 5: Now, I don't think I've spoken to anyone that's built
Speaker 5: out an entire app using an LLM. We're enterprise focus,
Speaker 5: so there's a lot of you know, we're quite insulated
Speaker 5: in the scheme of things. I think that dot net
Speaker 5: in general is going to be one of the last
Speaker 5: ecosystems to really embrace AI.
Speaker 4: I think we'll get there eventually, I think so.
Speaker 5: I think so, yeah, I think there are going to
Speaker 5: be some organizations that just can't. I mean, one of
Speaker 5: our customers builds stuff that's used for NATO planning, Like,
Speaker 5: I don't think they're going to be feeding their source
Speaker 5: code into some random LLLM.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's true. Well, I'm hopeful that at some point
Speaker 1: in the future we'll be able to use local lms
Speaker 1: that do the same thing but keep everything local. And
Speaker 1: I'm ready for it because I got my honkin' machine
Speaker 1: here with the Scream and GPU, but I haven't. I
Speaker 1: haven't had that experience yet. I've tried, but I haven't.
Speaker 1: It hasn't worked.
Speaker 5: I'm all about clawed code. That's my current current agent
Speaker 5: of choice.
Speaker 3: You can deny. Avalonia's growth is astonishing, you know, and
Speaker 3: the fact without the marketing really speaks to people are
Speaker 3: finding it and keeping it and those that are using
Speaker 3: it are taking to the next project, the next project,
Speaker 3: the next problem.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we have we have some telemetry, so it's all
Speaker 5: open source. People go and have a look at what
Speaker 5: we collect. It's very minimal, but it gives us an
Speaker 5: insight into the adoption. So last year or one hundred
Speaker 5: twenty two million bills, which was up thirty one point
Speaker 5: month on month growth two point one million unique projects.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's it's really incredible the amount of growth
Speaker 5: that we've seen.
Speaker 3: So how do you guys make a living? That good question.
Speaker 5: I have a very supportive wife. I mean that that
Speaker 5: is there's a joke to that, but it's also the truth.
Speaker 4: I mean, we.
Speaker 5: Building a business around this has been just a huge
Speaker 5: learning curve and uphill struggle.
Speaker 4: Open source sure well.
Speaker 3: And you know, for me as an architect, when people
Speaker 3: are asking about Avalonia, it's like, how do you know
Speaker 3: this thing's going to survive? Like what's the main open
Speaker 3: sours is one thing, but I'm not prepared to take
Speaker 3: over this library if you guys go away, Like, how
Speaker 3: do we have some confidence?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 5: That's that's the mindset that we make all of our
Speaker 5: decisions through, is how do we ensure the long term
Speaker 5: viability of what we do because we have to be
Speaker 5: around in ten years time because the folks that are
Speaker 5: building on Avalonia have taken a bet on us and
Speaker 5: they need that enterprise timeline. So part of that is
Speaker 5: a rejection of outside capital. We don't We've we've had
Speaker 5: offers for VC injection, but that puts us on a
Speaker 5: We did it with Zamorin. It's a very condensed timeline.
Speaker 5: You've got to have an exit and that does not
Speaker 5: bring long term stability for anyone. So we've said no
Speaker 5: to that. So then it was like, well, how do
Speaker 5: we monetize this thing that we give away all of
Speaker 5: the value. So there was XPF, which is our cross
Speaker 5: platform WPF and this.
Speaker 3: Is sort of your claim to fame of Hey, you've
Speaker 3: got a WPF app and you want to run it
Speaker 3: on here you go.
Speaker 5: I read an email earlier from a guy that they've
Speaker 5: got two applications WPF apps. They got both of them
Speaker 5: running on Mac within fifteen minutes of signing up to
Speaker 5: our customer portal.
Speaker 3: Yeah what's that word?
