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Herding Code 146 - Shay Friedman on Roslyn, IronRuby and the DLR Aug 03, 2012

Show notes

Episode 146

While at NDC 2012 in Oslo, Jon and K. Scott talked to Shay Friedman about Roslyn, IronRuby, and the DLR.

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 146 - Shay Friedman on Roslyn, IronRuby, and the DLR

Show Notes:

K. Scott asks Shay about the what he covered in his "What? C# Could Do That?" talk. Shay mentions dynamic capabilities, the DLR, and Roslyn.
K. Scott asks Shay to explain Roslyn. Shay explains how Roslyn works as a very configurable compiler and talks about how his demonstration showed creating a new language keyword.
Jon asks if it's possible to build out significant parts of a language with Roslyn. Shay says you'd really use it to extend C# - but there's more to it than that. He talks about CSX (scripting with C#), C# REPL, and changes to the IDE experience that are now available due to having a much better compiler.
K. Scott asks if it's shipping in Visual Studio 2012. Shay says that it's a CTP, but it's avialable for both Visual Studio 2010 and 2012.
Jon asks for Shay to talk more about metaprogramming. Shay explains more about what could be done with this - for instance, an ORM could could add in specialized language support.
K. Scott asks about the state of IronRuby. Shay says that it's still active, it's ignored by the Ruby community, but it has a lot of great applications - for instance, allowing users to write simple business rules in Ruby, and loading Ruby Gems in .NET applications.
Jon asks if Shay uses the DLR separately from IronRuby and IronPython. Shay mentions some examples like IronJS, Scheme, LUA and LOLCODE. The DLR is built into .NET framework, so it's not going anywhere.
Jon asks about how dynamic objects function differently than other C# objects. Shay explains it's basically an object, but it's all executed at runtime.

Show Links:

Shay Friedman blog @ironshay
NDC 2012 "What? C# Could Do That???" - video
NDC 2012 "Roslyn hmmmmm WHAT?" - video
Sample code from Shay's talk
Roslyn on MSDN
IronRuby
IronJS
LOLCODE

Herding Code 145 - NDC Cage Match with Rob Conery (node.js/socket.io) and Damian Edwards (SignalR) Jun 28, 2012

Show notes

Episode 145

While at NDC 2012 in Oslo, Jon MC'd a Cage Match between Rob Conery (Node.js and socket.io) and Damian Edwards (ASP.NET and SignalR). Immediately after the cage match ended, Jon and K. Scott caught up with them to talk about the similarities and differences between these development stacks.

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 145 - NDC Cage Match with Rob Conery (node.js/socket.io) and Damian Edwards (SignalR)

Show Notes:

Jon asks Damian how he'd summarize the distinguishing features. Damian says they're very similar feature-wise, and it comes down to how you want to develop. Rob says the main difference for him is that node+socket.io is all Javascript, which has pros and cons.
Jon recalls a part in the cage match where Rob talked about invoking Javascript methods on the client and asks Damian if SignalR can do something similar. Damian talks about how SignalR's hubs can also invoke dynamic client methods.
Jon asks Rob about WebSocket support and fallback to older alternatives. Rob and Damian both discuss the fallback methods.
Rob asks Damian about confirmation and callback support in SignalR. Damian explains how that works with jQuery promises in the Javascript client. Rob asks for more info about how SignalR pushes content to the client, and Damian talks about the use of JSON.
Jon asks about the differences in development stacks.
K. Scott asks about what was actually built during the presentation. Rob and Damian talk about what they built in the time available. Rob was wanting to use Backbone if time permitted. Damian says he generally uses simple HTML for many cases.
Damian calls out a future feature they're working on for SignalR that adds something like an Update Panel for Web Forms using SignalR.
Rob talks about the synchronization feature Backbone uses with SignalR and tells Damian they should add something similar to
Jon asks if Rob and Damian are "web scale." Rob talks about how he load tested using NodeLoad. Damian talks about how he tested using Flywheel and WCAT. Damian says they've been able to get great throughput out of SignalR and how they're moving to some custom data structures to possibly double or triple capacity in SignalR 0.6.
Rob thinks it's interesting the SignalR can run outside of ASP.NET, and Damian talks about the hosting models for SignalR.
Jon asks about some of the differences in development. Rob talks about the Node module ecosystem, Damian calls out some of the advantages of using .NET on the server.
SignalR runs on Mono.
K. Scott asks what the future holds for SignalR. Damian talks about 0.6, calling out future performance enhancements in the in-memory message store and standardizing on OWIN as the hosting layer. In version 1, they're looking at the client story, low level transport, cross-domain support, and more.

