I was recently asked which podcasts I listen to and I've actually been planning to write about for a while. Commuting to and from work takes about 1½ hours of my time each day, my way of making an opportunity out of this time is to listen to a lot of podcasts. I learn something from the work related podcasts and I get to relax with the ones just for fun when my brain is fried after a day at the office :)

To mix it up I dabble with audio books from Audible.com but I've not yet gotten that routine down so I'm going to hold off with my commentary on that for now. Just know that if you're looking for richer content you can go there a get real books to listen to.

Work Related

Dot Net Rocks! w. Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell - Everything .NET. The first and definitely the best. You get a nice high level insight into many different products from Microsoft.

Hanselminutes w. Scott Hanselman - Lots and lots of information about .NET and its extended family. If you listen to only a few podcasts be sure to make this one of them.

ARCast.TV w. Ron Jacobs - Architecture on the Microsoft platform, higher abstraction level than .NET rocks.

Polymorphic Podcast w. Craig Shoemaker - the content is there but Craig doesn't keep a regular schedule which I dislike so I ditched it again. Still well worth a listen if the missing regularity isn't an issue for you.

ASP.NET Podcast w. Wally and Paul - geared towards the Microsoft .NET Framework and ASP.NET.

RunAs Radio w. Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes - a podcast for IT professionals working with Microsoft products. I listen to this to become better at understanding the issues which people of the development cycle has to deal with. Also I'm a hardware nut which is something they tend to talk about as well. Finally they offer up some nice tools and techniques for debugging problems which is something we as developers have to deal with due to increasing complexities and number of moving parts in the systems we build.

For Fun

Windows Weekly w. Paul Thurrot - news show that deals with stuff related to the Windows user, nice commentary on various news stories and they even talk about Apple from time to time.

Diggnation.com w. Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht - Kevin and Alex chat about the new stories on Digg.com but mostly they are just fun to listen to. Caution! This one will make you laugh out load. I usually start my Monday morning drive to work with this one just to ensure that I get started on a good note. It's a video podcast but the audio version works very well.

Games for Windows - Talk about the newest games for Windows. Very funny. I actually don't get to play a lot of games due to lack of time so when I do I damn well make sure that they are the best. This is the place I go for that information.

1UP Yours - Talk about games for the console. I own a Nintendo DS and have a heck of a time to find good games for it. This is a great way to find them.