Herding Code

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Herding Code 126: Jeff Atwood on the overlap of Video Games and Learning Nov 15, 2011

Show notes

Episode 126

On this episode of Herding Code, the guys talk to Jeff Atwood about the intersection of video games and learning, along the way discussing music, learning to program, casual games, bleeding edge games about bleeding (Battlefield 3), Kinect, Wii, and retro games.

Jeff talks about video games as a gateway to programming. Jon and Jeff talk about how video games teach a skill which is valuable in programming - the ability to accept and work with arbitrary rules.
Jeff talks about the crappy games he has created.
The guys talk about how Rocksmith can teach you how to actually play a real guitar. The guys compare Rocksmith to Rock Band and Guitar Hero, and Jeff talks about how really learning guitar skills takes work, and Rocksmith and Rock Band take two very different approaches.
There's a discussion of how well Rocksmith senses what you're playing, and how musical performances are by nature interpretive and imprecise.
The guys talk about how video games can lead to real world knowledge and skills.
Jeff brings up the concept of gamification and how it can be used to get people to learn something worthwhile. He discusses the balance of fun and learning, and the importance of keeping learning fun.
Jeff talks about Khan Academy, and how it leverages gamification.
Jon talks about Codecademy - free, interactive programming classes with some game-like features.
K. Scott talks about the Roblox game and using Roblox Studio to do some basic programming.
Jon talks about the World of Goo, and how he'd helped his own daughters build their own levels in World of Goo.
Jeff talks about incidental learning and how games can encourage it.
Jeff says programmers need more points of reference than XKCD to explain things.
Jeff and Kevin talks about the power of gamification as a psychology hack, and how it can be used for good and evil.
Kevin brings up the idea of addiction to Stack Overflow. Jeff talks about the ways that Stack Overflow tries to prevent burnout of contributors.
Jeff talks about the balance of effort and reward, and how Stack Overflow sometimes over-rewards people for minimal work on their part.
The guys talk about video games that encourage teamwork, such as World of Warcraft, Battlefield 3, and Half-Life.
The guys discuss Microsoft Kinect and compare it to the Nintendo Wii. There's a discussion of the controller responsiveness and selection gestures for these systems, and the importance of writing a game that's native to these new platforms as opposed to simple ports.
Jon takes from questions from Twitter about Jeff's favorite retro games, and Jeff says video game nostalgia is overrated - he's really excited about the new games like Battlefield 3.
Kevin asks about MAME and home arcades. Jeff says it was interesting to have build two home arcade machines, but it's not something he'd want to spend anymore time on.
Jon talks about Braid, and the hidden insanely tough extra game of finding all 8 stars.
The guys congratulate Jeff on his recent news that he's expecting twins, and he signs off to play Battlefield 3.

Show Links:

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Herding Code 126: Jeff Atwood on Video Games and Gamification

This week's show notes were typed up by @rossfuhrman - Thanks!!!

Herding Code 125: Truffler with Joel Abrahamsson, Marcus Granstrom and Henrik Lindstrom Nov 04, 2011

Show notes

Episode 125

On this episode of Herding Code, the guys talk to Joel Abrahamsson, Marcus Granström and Henrik Lindström about Truffler, a solution for building advanced search and querying functionality for websites and other data-centric systems.