Show Links:

Rob Conery blog Twitter
Damian Edwards blog Twitter
NDC 2012 Cage Match - video
Node.js
socket.io
SignalR
jQuery promise interface
flywheel
nodeload
Web Capacity Analysis Tool (WCat)
Scott Hanselman's Million Monkeys in SignalR
Open Web Interface for .NET (OWIN)

Herding Code 144 - GitHub for Windows with Tim Clem, Paul Betts and Phil Haack Jun 15, 2012

Show notes

Episode 144

In this episode, the guys talk to Tim Clem, Paul Betts and Phil Haack about GitHub for Windows.

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 144 - GitHub for Windows with Tim Clem, Paul Betts and Phil Haack

Show Notes:

The guys start off talking about why there is a need for GitHub for Windows.
Kevin asks if GitHub for Windows can be used as a client for other Git hosts.
Kevin asks for an overview of GitHub for Windows and if it is similar to GitHub for Mac.
Jon asks what they did to make the install process so smooth.
K. Scott asks what technologies were used to build it.
Scott asks about the features that GitHub has that are missing from GitHub for Windows.
The guys discuss the decision to use WPF, which leads into a discussion about developer and designer interaction.
The guys talk about Metro UI.
Jon asks about the install and update process.
Kevin asks Phil about his transition from web development to desktop development.
Jon asks about the different OSS libraries and frameworks used to build it.
Kevin asks about unit and integration testing.
Kevin asks if they dogfooded GitHub for Windows.
The guys talk about line endings.
Kevin asks about Linus Torvalds' recent comments about GitHub.

Show Links:

Phil Haack blog Twitter
Paul Betts blog Twitter
Tim Clem blog Twitter
GitHub for Windows
msysgit
GitPad
GitHub for Mac
posh-git
libgit2
libgit2sharp
ReactiveUI
Reactive Extensions
Akavache
Cameron McEfee
NSync
Caliburn.Micro
Cef Sharp
Nustache
Linus Torvalds comments about GitHub Pull Requests

Herding Code 143 - Paul Stack on Continuous Delivery May 11, 2012

Show notes

Episode 143

The guys talk to Paul Stack about Continuous Deployment.

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 143 - Paul Stack on Continuous Delivery

K. Scott asks Paul for a description of what Continuous Delivery is.
Paul talks about the differences between Continuous Testing, Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment.
Scott brings up the difficulties that databases bring about as it relates to deployments.
Paul talks about how a distributed cache layer has helped alleviate those deployment problems for him.
Jon asks how these processes lead software to have a better architecture.
K. Scott asks how source control plays into the process.
Paul talks about feature switching, which can be used to turn features on and off.
Paul talks about the benefits of rapid feedback.
There is a question from Twitter about databases and data warehousing and PowerShell equivalents of Chef and Puppet.
Another question from related to the processes related to deploying with TFS.
Scott talks about his experience prototyping Octopus Deploy.
Kevin brings up the topic of rollbacks.
Paul talks about A/B testing and canary testing.
K. Scott asks about pushback on Continuous Delivery.
Jon asks if it is possible to incrementally work towards Continuous Delivery.
K. Scott asks about the pitfalls of Continuous Delivery.
Jon asks if there are teams or situations that Continuous Delivery would not work.
K. Scott asks about benchmarking of deployments.
Another question from twitter related to Continuous Deployment of desktop software.
Paul gives examples of technology making Continuous Delivery easier.
Kevin asks if decisions made at the beginning of a project make it harder to implement Continuous Delivery.

