I really enjoy podcasts and listen to them most days on my commute to and from work, sometimes at work, sometimes when bathing my son and getting him ready for bed, sometimes when mowing the lawn or walking the dogs.  It’s a great way to keep up, or at least get a high level overview of what’s going on in tech.

I think this is where UWP also can be seen living up to the hype. I’ve used Cast and more recently Grover Pro and both apps are well designed and consistent on phone and PC. When I use Grover Pro, I miss Cast’s organizational options, dividing podcasts into categories. Sadly I was seeing a few bugs with Cast, at least with the insider preview – it seems the developer was trying to clean this up and I’ll give it another try soon. Anyway, the key thing both do is allow you to listen to one podcast on your phone and pick up from where you left off on the PC, or vice versa and if you are looking for a podcast app that rises above the pack, I can recommend both of them.

These are some of the podcasts I have found the most useful and interesting for me as a .Net/C#/Windows developer.

The MS Dev Show

This isa weelk podcast from a couple of Microsoft employees and benefits from getting great access to people to come and tak about new projects and technologies that Microsoft has released. The MS dev show covers a very broad range of developer topics and products that are relevant to the .Net, web and Windows developer community and follows the news followed by guest format.

.Net Rocks

An oldie but a good one. With over 1300 episodes behind them, Carl Franklin and Rich Campbell are good at what they do, at digging in on a technology and going about as deep as you can in 30 mins or so discussion with their guests. Similar to the MS Dev Show in format (news followed by guest) in most shows, they have also been doing guestless “geekout” shows on other topics such as reusable space travel, GMO’s, and of course, Whiskey. They release several episodes a week.

Coding Blocks

Ran by 3 full time software developers who do corporate web applications on the ASP.Net stack, this show focusses more on principles and patterns around software development e.g Design patterns, unit testing, how to be a good programmer. The show is monthly, but when it comes out, it’s usually about 2 hours long which allows them to go in depth and have a good discussion around the topic.

Developer on Fire

An inspiring podcast created by Dave Rael. He interviews people from the software development world, usually published or on the conference circuit, and asks them a standard series of questions. The stories told in these interviews are often inspireing though and encourage me to keep learning, and it doesn’t seem to matter if they are F# or ruby or .NET folks being interviewed, the language or domain is rarely that important, which is nice. They also come out several times a week so although it’s only just turned one year old, there’s already a good back catalog including (Uncle Bob) Robert Martin, Scott Hanselman, Rob Eisenberg, John Sonmez and the aforementioned Carl Franklin.

A few others worth a listen from time to time that are also aimed at developers are Hanselminutes, Software Engineering radio, and East, sleep code. Non developer focused ones I’d recommend are Windows Weekly, 361 Degrees and All About Windows Phone.

Unfortunately, the podcast most directly relevant to me is no longer – the Windows Dev Show, hosted by brothers Ryan and Travis Lowdermilk.  That has some interesting stuff in it’s history that’s still available through podcast apps, including several episodes containing good encouragement and advice for developers who sent in their own apps for them to take a look at.  The last episode was June 2015 when they talked about Bing Solutions.

Do you have recommendations for podcast that developers should seek out? Let me know in the comments.