They talk about their backgrounds and combining their different skills to build something pretty awesome.
K. Scott says Truffler has a REST API and can be called from several languages (.NET, Java, js). How to send queries, where is the data?
Joel explains they're using Elastic search, which indexes JSON documents; you push data to it in the form of JSON, then query it using JSON. The data is stored, but the point is to build awesome search.
Marcus points out you can get a Truffler in a box, where you get a server to your house so you can run it inside your own internet if you like.
K. Scott mentions the examples using the C# API on the Truffler home page. Do you convert that to a URL for your service?
Joel talks about using Elastic Search and the bits they've added on top of it, including the various integrations or client APIs they are making available.
K. Scott says he ran through their example; was able to just bang his way through it without having to dig into the documentation too much.
Joel: Instead of bringing your data to the search engine, we're trying to bring the search engine to you, so you can query it in a way that feels natural in C#. That's the whole point of Truffler.
Jon Asks about being able to search for a keyword and also have a geographical search and how that works.
Joel says they search for the keyword and then filter by coordinates, which does not affect relevance. Can specify that matches for the keyword have double the relevance of non-matches.
Talking about the ability to modify relevance and rank criteria higher and lower.
K. Scott asks if they contribute any patches or make any patches or augment anything to the technology they are building on?
Henrik has gone through the elastic search source code quite a few times. Found bugs, but not trying to augment it, just trying to find a way to package it in a nice way.
Jon asks about the document search capabilities (pdf, xml, word, etc) - part of elastic search? Or did you have to do some of that work?
Marcus replied that most features are basically from the elastic search core functions. The mods we have are just bug fixes. Not exposing any new functionality, just providing some features that are a little different from the core project.
They're trying to make search easier so you don't have to analyze and then index your data; they'll do that for you.
Jon asks about highlighted words and bacon. Joel says it's configurable. Can ask for one big fragment with highlighted keywords, or several small fragments, comes back as a separate fields in the JSON document. To make it as easy as possible, they are using LINQ syntax. Example: Select.As Highlighted()
Discussing how to add search to your website/blog.
They're using JSON.NET. Discusses client class and using extension methods.
They discuss how to do a Google-type search - typing in textbox, brings results.
K. Scott: Any support for Word and PDF? Joel: Yes, it's out of the box with Elastic Search; handles all kinds of formats.
K. Scott asks what the biggest challenge is. Joel: Everything. Branding, building the product, figuring out the market.
K. Scott says this is actually a product and a business now; was that new for the three of you? Joel says yes; were forced into it when working for a customer together who needed to search and query data not stored in a normalized database. Was the initial seed idea of Truffler.
K. Scott asks about node. Henrik said they use node as a reverse proxy to do authentication for Elastic Search.
They know what it can do; they can control how it's used. It's scary and exciting to see how people are using it.
Marcus said have to know what queries they want before they come; they are adapting it to handle so many queries without knowing what people are going to use it for.
Jon asks about performance / caching results on client side. Joel says servers can handle a lot, but there's always latency. With .NET, allow you to cache search queries, which are serialized. For Get requests, don't have caching; they're pretty quick, but will add them in the future.
K. Scott asks what's next. Lots of features; very interested in feedback. Have partners/customers testing with large sets of data. Lots of things in the .NET API they don't expose but would like to. Want to provide as much flexibility as possible.
K. Scott asks about storing his own metrics. Providing some metrics about how his search is being used? They're working on that, and SSL, encrypted indexes in planning stage.
Jon asks about support for custom synonyms; they explain what that means.
Plans and prices - free for developer. Then have basic and premium plans depending on how much you're using it, what features you want, etc.
Joel says they have support for inheritance.
Jon asks about pricing. With developer license, if have open source project, get quite a bit of functionality and features.
Joel says that for developers, they want to encourage use. Would like feedback.
Jon asks how this compares to other search engine options and other document databases like RavenDB? Joel says you can use it for a document database, but that's not the primary purpose of it. Raven is an awesome document database with text search, where this is awesome text search with basic document database capabilities. Henrik says if you take hardcore search, their main idea is not to provide hardcore search, but to enable developers to utilize search without being search experts.
Released client for Episerver, used widely in Sweden. Truffler will take care of indexing and hook up to events for you. They have the concept of filtering (using the LINQ where method), and have the ability to extend that.
K. Scott asks if this is open source. Joel says not exposing the source code at the moment. The .NET API is a very important part of their product, do some really cool things with it, would like to keep it to themselves. May release it in the future.
Truffler web site is truffler.net. On the about page, there are links to twitter and Joel's blog.