Show Links:

Show notes by @rossfuhrman - thanks!

Herding Code 142 - Scott Guthrie on the ASP.NET MVC, Web API, and Razor Open Source Announcement Apr 23, 2012

Show notes

Episode 142

The gang talks to Scott Guthrie about the recent announcement that ASP.NET MVC, Web API, and Razor are being developed in public, open source repositories using git and will accept external code contributions. It's an action packed show, jam packed with information and guys named Scott.

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 142 - Scott Guthrie on the ASP.NET MVC, Web API, and Razor Open Source Announcement

Show Notes:

K Scott asks Scott Guthrie about the recent open source announcements about ASP.NET MVC, Web API, and Razor. Scott G. details what's changed, highlighting both the new transparency due to working in public repositories and the changes to accept external code submissions.
Scott G. explains that these are still supported products with dedicated Microsoft engineering investment.
K Scott mentions a question from twitter - How far will this go? Will we see other products and projects following a similar model?
Some more questions from twitter - What kind of feedback is Scott G. hoping to see? How will feedback be handled?
Scott G. talks about how pull requests will be implemented. Developers will have to fill out a form and after they're on record pulls will reviewed for various factors and then be integrated.
Scott K. asks a about ownership of the code contributed to the project. Is OuterCurve involved?
Jon asks a question from twitter: Was this the goal from the beginning? What was the biggest hurdle - legal or logistics. Scott G. mentions the community response to including jQuery in the ASP.NET MVC Project Template.
Kevin asks Scott about patch contributing that has some performance issues and is the patch rejected or are the issues fixed. Scott G. thinks that minor issues in code might still be accepted or just asked to be fixed. A patch that does noting but "Format C Drive" will be rejected outright, other than that the process is pretty flexible.
ASP.NET MVC 4 is not taking new features on as it's currently in a Release Candidate mode.
K Scott asks how Microsoft chose git as it's source control. Microsoft sure has made a lot of OSS developers happy using git.
Kevin points out that the Windows Azure SDK's are on GitHub and asks why the ASP.NET components weren't put there as well. Are there plans to move those projects from GitHub to CodePlex now? Scott G. says that CodePlex didn't support git when the Azure SDK's were released. With the announcement of git on CodePlex they've made decisions based on where they fit best, and ASP.NET content had historically been on CodePlex. There aren't any plans to move from one to the other, and the beauty of DVCS is that they can be worked on in either place..
Scott K. talks about how the team received feedback from blogs and mailing lists and now CodePlex discussions and asks about whether feature/roadmap discussions will be public or not.
Jon asks about how release versions vs. nightly code builds will be supported from Microsoft. Scott G. explains that support will still attempt to help, but of course a released version is recommended for production scenarios. He also reminds that product support will help with any .NET support scenario, including ASP.NET open source code.
Jon asked a about how this will affect the Mono project, and Scott G. hopes that it does.
Scott K. asks about how the release schedule might change now that the projects are open source.
Scott G. talks about how, by going open source, customer feedback can be potentially received in real time which hopefully increases product quality.
Kevin asks about community contributions of major new features. Scott G. says it'll be a learning process, but they're hoping to see some great ideas from the community. He discusses how Microsoft's been incorporating open source libraries for a while, including JSON.NET, jQuery, Modernizr, etc., so now there's flexibility to incorporate features both as core code and as external libraries.
K Scott says Microsoft has been doing a great job incorporating community projects into their products rather than reinventing the wheel each time.
Scott K. asks how Microsoft decides to create new projects or use existing solutions from the OSS community. Scott G. says it's important to keep the MVC core concepts simple while allowing for advanced scenarios, and he and Scott K. discuss the balance between keeping concept count and clutter low while including support for popular scenarios.
Scott G. mentions that he hopes the new open source view gets Microsoft feedback sooner so that changes can be made faster to final releases which will translate to better products.
K Scott asks about what's new in the world of Windows Azure. Scott G. clarifies that his new role includes ASP.NET and the web stack as well, and says there's a lot of exciting stuff in the works for Azure. Scott G. says he'd like to come back on Herding Code to talk about it when it's released.