Speaker 5: Yeah, they were blown away by it. So that's that's
Speaker 5: been huge for us. That's really helped. But I think
Speaker 5: the other main thing that's helped us this year, the
Speaker 5: reason that we're at seventeen is Devolutions, one of our customers.
Speaker 5: They've sponsored the project for three million dollars, so we
Speaker 5: get a million dollars a year, and our attorney couldn't
Speaker 5: believe it. So I sent her the contract and she
Speaker 5: responded and she said, Mike, people don't give a million
Speaker 5: dollars for nothing?
Speaker 1: What longs did you break?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 5: What what's happening here? This is not normal? And I
Speaker 5: was like, I trust these people. We've worked with them
Speaker 5: for a while now. They seem genuine and yeah, they
Speaker 5: have been everything that we could ever want in a partner.
Speaker 3: Wow, that's great.
Speaker 5: Their their view is that they want to ensure that
Speaker 5: we're around that they're investing heavily in porting their app
Speaker 5: to Avalonia, so it benefits them for the platform to
Speaker 5: be stable, and it gives us a runway to be
Speaker 5: able to invest in the core technology without having to
Speaker 5: be so concerned about, you know, where's the money coming from.
Speaker 3: It's got to be cost effective for them, Like somebody
Speaker 3: must have done the math to say, should we build
Speaker 3: this ourselves? And it was more money than that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm not I mean to build this. If you
Speaker 5: look at who builds your WI frameworks, you've got to
Speaker 5: be pretty crazy to do it.
Speaker 3: It's like Google, Yeah, no, it's a solve problem.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it would be madness. Yeah.
Speaker 5: So Devolution three million dollars, So we get a million
Speaker 5: dollars a year. We've got I think two and a
Speaker 5: half years left of that. We've got XPF, we sell
Speaker 5: support agreements, and we do some development work, but we
Speaker 5: try and avoid that as much as we can. And
Speaker 5: then we've got Accelerate, which is a huge part of
Speaker 5: why I reached out to Matt and was like, would
Speaker 5: you please come and work for us? Because Matt is
Speaker 5: one of the experts. I think anyone who's looks say
Speaker 5: his GitHub, or followed him or knows of him, knows
Speaker 5: that he is an expert when it comes to visual
Speaker 5: studio development and tooling and understanding how to deliver delightful
Speaker 5: developer experiences.
Speaker 1: Can you explain accelerate?
Speaker 4: I can.
Speaker 5: So Accelerate is our value add So we give away
Speaker 5: everything within Avalonia for free, so you don't have to
Speaker 5: pay a penny to use it. But there are bits
Speaker 5: of it that are really the ide. Tooling that is
Speaker 5: really difficult engineering, and it takes a certain type of
Speaker 5: person to enjoy.
Speaker 4: Working on that stuff. People like Matt and.
Speaker 5: These types of folks don't work for GitHub stars. They
Speaker 5: need some cold, hard cash at the end of the month.
Speaker 5: So we were looking at how do how do we
Speaker 5: keep having a lonely sustainable and fund these more challenging parts.
Speaker 5: So we created Accelerate which is an optional set of
Speaker 5: tools and components. So you've got a visual studio, visual
Speaker 5: studio code dev tools, and then a packaging app. And
Speaker 5: then the components are webe media player, markdown editor. In
Speaker 5: the final stages of completing, some other components that will
Speaker 5: go into that suite as well. Yeah, the goal is
Speaker 5: to have that generate some of the revenue to help
Speaker 5: sustain the project so that we can keep working on this,
Speaker 5: keep hiring, and keep investing in a platform that is
Speaker 5: solving a problem that hundreds of thousands of enterprises have got.
Speaker 1: So give us the give us a few of the
Speaker 1: tools that are in Accelray. Here's your chance for little
Speaker 1: sales pitch. I know you don't like marketing, but might
Speaker 1: as well.
Speaker 4: I'm terrible it.
Speaker 5: Maybe Matt can tell us why the Visual Studio extension
Speaker 5: is incredible, because I think that's the main thing that
Speaker 5: most folks are excited for.