Show Links:

http://truffler.net
Joel Abrahamsson: Twitter, Blog
Marcus Granström: Twitter
Henrik Lindström: Twitter
elasticsearch
Raven DB
Truffler package on NuGet
Read-only service at http://sample.truffler.net/ (downloadable from https://github.com/200OK/TrufflerSample)

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Herding Code 125: Truffler with Joel Abrahamsson, Marcus Granstrom and Henrik Lindstrom

This week's show notes were typed up by @RobinDotNet - Thanks!!!

Herding Code 124: Anthony van der Hoorn and Nik Molnar on Glimpse Oct 24, 2011

Show notes

Episode 124

On this episode, the guys talk to Anthony van der Hoorn and Nik Molnar about Glimpse, which allows you to debug your web site or web service right in the browser.

Jon asks why Glimpse was created.
Anthony gives a high-level explanation of what Glimpse does.
Glimpse is for your server what Firebug is for your browser.
Glimpse exposes a plugin architecture that allows it to be extended as necessary.
Kevin asks if Glimpse can be leveraged from application code. Nik explains it is possible, but 99% of the functionality you need will not require any extra code in your application.
You can point your logging framework to Glimpse and then you can see log entries relevant to the request.
The guys talk about how Glimpse fits in with NLog, ELMAH, mvc-mini-profiler, etc.
Nik says Firebug + Fiddler + Glimpse is the trifecta of development tools.
Jon asks how Glimpse can be used to help a user experiencing trouble with a production site.
Jon asks about running Glimpse in production.
Twitter question from @danielauger: "What was the most difficult metric to tap into?"
Anthony and Nik explain all the detail that is tracked in the Execution tab of Glimpse.
Anthony talks about how they decided to display all the data that Glimpse has.
Jon and Anthony talk about how Glimpse could be used to improve page response times.
Kevin asks about the performance overhead of using Glimpse and using it in production.
Nik explains how Glimpse plugins are enabled/disabled.
Jon asks about seeing the validation rules for a particular request.
Anthony talks about what is added in to core Glimpse versus what goes in to Glimpse plugins.
Jon asks about how Glimpse handles Ajax.
Kevin asks about record-and-replay functionality in Glimpse.
Jon asks about the implementation of the client side display of Glimpse data.
Nik explains how to configure Glimpse to easily compare differences between test, staging and production environments.
Jon asks about the future of Glimpse.

Show links:

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Herding Code 124: Anthony van der Hoorn and Nik Molnar on Glimpse

Note: Thanks to @rossfuhrman for typing our show notes this week!

Herding Code 123: Andreas Håkansson and Steven Robbins on NancyFx Oct 17, 2011

Show notes

Episode 123

On this episode, the guys talk to Andreas and Steven about Nancy, a lightweight, low-ceremony, framework for building HTTP based services on .Net and Mono.

Scott Koon asks why Nancy was developed and what are the problems going up against ASP.NET.
Andreas explains Nancy is a lighter approach and doesn't get in the way.
Andreas explains a basic Hello World - 5 lines of code, and Steven points out a Nancy app fits in a single Tweet.
Nancy has No System.Web dependencies - just depends on the Client profile, and works great on Mono.
Jon asks about support for OWIN, a Rack equivalent for .NET. Combining Nancy and OWIN allows you to have an end-to-end OSS solution.
Jon asks about support for view engines, and Andreas says that Nancy supports most major view engines including Razor and Spark. There are quite a few Nuget plugins.
Andreas points out that you can do most things in Nancy that you can do in ASP.NET MVC.
Jon asks if you can add Nancy to an existing ASP.NET MVC app.
The group discusses the value of having many competing web frameworks.
Steven explains Nancy isn't about crushing the competition, just providing a different approach that some people might prefer.
Jon asks Andreas about his post about the value of OSS being the vision not the code.
Jon asks about web application security for Nancy - since it's a lightweight framework, am I on my own when it comes to security? Steven explains the security features in Nancy, and how they work without requiring a dependency on System.Web.
Jon asks how many users of Nancy there are.
Kevin asks what the most challenging part of developing Nancy has been. - Steven: HTTP implementation and the syntax simplicity. Andreas: fighting C# syntax limitations.
Kevin asks whether Nancy is trying to be ASP.NET MVC.
The group discusses extensibility and custom configurations.
Andreas explains Nancy will be adding static and trace diagnostics in the future.
Twitter question from @bitbonk: "Relate or compare NancyFx with WCF Web API."
Twitter question from @codereflection: "can we get around having to mock httpcontext w/ Nancy? Do we even need to?"
Via Twitter, @kppullin asks about how the Nancy team decides how to add features.
Jon asks about the best places for interested users to get information, and there's a discussion of documentation, Google Groups, Twitter, and screencasts.
Jon asks about a NuGet packages that would have some samples. Andreas explains why the samples are included along with the source code on Github instead.
Kevin asks whether they do performance testing, and how Nancy's performance stacks up.