Show Links:

Scott Guthrie - @scottgu
Scott's blog post: ASP.NET MVC, Web API, Razor and Open Source

Show notes by @buildstarted - thanks!

Herding Code 141 - Lightning Round with Hadi Hariri Apr 11, 2012

Show notes

Episode 141

K Scott wraps up his series of lightning round interviews from Sofware Passion Summit by interviewing Hadi Hariri.

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 140 - Lightning Round with Hadi Hariri

Show Notes:

K Scott asks Hadi about EasyHttp.

Hadi explains some of the problems and annoyances EasyHttp solves.

Configuring the web request was a pain
It was annoying to change the data structure of the classes to work with dynamic JSON

EasyHttp supports all HTTP verbs (including PATCH and OPTIONS)
It works really smoothly with dynamics
Hadi talks about a library he used called JsonFx, which he prefers to JSON.NET

Hadi says he decided to build out EasyHttp due to his work on YouTrackSharp
That's it! Scott runs off to tackle some more lightning round interviews.
K Scott asks about EasyMVC

Hadi talks why he created EasyMVC, explaining how the convention based routing works.
EasyMVC also includes some filters which use conventions to handle content negotiation.
K Scott asks what Hadi thinks about ASP.NET Web API. Hadi says he dislikes it, as it pushes developers towards having separate controllers for HTML and services.

K Scott wraps up by asking Hadi about Kotlin.

Kotlin is a new language in the JetBrains early access program.
Kotlin attempts to improve on some of the shortcoming that JetBrains has seen working with Java.
Kotlin is perhaps conceptually similar to Scala, but a lot easy to learn
Object oriented with nullable types.
Kotlin targets both the JVM and JavaScript
It's open source, and in early alpha phase.

That's it! Hope you liked K Scott's lightning round interviews!

Show Links:

Hadi Hariri - @hhariri
EasyHttp project
JsonFx project
YouTrackSharp project
EasyMVC project
Blog post: With HTTP, your application is your API
Blog post: The Kotlin Journey Part I : Getting things set up
Kotlin project

Herding Code 140 - Lightning Round with Morten Kromberg on APL Apr 11, 2012

Show notes

Episode 140

While at Software Passion Summit, K Scott continues a series of lightning round interviews with Morten Kromberg, discussing APL.

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 140 - Lightning Round with Morten Kromberg

Show Notes:

Morten describes the history and purpose of APL.
- Did you know that APL stands for "A Programming Language"?
- The first book about APL was written in 1962. It's as old as COBOL and FORTRAN.
- APL was first written as a mathematical notation, and was used in teaching for 4 years before an interpreter was even written.
It's a dynamic, interpreted language, and it encourages a functional style. Dyalog APL, which branched off about 30 years ago, is even more functional.
People are still developing with APL, especially within the financial sector.
Morten's company makes APL interpreters.
K Scott asks about the ability to work with APL from .NET. Morten says that, while it's not a managed language, they have full interop so you can both create .NET classes in APL and consume them. You can use the GUI features in Dyalog APL, or you can interop with Windows / .NET GUI's, and it can even be used as an ASP.NET scripting language.
K Scott asks why such an interesting language that's been around for so long isn't well known. Morten speculates on some reasons and talks about why he thinks it's seeing a resurgence.
Morten and K Scott talk about some of the examples which really show off the language, such as a one line implementation of Conway's Game Of Life.
Morten talks about how APL sees matrices as a fundamental concept, expressing them at a level higher than objects.
APL is a very agile language, as it encourages direct interaction from domain experts.
Morten recommends http://tryapl.org, an interactive website where you can learn more about APL.
That's it! Scott runs off to tackle some more lightning round interviews.

