 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity. Hello and happy Taco Tuesday, Cube viewers. You are watching theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with Stu Miniman. We're joined by Scott Hanselman. He is the partner program manager at Microsoft. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Absolutely my pleasure. And happy Taco Tuesday to you. Will Code for Taco? Will Code for Taco? I'm digging it, I'm digging it. I'm a very inexpensive coder. So you are the partner program manager, but you're really the people's programmer at Microsoft. Satya Nadella up on the main stage yesterday, talking about programming for everyone, empowering ordinary citizen developers. And you yourself are on the main stage this morning, app development for all. Why is this such a priority for Microsoft at this point in time? Well, there's the priority for Microsoft, but then I'll also speak selfishly as a priority for me. Because when we talk about inclusion, what does that really mean? What is the opposite of exclusion? So when we mean inclusion, we need to mean everyone. We need to include everyone. So what can we do to make technology, to make programming possible, to make everyone enable? Whether that be something like, you know, drag and drop and power apps and the power platform, all the way down to doing things like we did in the keynote this morning with C-Sharp on a tiny microcontroller and the entire spectrum in between, whether it be citizen programmers in Excel using Power BI to go and do machine learning or the silly things that we did in the keynote with rock, paper, scissors that we might be able to talk about. All of that means including everyone. And if the site isn't accessible, if Visual Studio as a tool isn't accessible, if you're training your AI in a non-ethical way, you are consciously excluding people. So back to what Sacha thinks is, why can't everyone do this? Why are we as programmers having any gatekeeping or you can't do that, you're not a programmer, you know I'm a programmer, you can't have that. That's silly, we got to just bust it all open. What does the future look like if everyone knows how to do it? I mean, do some visioning right now about if everyone does know how to do this or at least can learn the building blocks for it, what does technology look like? Well hopefully it will be ethical and it'll be democratized so that everyone can do it. I think that the things that are interesting or innovative today will become commoditized tomorrow. Like something as simple as a webcam detecting your face and putting a square around it and then you move around and then square. Like we were like, oh my God, that was amazing. And now it's just a library that you can download. What is amazing and interesting today like AR and VR where it's like, oh wow I've never seen augmented reality work like that. My eight year old will be able to do it in five years and they'll be older than eight. So Scott, one of the big takeaways I had from the AppDev keynote that you did this morning was in the past it was trying to get everybody on the same page. Let's move them to our stack, let's move them to our cloud, let's move them on this programming language. And you really talked about how the example of Chipotle is different parts of the organization will write in a different language and there needs to be, it's almost that service bus that you have between all of these environments because we've spent a lot of us, I know in my career I've spent decades trying to help break down those silos and get everybody to work together, but we're never going to have everybody doing the same job, so we need to meet them where they are. They need to allow them to use the tools, the languages, the platforms that they want, but they need to all be able to work together. And this is not the Microsoft that I grew up with that is now an enabler of that environment. The word we keep coming back to is trust at the keynote, so I know there's some awesome cool new stuff about .NET which is a piece of it, but it's all of the things together. Right, I was actually, I was teaching a class at a massive community college down in San Diego a couple of days ago and they were trying to, they were all people who want a job. These are community college people, I went to community college and it's like, I just want to know how to get a job. What is the thing that I can do? What language should I learn? That's a tough question they want. Do I learn Java? Do I learn C sharp? And someone had a really funny analogy and I'll share it with you. They said, well, you know, English is the language, right? Why don't we, why don't the other languages just give up? They said, you know, Finland, they're not going to win, right? Their language didn't win. So they should just give up and they should all speak English. And I said, what an awful thing. They like their language. I'm not going to go to people who do Haskell or Rust or Scala or F sharp and say, you should give up, you're not going to win because C one or Java one or C sharp one. So instead, why don't we focus on standards where we can interoperate, where we accept that the reality is a hybrid cloud, things like Azure Arc, that allows us to connect multiple clouds, multi-vendor clouds together. That is all encompassing