Show Links:

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Herding Code 123: Andreas Håkansson and Steven Robbins on NancyFx

Note: Thanks to @rossfuhrman for typing our show notes this week!

Herding Code 122: Bert Belder on porting Node.js to Windows Oct 11, 2011

Show notes

Episode 122

This episode of Herding Code the guys talk to Bert Belder, a Node.js developer who's working on the native Windows port.

Kevin asks how Bert got started with Node.js. Bert explains that he was working on a PHP based system which had a good amount of logic in Javascript, and he started looking to node as a way to consolidate that logic.
K. Scott ask Bert about how you'd go about sharing Javascript between client and server.
Kevin asks how the Windows port of Node.js got started, and whether there was any resistance to it.
Jon asks if the eventing model in Windows was one of the more difficult things Bert had to work on. Bert explains that getting REPL (read evaluate print loop) to work on Windows as it did on Unix was actually one of the more difficult challenges at the beginning.
K. Scott asks about experience of running Node.js. Bert talks about how Node.js runs as an executable, and it's up to you to set up an HTTP server.
Kevin asks about the team that's working on the Windows port.
Kevin asks Bert for more info on technical challenges on getting Node.js not only working on Windows, but really performing. Bert describes some challenges in implementing I/O Completion Ports, spawning child processes, etc.
Jon says that some of the initial negative feedback he'd seen on the announcement of the Windows port was concern over negative performance implications for the Unix version, and Bert says that one of the criteria they're working under is that Unix performance not be degraded.
Kevin asks Bert if he had a background in high performance networking, of if he'd been figuring things out as he went along. Bert explains that he and the team have had a good amount of time to work on this, so they had a pretty good idea of how to solve this.
Jon asks about performance testing, and Bert describes some of the load tests that they use.
K. Scott asks about if most Node.js modules will work on Windows. Bert says he guesses 90% will work, and the ones that won't are making operating-system specific assumptions.
Jon asks Bert about his work on libuv, the abstracted platform layer for Node.js, and Kevin asks about the process of designing this abstraction layer.
Kevin asks Bert if there are places where Windows is more flexible or powerful than Linux. Bert explains that since node was written for Unix first, it wasn't built to exploit Windows advantages, but with Windows kernel mode HTTP stack might be useful in the future.
K. Scott asks if the port could have been aided by open source projects like Cygwin. Bert explains how Cygwin isn't really helpful in making node.js work well on Windows.
Jon asks if dropping support for Cygwin in Node.js will affect users, and Bert says the only effect may be for addons which are written so as to be Unix-only.
Kevin asks about Windows support for NPM.
There's a discussion about the different hosting options on Windows including Azure and iisnode. Kevin asks about service hosting to allow socket level access (below IIS).
Kevin asks if there's a plan for cross-platform system support for modules that need native access. Bert talks about changes to npm to support binary hosting so operating system specific binaries can be automatically downloaded.
Kevin asks if there will be a focused effort to get node module authors to support Windows.
Jon asks about multi-core scenarios. Bert talks about different options, explaining that iisnode can help with this, but he hasn't seen options for interprocess communication in iisnode or in in either multi-core scenarios.
Kevin asks about the use of gyp for the node.js build process and about Bert's development environment on Windows.
Kevin wraps up by asking Bert how to pronounce his twitter handle.

Show Links:

Bert Belder (@piscisaureus)
Node.js
Porting Node to Windows with Microsoft's Help (announcement post on blog.nodejs.com)
I/O Completion Ports (MSDN)
ApacheBench
libuv (github)
Installing and Running node.js applications within IIS on Windows - Are you mad? (Scott Hanselman post about iisnode)
gyp (Generate Your Project)

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Herding Code 122: Bert Belder on porting node.js to Windows

Herding Code 121: Sara Chipps updates us on Girl Develop It at one year Sep 23, 2011

Show notes

Episode 121

This episode of Herding Code Kevin and Jon catch up with Sara Chipps to find out how Girl Develop It is going.

Kevin jumps right into it by asking Sara about what's been going on over the past year. Sara goes back to what was on their minds as they were first getting started with their first class, and how that's grown to 6 cities worldwide, and their original New York chapter offers 20 classes a month with 5 teachers.
Kevin asks where the other teachers came from, and Sara spins a tall tale about flamethrower classes. Well, maybe it's true, but I find it a bit suspect.
Kevin asks about where the classes are held.
Jon asks about how the money part works out. Sara explains how the class fees, donations, and teacher payments all work out.
Kevin asks Sara about about what tools they teach, and Sara mentions Aptana.
Jon asks for some success stories and Sara tells a few.
Kevin asks how many students go through several classes; Sara says they see about 25% frequent fliers.
Jon asks if there's some measurement of how much the students actually learn. Sara explains that the classes include a good amount of hands-on work and homework, and that she and the other teachers continue to learn how to gage when students are getting lost.
Kevin asks if there are some students that just don't get it, and Sara says that some students have a tough time understanding that a single missing character can break a whole program. Everyone commiserates about this fun part of software development. Jon speculates that young women may be missing out on some of the split between cold logic and reason because they don't play enough video games.
Jon notes that a lot of real world computer programming involves problem solving and support network and asks if students are equipped with those things. Sara talks about how anyone watching her code will see a good amount of debugging; additionally she teaches students about how to use StackOverflow so they can get their questions solved.
Kevin asks how the curriculum and courses have evolved over the past year. Sara and Jon talk about the amount of time and effort involved in preparing decent training materials.
Kevin asks about changes in teaching approach over the course of the past year. Sara said she's moved from code-only to using some slides, and that when writing code it's important to walk through it in pretty good detail.
Kevin asks what's been different from expectations, and Sara talks about both the amount of interest and community goodwill.
Kevin asks about how Girl Develop It has spread to other cities, and asks about how much of the content is shared between cities.
Jon asks about how the branding and design is handled.
Jon asks if there are advanced classes or seminars.
Jon asks Sara what sort of projects she's been working on lately. Sara says it's pretty much all Javascript lately.
Kevin asks if there will be a node.js class (drink!)
Kevin asks what's next for Girl Develop It, which prompts Sara to talk about the first Girl Develop It hack-a-thon. Apparently these are like a guy hack-a-thon except with less pizza and body odor and more resort and catering.
Kevin asks if Girl Develop It could develop into a full time gig. Sara says that all the leaders love developing and don't want to give that up, so they're still trying to figure that out.
Jon asks how listeners can support Girl Develop It. Sara lists a range of options, including book, laptop donations, and meeting space. Kevin asks about cash contributions.
Jon and Kevin note that there are no West Coast US branches. Sara mentions that a bay area location may start soon.
Kevin asks about the 15% male attendance in Girl Develop It, and Sara explains how that works.
Jon asks if there's potential for virtual events and video recordings. Sara explains that, while it sounds great logistically, it misses out on a lot of the most important aspects of the Girl Develop It classroom experience. They've got trial running in the Columbus branch, though, so they'll see how it goes.
Sara teases about an interesting hack-a-thon project they did recently using the Aviary API's called Stash Your Stash, which removes moustaches from photos because "they're super creepy!"

Show Links:

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Herding Code 121: Sara Chipps updates us on Girl Develop It at one year

Herding Code 120: Ryan Stewart on RIAs and All Things Adobe Sep 13, 2011

Show notes

Episode 120

This episode of Herding Code the guys talk to Ryan Stewart, a developer evangelist at Adobe.

Scott K asks about the pricing of Adobe products. Ryan explains why things are priced as they are and talks about the subscription model alternative.
Jon talks about the open other free or inexpensive alternatives for beginning Adobe development since the formats are generally open sourced. Ryan agrees and also explains that Adobe's entire pricing model is built around tools, whereas Microsoft's includes both tools and servers.
Jon asks about the licensing around Flash Media Server. Ryan explains that it's not something general developers will need to deal with.
Scott K speculates around the idea of appliances from Adobe which would be complete video / media processing systems. Ryan says he thinks that's interesting but he doesn't expect anything like that to happen.
Jon asks about the general trends away from some rich internet abuses in the past. Ryan and Jon talk about the polyfill approach for using Flash and RIA technologies to augment browsers when the features aren't supported. Ryan and Scott K talk about how developers and the tech press have quickly forgotten that many of the new emerging browser capabilities (typography, media, animation) are modeled after capabilities that RIA technologies initially pioneered.
Scott K points out that this is a good segue to the new Edge tool. Ryan talks about how Edge is a designer tool that creates CSS3 and JavaScript animation using the timeline that Flash designers are used to. Jon mentions that this makes more sense to him when thinking about Adobe primarily as a developer tools company rather than a platform oriented company.
Jon asks about Adobe support for HTML5 / CSS3 development in Edge with Flash fallback. Ryan talks about how they generally keep them separate, and if browser-based animation isn't supported it just won't play.
Kevin asks about how Edge affects the accessibility of the underlying content.
Jon asks about how Flash Builder 4.5 allows for developing native iOS and Android applications. Ryan explains how it works and clarifies how it complies with Apple developer guidelines. There's a mention of the popular Mono apps which run on iOS.
Twitter question from Chris Edwards: "What are the are the best tools for automated testing of Flash UI's" - Ryan recommends HP Quick Test Pro
Scott K asks about Adobe Air - it seemed great, but seems to have kind of fallen out of favor. What's the deal there? Ryan talks about how Air was both a great, bold idea, but also a new challenge for Adobe, in that Air applications are much longer running than most Flash apps.
Jon asks about some annoyances in installing updates for Air, Flash, etc. Ryan explains some of the reasons for the updates. Jon asks about the possibility to add in more of an auto-update experience.
Jon asks Ryan about some of the new features in Flash. Ryan talks about a lot of features, including Stage Video and 3D GPU support and graphics features. Scott K. asks if there are opportunities for leveraging WebGL, and Ryan says that there have been discussions about that but nothing's in progress yet.
Ryan asks the guys what they're expecting at at BUILD, and they all clam up. Scott K. ask about Flash on Windows Phone. Ryan says it'd be great, but he'd be surprised given the Silverlight support on Windows Phone. Kevin's happy that speculation will finally stop. Scott K. talks it's good that developers are having to care about memory and CPU usage again.
Ryan talks about the difficulty of bringing richness and creativity to the client without adversely impacting performance.
Scott K asks about the current state of Adobe Labs. Ryan points out that the Adobe MAX conference is coming up in October, so Labs will probably be pretty quiet until then.
Jon asks about Muse. Ryan explains that really targeted at print designers who want to create web content, so it's not really a tool for web designers or developers.
Jon asks about some Adobe client products which are developed in Air.
Scott K. asks about what big surprises may be happening at MAX this year. Ryan and and Scott K. speculate a bit more about BUILD, and Ryan tells listeners who recognize him at BUILD to please say hi. Jon says he might sneak in if he can locate a catering costume.