Show Links:

Herding Code 139 - Lightning Round with Roy Osherove on his new book, Notes to a software team leader Apr 11, 2012

Show notes

Episode 139

While at Software Passion Summit, K Scott continues a series of lightning round interviews with Roy Osherove discussing Roy's new book, Notes to a software team leader.

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 139 - Lightning Round with Roy Osherove

Show Notes:

K Scott asks Roy about his new book.
Roy talks about the LeanPub approach.
Roy describes the two parts of the book - elastic leadership and community contributions featuring notes from team leaders.
K Scott says that our industry often throws developers into leadership positions, and the transition can be difficult. Roy agrees, and says these are the notes he'd wished he had when he was a new leader. Back then he thought he was doing a good job, and was having fun, but wasn't really doing his job.
Roy talks about how he got started, explaining how his passion is at the crossroads of where people and software meet. This book is coming out because it needs to come out - it's a missing book.
Different team phases require different leadership types, describing his elastic leadership approach that deals with the three phases he's observed:
- Chaos phase
- Learning phase
- Self organizing team
What are some common mistakes?
- Not recognizing which phase your team is in
- Being afraid of talking to people about difficult things
- Not understanding how to influence behavior
That's it! Scott runs off to tackle some more lightning round interviews.

Show Links:

Herding Code 138 - Lightning Round with Douglas Crockford Apr 11, 2012

Show notes

Episode 138

While at Software Passion Summit, K Scott did a series of four Lightning Round interviews, starting with Douglas Crockford.

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 138 - Douglas Crockford

Show Notes:

K Scott asks Douglas what he meant when he said that the human brain wasn't designed for this sort of work? What were we designed for? Douglas talks about how our minds are selected for hunting and gathering, but we have to work with what we've got, relating this to some tips for defensive programming.
K Scott asks about JSLint. Douglas talks about how he thinks all languages should have code quality tools.
The increment operator came over from C++ due to pointer operations. Bad idea?
K Scott asks where he sees JavaScript going. Are things moving too fast, or too slow? Douglas talks about the difficulty of supporting multiple browsers and versions. EcmaScript 5didn't break things, but EcmaScript 6 is making some bets to allow for that.
EcmaScript 5 introduced "use strict" - how does that work? Douglas talks about the use of useless expressions.
K Scott asks what developers should be doing today. Douglas says developers should be working in the intersection of EcmaScript 3 and the strict parts of EcmaScript 5 to be ready for EcmaScript 6.
That's it! Scott runs off to tackle some more lightning round interviews.

Show Links:

Douglas Crockford
JavaScript, The Good Parts
JSLint
EcmaScript 5
Strict Mode Is Coming To Town (YUI Blog post by Douglas Crockford)
ECMAScript 5: The New Parts

Herding Code 137 - Mass Assignment, New New iPad, JavaScript libraries, Windows 8, Visual Studio, and Sad Trombones Mar 29, 2012

Show notes

Episode 137

Oh, hey. A discussion show. Haven't done one of those for a while. Bonus: recorded during the day so K Scott's awake. Download / Listen: Herding Code 137: Mass Assignment, New New iPad, JavaScript libraries, Windows 8, Visual Studio, and Sad Trombones Show Notes:

K Scott asks everyone's opinions on the GitHub / Ruby on Rails "mass assignment" debacle.
- Everyone talks about mass assignment binding issues in MVC frameworks, including Rails and ASP.NET MVC - is this a security issue in the frameworks, or the web developer's responsibility?
- Jon says that it's often tricky to debug negative cases, Kevin says that everything should be secure by default, and Scott K can go either way on it.
K Scott asks us all who will buy the new new iPad.
- Scott K says it struck him that they were limited in demonstrating it by the projection resolution.
- Kevin wants one.
- Jon thought it was interesting that Retina isn't a hard DPI spec, it's driven by the expected distance the device will be from your eyes - can he get a Retina effect by just sitting far from his desktop monitors?
- There's a discussion about the lack of a version number.
- Jon wonders if that high quality of display will show up on other devices, or if Apple bought all the pixels. Oh, and patents.
- K Scott asks Kevin if Samsung users laugh at him.
- Jon says that's no longer a issue now that software updates brought 4G to this iPhone... magic!
Twitter question: What JavaScript libraries is everyone using?
- Kevin talks about the Mocha JavaScript test framework.
- Jon mentions Upshot from the ASP.NET Single Page Application framework.
- K Scott talks about Sylvester and Zoomooz.
- Scott K talks about tiny libraries like Zepto, Ender, and the Micro.js list.
- Jon says he likes cdnjs.com for JavaScript library hosting.
Scott K talks about the difficulty he had in shutting down Windows 8.
- Jon says it's all about search now... and what's wrong with hitting the start button to power off?
- Scott K says we've been trained for decades not to do that.
- Jon says this is the biggest shift since Windows 95... there's a lot of learning and unlearning to do.
What about Visual Studio 11?
- There's some discussion about the color and design aspects. Should there be color? Metro?
- Jon says at least it's a lot faster, and he likes the quick search.
- Scott K said it worked fine once he figured out what it was for... and maybe there should be fewer items in the menu to begin with.
- Jon throws out a crazy idea - what about the ribbon interface for Visual Studio and kind of convinces Kevin.
- Scott K says the memory usage is still way too high. Jon asks if that really matters. After some discussion, Scott K says something's slow in there.
- Oh, hey, the macro recorder's gone now. Jon actually used that in Visual Studio recently.
- Kevin asks if there's really no way to customize the install anymore. The gang all agree they don't want to install stuff like C++ and VSTO. Jon says the blog post says that few people actually customize the installation, but Scott K doesn't believe it.
- Scott K runs through some fun issues on the Visual Studio UserVoice.
- Kevin put up a bajillion issues on Connect long ago, most are Closed - Won't Fix.
Jon talks about a post about 24 bit / 192 khz audio he read. Nobody seems to care all that much.
Jon asks everyone what they've been up to.
- K Scott's travelling around and working on project that's Ruby / Mongo on the backend and ASP.NET MVC on the front end. This freaks Kevin out.
- Jon's been working on ASP.NET MVC / Web API release stuff and hacking on Code52 project late at night.
- Scott K spoke recently at NodePDX on is doing a bunch of crazy stuff at work around deployment.
- Kevin remembers what a DSN is when nobody else does.
Somebody sneaks in a Sad Trombone. Jon is unable to figure out who is playing tricks and motions to adjourn.

Show Links:

GitHub posts: Public Key Security Vulnerability and Mitigation and Responsible Disclosure Policy
Brad Wilson post: Input Validation vs. Model Validation in ASP.NET MVC
Mocha - JavaScript test framework
Sylvester - Vector and Matrix math for JavaScript
Zoomooz - an easy-to-use jQuery plugin for making any web page element zoom
Zepto - a minimalist JavaScript framework for modern web browsers*, with a jQuery-compatible syntax
Ender - The no-library library
microjs - tiny JavaScript libraries
cdnjs.com - The missing CDN (for all the other JavaScript libraries)
Windows 8 blog post - Evolving the Start menu
Visual Studio 11 Beta Performance blog post series
Visual Studio UserVoice
Kevin Dente's Visual Studio Connect Bug list
24/192 Music Downloads ...and why they make no sense
Scott K's talk at NodePDX - info / video

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