Fusion 360 by Autodesk is my application of choice for making things - real things - plastic and metal and wood things. I've often found myself wanting to select a face in my design and do some fancy 2D graphics on that face, but the sketch environment in Fusion 360 is pretty basic. I finally figured out a good workflow for exporting a face from my 3D design, drawing in 2D on a replica of that face in my vector editor of choice, and then easily bringing my new drawing back in to Fusion 350... perhaps to initiate an extrusion. Hopefully this is helpful to you when making things.

The energy and enthusiasm level of a single intern is inspiring to me, so I was glad to get three recent Microsoft interns into Studio C at Channel 9 for a little code chat about their experience coming onboard at Microsoft as intern evangelists. It's really fun to hear what technology-related university degree programs are like these days and what your options are as a new university student. It's been a long time since my university studies, but although little has changed with the actual degree offerings, it's a whole different world for prospective technologists.

As you may know, I'm pretty excited about blockchain technology. It's a super creative algorithm. It's interesting how a system that distributes data (or in many cases logic too) actually gives all of the participants more ownership and authenticity in their own data. My guest on the show today is Cale Teeter (@windozer) who knows a lot about blockchain and is happy to answer my questions to help us all come to a good understanding. Enjoy.

Rick Barraza (@rickbarraza) works in the AI space at Microsoft, and is particularly good at communicating the concepts of the seemingly (and actually) complex world of machine learning. In this interview, Rick clarifies the terms machine learning (ML), deep neural networks (DNN), and artificial intelligence (AI), and attempts to cast a vision for this technology in the near and distant future. And an exciting future it is!

Mark Michaelis - Microsoft RD from Spokane - is back on the show to talk about the latest version of C#. C# version 7.0 is totally a thing and with it come a number of cool features like tuples and deconstruction. According to Mark, none of the enhancements are earth shattering or code breaking, but they will eventually change the way you author your project. Mark has a great way of relaying what's important to developers today. I hope you enjoy this episode. Happy coding.

Well, it's been a while :) After a significant hiatus, CodeChat is back in force. I'm going to be bringing new interviews every week about what's happening in the world of technology. You'll hear from Microsoft product teams, tech startups, indie developers, and anyone else I find fascinating and want to talk to on camera! Thanks for tuning in.

This week on CodeChat I had the honor of talking with Jason Dobry - the creator of JS Data. JS Data is an open source ORM for JavaScript that I call amazing because frankly it is. Being JavaScript, it's as happy in the client (as in browsers, for example) as it is on the server, and if you're a data hound then you know what the implications there are - that's right, the same models across your entire stack! It's been decades in the coming. Without further ado, I'll let Jason tell you more about this project, and then you can catch up on the details by browsing the official website at js-data.io Jason mentions too that you can go to slack.js-data.io to request an invite to the slack channel to discuss your project. Happy data hacking.

Bryce works at Microsoft in the Xbox division as a designer. He specializes in inclusive design in the world of gaming. You'll learn a lot about the general definition of disability and the options that game developers have for facilitating software use for everyone. One of the interesting things that I learned from Bryce during this chat is that in the gaming work, we purposely build barriers (enemies, challenges, etc.), while simultaneously we're trying to remove accessibility barriers. If you are a game designer, I think you'll learn something here. I hope so.

I recorded a lot of CodeChat episodes from Build 2016, and this is the last. This means the last time you have to look at the same screaming plaid shirt. This is a fun one though, because this time I (and my shirt) are talking to Jason Fox of Microsoft and Eric Ang of Dolby about what Dolby is doing for developers - primarily around their Dolby Digital Plus platform for amazing audio. Did you know it already works in the Edge browser? If you're running Edge, check out the Feisty Galaxies demo at http://www.feistygalaxies.com/ to see what I'm talking about. Not only do we chat with Eric, but Eric escorts Jason to the Dolby Headquarters and we get a little bit of footage from inside where the audio and video experiences are apparently (I wasn't able to join) breathtaking. Enjoy!

Paul lives in Australia and works for Octopus Deploy - a software tool for pushing your code out to all of your servers. You can use Octopus Deploy for free for small teams, so it's really easy to try it, realize the benefit, and then move into a higher scale production scenario. Octopus is works for pushing code to both Windows and Linux. Go to octopus.com to check it out. Watch the video and see what it looks like to get started and what the benefits will be. By the way, at around 4:49 we referred to writing BASH scripts on Windows machines, and what we're talking about is the relatively recent ability to run BASH on Ubuntu on Windows. I'm really using and loving this feature on Windows 10 now. You can read more about that on this post on the Windows blog.