Show Links:

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Herding Code 120: Ryan Stewart on RIAs and all things Adobe

Herding Code 119: On The Writing Technical Books (with Jesse Liberty, Phil Haack, and Brad Wilson) Aug 27, 2011

Show notes

Episode 119

This episode of Herding Code the guys talk to Jesse Liberty, Phil Haack, and Brad Wilson about writing technical books. Jesse has written dozens of technical books, and both Brad and Phil worked with Jon and K. Scott on the recently released ASP.NET Professional MVC 3 book. What's it like to write a book? Why do it at all? How does the process work? How is it changing? Is Angry Birds your favorite story? Join us for a very literary version of Herding Code to find out.

We start with a listener question from @tpdorsey (Terrence Dorsey): "*Printed* books? If so, why bother? I ask this as a print writer and editor for 17 of last 20 years."
There's a discussion of the value that the editorial process adds to books as compared to blog posts.
Twitter question from @schwarty: "Best way to work a first time deal? Submit queries? Try to team up with co-writers?" Phil, Brad, Jon, K. Scott, and Jesse tell stories about how they got their first book deals.
Phil notes that most authors get a start in other mediums - blogs, magazines, possibly StackOverflow in the future.
Jesse talks about his investigation of self-publishing. In the end, he decided that the editorial process tipped the scales towards working with a publishing company.
Jon references Twitter questions from @devhammer and @jglozano on dealing with procrastination, making time to write, etc. He points to positive pressure of working for a publisher under a schedule and a contract to get the book out the door. Brad talks about how peer pressure from other authors to keep up is also helpful.
There's discussion about the challenge writing up an outline before starting the book. Phil talks about how the publishing industry in general is pretty stuck on older technologies like FTP, and in general the process feels like waterfall software development.
Jesse says that if you're reasonably on schedule, publishers are pretty flexible about changes to the outline.
Brad answers listener questions from @stevenproctor "Have you found e-readers coming into their own to influence how you think about book?" and "has it changed how you think about layout/presentation for cross format reading" saying that it was difficult to write without seeing what the end result would look like, but he was very happy when he saw the end result, both in print and the e-book format.
Jon talks about how working with book templates from various publishers has taught him to appreciate the use of styles in Word, explaining a case where he was able to search for code snippets based on the styles that were used.
Kevin asks some interesting questions about whether working on the book puts pressures on when to ship the product, and whether writing a book about a product points out features that should be changed. Brad explains that the king of product changes due to writing (blogging in this case) is Scott Guthrie.
Phil talks about how Eilon (the technical reviewer) was good at keeping him from digging too far into minute details that nobody would care about. Jon explains that Eilon pointed out that the Controllers chapter was going way into the weeds before actually showing the most common use case, and Brad says that he's in good company with an example from Charles Petzold's book on Windows programming.
Jon talks about the tricky chicken-and-egg situation with trying to explain the MVC pattern in depth, since an in-depth explanation of the Model, View, and Controller requires an in-depth understanding of the other components. Jon asks Jesse about how he handles that, and Jesse talks about the importance of having a model user and getting volunteer readers as you're writing.
Jon talks about the benefit of working with other authors. Brad talks about the this is more important with products with quick release cycles, and Phil compares book writing with software development techniques.
There's a discussion on ensuring a consistent voice in a book with more than one author.
Phil, Jon, and Brad discuss the conflict between beginner and advanced content. Are the experts who are asking for advanced content representative of most readers? Phil points out that writing advanced content is a lot more fun, but limits the audience. Can a book please everyone? Is there a way to include beginner and advanced content? Jesse describes some ways he handles this, and says that it's important to set expectations.
Jon talks about the decision to remove NerdDinner, referring instead to the MVC Music Store tutorial.
Jesse says that it's remarkable that books are still selling well, since they're competing with blogs, tutorials, videos, etc. He speculates that the main selling point for books now is in context: telling a story. Jon asks how he manages to do that.
Phil talks about the decision to put all the book's code samples in NuGet (triggering the Haacked NuGet Drinking Game clause).
Jesse talks about the mismatch between the publisher's requirements for a flow of completed chapters and the software developer's desire to refactor.
Jon asks K. Scott how writing magazine articles compares to writing for a book.
That's pretty much it.