the concept of inclusion, including everyone and means including every language and as many standards as you can. So it might sound a little bit like a Tower of Babel, but we do have standards and the standards are HTTP, REST, JSON, JavaScript. It may not be the web that we deserve, but it's the web that we have. So we'll use those building block technologies and then let people do their own thing. So speaking of the keynote this morning, one of the cool things you were doing was talking about the Rock, Paper, Scissors game and how it's expanding. Tell our viewers a little bit more about the new elements to Rock, Paper, Scissors. So folks named Sam Cass, a gentleman named Sam Cass many, many years ago on the internet, like when the internet was like much simpler web pages, created a game called Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock. And a lot of people will know that from a popular TV show on CBS and they'll give credit to that show. In fact, it was Sam Cass and Karen Bryler who created that and we sent him a note and said, hey, can I write a game about this? And we basically built a Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock game in the cloud containerized at scale with multiple languages. And then we also put it on a tiny device. And what's fun about the game from a complexity perspective is that Rock, Paper, Scissors is easy. There's three rules, right? Paper covers Rock, which makes no sense. But when you have five, it's hard. Like Rock, what Spock shoots the Rock with his phaser and then the Lizard poison Spock and the Paper disproves and it gets really hard and complicated but it's also super fun and nerdy. So we went and we created a containerized app where we had all different bots. We had Node, Python, Java, C-Sharp and PHP. And then you can say, I'm going to pick Spock or Node and Paper and have them fight. And then we added in some AI and some machine learning and some custom vision such that if you sign in with Twitter in this game, it will learn your patterns and try to defeat you using your patterns that you don't recognize you have. And then clicking on your choice is in fun because we all want to go Rock, Paper, Scissors, shoot. So we made a custom vision model that would go and detect your hand or whatever that is saying, this is Spock and then it would select it and play the game. So it was just great fun. And it was a lot more fun than a lot of the corporate demos that you see these days. All right. Scott, you're doing a lot of different things at the show here. We said there's just a barrage of different announcements that were made. Love if you could share just some of the things that might have flown under the radar. Arc everyone's talking about, but some cool things or things that you're geeking out on that you'd want to share with others. Two of the things that I'm most excited. One is an announcement that's specific to Ignite and one's a community thing. The announcement is that .NET Core 3.1 is coming. .NET Core 3 has been a long time coming as we have been to begin to mature and create a cross-platform open source .NET runtime. But .NET Core 3.1 LTS, long-term support, means that that's a version of .NET Core that you can put on a system for three years and be supported. Because a lot of people are saying all this open source is moving so fast. I just upgraded to this and I don't want to upgrade to that. LTS releases are going to happen every November in the odd-numbered years. So that means 2019, 2021, 2023 is going to be a version of .NET you can count on for three years and then if you want to follow that train, the safe train, you can do that. In the even-numbered years we're going to come out with a version of .NET that will push the envelope. Maybe introduce a new version of C-Shar but it'll do something interesting and new then we tighten the screws and in the following year that becomes a long-term support version of .NET. Yeah, a question for you on that. One of the challenges I hear from customers is when you talk about hybrid cloud they're starting to get pulled apart a little bit because in the public cloud, if I'm running Azure, I'm always on the latest version but in my data center, often as you said, I want longer term support, I'm not ready to be able to take that, CICD push all of the time so it feels like I live, maybe call it bimodal if you want but I'm being pulled with the am I always on the latest, getting the latest security and it's all tested by them or am I owned there? How do you help customers with that when Microsoft's developing things? How do you live in both of those worlds or pull them together? Well, we're really working on this idea of side by side whether it be different versions of Visual Studio that are side by side, the stable one that your company is paying for and then the preview version that you can go have side by side or whether you can have .NET Core 3, 3.1 or the next version, a preview version and a safe version side by side. We want to enable people to experiment without fear of us messing up their machine which is really, really important. One of the other things you were talking about is a cool community announcement. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? So this is a really cool product from a very, very small company out of Oregon from a company called Wilderness Labs and Wilderness Labs makes a microcontroller, not a microprocessor, not a Raspberry Pi. It doesn't run Linux. What it runs is .NET. So we're actually playing Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock on this device. We've wired it all up. This is a screen from our friends at Adafruit and I can write .NET. So somehow, if someone is working at, I don't know, the IT department at Little Debbie Snack Cakes and they're making WinForms applications, they're suddenly a now an IoT developer because they can go and write C-Sharp code and control a device like this. And when you have a microcontroller, this will run for weeks on a battery, not hours. You go and 3D print a case, make this really tiny, it could become a sensor, it could become an IoT device or one of thousands of devices that could check crops, check humidity, moisture, wetness, whatever you want and we're going to enable all kinds of things. This is just a commodity device here, this screen. It's not special, the actual device, this is the development version, size of my finger, it could be even smaller if we wanted to make it that way and these are our friends at Wilderness Labs, this is called the Meadow and they had a successful Kickstarter and I just wanted to give them a shout out, I don't have any relationship with them, I just think they're great. Very cool, very cool. So you are a busy guy and as Stu said, you're in a lot of different things within Microsoft and yet you still have time to teach at community college. I'm interested in your perspective of why you do that, why do you think it's so important to democratize learning about how to do this stuff? I am very fortunate and I think that we, people who have achieved some amount of success in our space need to recognize that luck played a factor in that, that privilege played a factor in that but why can't we be the luck for somebody else? The luck can be as simple as a warm introduction, I believe very strongly in what I call the transitive value of friendship so if we're friends and you're friends then the hypotenuse can be friends as well. A warm intro, a LinkedIn, a note, they're like, hey, I met this person, you should talk to them. Non-transactional networking is really important so if I can go to a community college and talk to a person that maybe wanted to quit and give a speech and give them, I don't know, a week, three months, six months more, whatever, chutzpah, moxie, something that will keep them to finish their degree and then succeed then I'm going to put karma out into the world. Hang it forward. Exactly. Scott, you mentioned that when people ask for advice it's not about what language they do. What advice do you give for people today is to, we talk in general about intellectual curiosity, of course it's good. Being part of a community is a great way to participate and Microsoft has a phenomenal one. Any other tips you'd give for our listeners out there today? The fundamentals will never go out of style and rather than thinking about learning how to code why not think about learning how to think and learning about systems thinking? One of my friends, Keisha Rogers, talks about systems thinking. I've had her on my podcast a number of times and we were giving a presentation at Black Girls Code and I was talking to a 15 year old young woman and we were giving a presentation. It was clear that her mom wanted her to be there and she's like, why are we here? And I said, all right, let's talk about programming. Everybody, we're talking about programming. My toaster is broken and the toast is not working. What do you think is wrong? Big long awkward pause and someone says, well, is the power on? I was like, well, I plugged a light in and nothing came on and they were like, well, is the fuse blown? And then one little girl said, well, do the neighbors have power? And I said, you're debugging. We are debugging, right? This is the thing, you're a systems thinker. I don't know what's going on with the computer when my dad calls and maybe I'm just figuring it out. Like, oh, I'm so happy you worked for Microsoft. You were able to figure it out. He has a son IT guy now. I don't know. I unplugged the router, right? But that ability to think about things in the context of a larger system. I want toast, powers out in the neighborhood, drawing that line, that makes you a programmer. The language is secondary. Finally, the YouTube videos. Tell our viewers a little bit about those. So if you're interested in .NET or C-Sharp, you can go to dot.net, so .NET, the word ., slash videos. And we went and we made 100 YouTube videos on everything from C-Sharp 101, .NET, all the way up to database access and putting things in the cloud. A very gentle Mr. Rogers neighborhood on ramp. A lot of things, if you've ever seen that cartoon that says, you know, want to draw an owl, we'll draw two circles, and then draw the rest of the freaking owl. A lot of tutorials feel like that and we don't want to do that. You know, we've got to have an on ramp before we get on the freeway. So we've made those at .NET slash videos. Excellent, well, that's a great plug. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Scott. Absolutely my pleasure. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite.