.NET Rocks! · Carl Franklin

Agentic RAG with Ed Charbeneau

April 8, 2026·1 hr 4 min·6 clips

Carl and Richard ask listeners to share their Y2K stories and how .NET shaped their careers for episodes 1999 and 2000.

First, there is business. Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell point listeners to ad-free patron feeds, a patron mug, and milestone shows about Y2K stories and .NET career memories. Then Ed comes in, and the episode shifts into the job of staying current when part of your work is spotting what could hit developers next. His motive is blunt. Ed says his career has been shaped by watching for the technology that might take his food away, which Richard turns into the old moving your cheese idea. The HG Wells quote gives the conversation a little vintage doom without making it dramatic. Complacency was a problem long before the latest shiny framework. Ed is not just chasing whatever is new. He is talking about a survival habit, the developer advocate version of listening early before the horizon turns into your backlog. Responsive web is the example that makes it concrete. He says he began using that warning when mobile changed web development, back when m-dot sites still seemed like they could handle the job. Then tablets made the story messier. The iPad becomes the awkward third factor, and suddenly teams can no longer pretend screen size is predictable. That is the useful lesson. Strong teams do not wait until a trend is obvious enough to arrive as a migration project with a deadline. Ed says he tried to move early. At the company where he worked then, he says they became one of the first industrial manufacturers with a web presence that worked across screen sizes. The tone is very .NET Rocks: enough technical detail to hold onto, enough banter to keep the pace, and a dry little laugh at old assumptions falling apart. The episode closes back on tooling. NuGet and the progress.nuclea package get mentioned on the way out, along with links, sponsor notes, and the show's familiar sendoff to go write some code.

As heard by us

A reminder to stay alert as the platform keeps moving.

Episode 1997 keeps its focus on staying alert while the platform shifts underfoot. Ed Charbonneau treats that as a habit, not a theory, and the mix of developer-advocate perspective, the War of the Worlds quote he likes to use, and the look back at responsive web work gives the…

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Why you'd press play

If you lived through the mobile shift, this one will click fast.

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