Speaker 6: So having been talked up, so I joined the company
Speaker 6: with the goal of making the best UI tooling that's available.
Speaker 6: That is that's my remit. And so you know, WPF
Speaker 6: is kind of the benchmark for visual studio integration, and
Speaker 6: we have a timeline for reaching and surpassing that we
Speaker 6: have views for sort of parity with visual radio code,
Speaker 6: and then that's just the catching up, and then I've
Speaker 6: got ten years of imagining what the tooling could be
Speaker 6: like to play in the future, different ways of visualizing
Speaker 6: what can be done, what the code might look like,
Speaker 6: and then what code you're actually writing. Obviously, zamor has
Speaker 6: its critics. No C sharp as a language of creating
Speaker 6: UI is you know, some of us deserved, some of
Speaker 6: it not so much. C sharp can be used to
Speaker 6: create UI, but there are pros and cons of that
Speaker 6: as well, And obviously with the rise of AI, I'm
Speaker 6: looking heavily at what the future of that might be like,
Speaker 6: because it's great that we can describe our AI in
Speaker 6: are UI in like in full English sentences or any
Speaker 6: other language sentences. But that's a level of abstraction, which
Speaker 6: is a big leap between what actually it runs. And
Speaker 6: so I'm sort of keenly following all the experiments that
Speaker 6: are happening at the moment around maybe some new language
Speaker 6: might serve us better as an abstraction between you know,
Speaker 6: what we speak and what the code needs to do.
Speaker 6: Take us by some of that guesswork, some of that
Speaker 6: interpretation and the vagueness. So things like code Speak, which
Speaker 6: is the new language from the guy who created Cotlin,
Speaker 6: is kind of really exciting for me. I'm just sort
Speaker 6: of really keen to see that what that can look like.
Speaker 6: I did some experiments last year about what a more
Speaker 6: human friendly version of Zama might look like. You know,
Speaker 6: we still have this we want to strictly define our
Speaker 6: U why, but we don't need XML to do that,
Speaker 6: and so the ideas around that, and then of course
Speaker 6: testability becomes and testing becomes even more important. It's great
Speaker 6: to say I will describe what might want my app
Speaker 6: to do, you go build it and it runs.
Speaker 4: That's great.
Speaker 6: And then six weeks later I will describe a a
Speaker 6: change and that gets made and no one notices the
Speaker 6: things that are broken in the meantime that you know,
Speaker 6: l m's are very good at making more changes than
Speaker 6: a desirable or necessary and if you haven't got something
Speaker 6: in place to spot those changes and see when it
Speaker 6: breaks something subtle, that's kind of really important. So that's
Speaker 6: kind of those are the things we're thinking about for
Speaker 6: the future, and that's what accelerate we'll go to. At
Speaker 6: some point I expect to hope.
Speaker 1: What's your relationship to Blazer.
Speaker 5: We don't really have We don't really have a relationship
Speaker 5: to Blazer. There's some projects that I've seen where you
Speaker 5: can use like Blazer style syntax to build out an
Speaker 5: avalo of your application. When I've discussed with the team
Speaker 5: about alternative syntax, one of the things I've often said
Speaker 5: is that I think if we did it, if we wanted.
Speaker 4: To move away, we'll not move away.
Speaker 5: But adn't an extra language than using Blazer or some
Speaker 5: kind of HTML like language is probably a smarter choice.
Speaker 1: I agree, That's why I brought it up. It seems like,
Speaker 1: you know, rather than improving Xamle, you have something that
Speaker 1: works that's really a nice little component model using angle brackets.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, if I like Blazer, I think when you think
Speaker 5: about who are ideal target is right now there the
Speaker 5: folks that have invested a huge amount in Xamle, they've
Speaker 5: already got all of that those skills, So we've got
Speaker 5: that nailed.
Speaker 4: So yeah, Matt's job is to think about the future. Yeah.
Speaker 6: You know, as I've alonne you, we're heavily enterprise focused,
Speaker 6: and that means maintaining things for a long time. We
Speaker 6: want to be building new features, not rebuilding the stuff
Speaker 6: we already have, unless unless it's a really really strong reason. Sure,
Speaker 6: you know, I like the idea of or if you'll
Speaker 6: build this new language on top of the thing that
Speaker 6: already exists, or the two can work together, and that
Speaker 6: compatibility in anything new is really important. The strength of
Speaker 6: cross platform is we can build four different platforms with
Speaker 6: the same technology, not necessarily that the same thing works everywhere.
Speaker 1: If people are going to be using Claude in the
Speaker 1: like for building Abalonia apps, what's the importance of going
Speaker 1: so far down into ZAM or learning that is, if
Speaker 1: you were going to do it by hand, if you
Speaker 1: can just describe it, you know, to an LM and
Speaker 1: habit right the ZAM I guess readability, I.
Speaker 6: Think, yeah, yeah, it's how much you trust what Claude
Speaker 6: does or whatever tool does without looking at the code.
Speaker 6: And if we can get to a point where I'm
Speaker 6: really happy that it's not going to break something, I
Speaker 6: can I can clearly describe everything that I want, or
Speaker 6: I don't care about the specifics enough that I can
Speaker 6: just describe it and it can do it. That's fine.
Speaker 6: But when you want to be sure about what's changed.
Speaker 6: You need to be able to look at the code
Speaker 6: and understand it, or someone needs to be able to
Speaker 6: I don't think.
Speaker 4: I don't.
Speaker 6: I think there's always going to be this position where
Speaker 6: we need something between what runs on the machine at
Speaker 6: like some really low level and the human speech. The
Speaker 6: kind of needs to be something in between.
Speaker 1: I'm having a hard time in visioning a future where
Speaker 1: I can be confident in the code that an LM writes,
Speaker 1: just to make sure it didn't misunderstand, you know, make
Speaker 1: sure it didn't make a bad assumption. I mean, I
Speaker 1: can't imagine. I mean, I'm probably it's probably going to
Speaker 1: come sooner than I think, but I just can't imagine
Speaker 1: being able to trust an l and that much. Not
Speaker 1: only that, but you know, it's your head on the
Speaker 1: chopping block if things go sideways, and you know that
Speaker 1: to some people that mean might mean a little embarrassment,
Speaker 1: but to other people it could cause it could cost lives,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, if you look at where Avaloni is used,
Speaker 5: we've used in operating theaters to make sure that you know,
Speaker 5: surgeons are drilling into people's.
Speaker 3: Legs exactly, that they're.
Speaker 5: Drilling into the right places. You wouldn't want a vibe
Speaker 5: coded app.
Speaker 1: Dealing with that, certainly not in twenty twenty six.
Speaker 4: No, No, we're a little way away from that.
Speaker 1: Well, guys would come to the end of the show.
Speaker 1: Is there anything else that you want to mention before
Speaker 1: we before we wrap it up?
Speaker 5: Avaloni twelve it's a preview now is already available, so
Speaker 5: if anyone wants to give that a world the performance
Speaker 5: is really good on mobile and yeah, just check us
Speaker 5: out on get hub. Let's say you won't see us
Speaker 5: at conferences or doing any marketing, you'll only hear from
Speaker 5: us as people have used it and liked it.
Speaker 1: It's great stuff. Thanks guys, Mike James and Matt Lacy
Speaker 1: from Avalonia. Thank you and we'll talk to you next time.
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Speaker 1: back to show number one, recorded in September two.
Speaker 3: Thousand and two.
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Speaker 1: us in business. Now go write some code. See you
Speaker 1: next time. Got in a band day.
Speaker 3: A summer time that means home. Then my Texas in
Speaker 3: line red ball