Show Links:

Jesse Liberty (@jesseliberty)
Phil Haack (@haacked)
Brad Wilson (@bradwilson)
Professional ASP.NET MVC 3 on Amazon and at Wrox.com
Jesse's dozens of books on Amazon
Eilon Lipton

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 118: On The Writing Technical Books (with Jesse Liberty, Phil Haack, and Brad Wilson)

Herding Code 118: Paul Betts on SassAndCoffee Aug 11, 2011

Show notes

Episode 118

This episode of Herding Code the guys talk to Paul Betts about SassAndCoffee, a NuGet package that adds runtime Sass and CoffeeScript compilation to ASP.NET.

Jon asks Paul about his role on the Office Labs team [Spoiler alert! Since this podcast, Paul has started a new job at GitHub!]
Jon asks Paul about why he got interested in Sass and Coffee for web development.
Jon asks Paul how an Office dev gets away with liking Ruby and Python.
Paul describes Sass (Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets), a meta-language for CSS that adds in variables, nested rules, inheritance, mixins, etc.
Paul explains how SassAndCoffee is designed to eliminate fiddling, so he's gone to great lengths to make the NuGet package just work without any setup.
Kevin points out that this is at run-time rather than at build. Paul talks about the advantages of run-time compilation (especially interactive CSS edit / refresh) as well as potential downsides (performance, potential for compilation errors). Scott K also mentions that it might be useful for CDN deployment and continuous integration.
Jon asks about the new package definition file the 1.0 release, and Paul explains how it tells Visual Studio that the .coffee files are to be included with the project build.
Paul explains how the CoffeeScript compiler works using an HttpHandler, Jurrassic, and V8. Jon asks if he'd looked at IronJS, and Paul describes why that didn't work for him.
Paul explains the hurdles he went through to get V8 running under an ASP.NET HttpHandler, since V8 assumes that it will always be accessed from a single threaded process.
Jon asks Paul about his use of uglify.js for Javascript optimization and compression.
Scott K asks about the ability to swap out other compilers, e.g. the Google Closure Compiler.
Paul talks about some of the commits he's had recently, including support for Nancy, better cache configuration and some useful refactoring. Jon and Paul discuss how some refactoring patches - especially blind Resharpering - are less than helpful.
The discussion shifts to how Paul got Sass working without requiring the user to have a local Ruby installation, including some crazy tricks with the DLR's platform resource library to embed a portion of the Ruby standard library as an embedded resource in the NuGet package via a virtual R: drive.
Jon asks if it's possible for others to reuse Paul's Ruby embedding technique in other applications.
Jon, K. Scott, and Paul discuss commenting policy, and Paul explains why he liberally commented certain sections of the code.
Paul mentions how the V8 integration falls back to Jurassic in case it can't run for some reason.
Kevin asks if Paul looked into creating native ports of Sass or CoffeeScript, and Paul explains why he decided to set up compilers for the original versions rather than port them.
Jon talks about how he'd looked at Zen Coding and mused about how to implement it in Visual Studio, deciding as Paul had that it's better
Twitter question from @elijahmanor about IDE support for Sass and CoffeeScript. Note: since the podcast, the Mindscape Web Workbench has made this available.
Scott K points out that the MVC 4 roadmap includes support for recipes, which should help with extending the IDE via NuGet.
Paul wraps up the nerdy internals of SassAndCoffee by explaining how he's handling loading the 32 and 64 bit versions of the V8 C++ CLI DLL depending on the user's CPU architecture.
Jon asks about what server-side hosting requirements are needed to run SassAndCoffee.
Kevin asks whether the V8 API was easy to work with, and Paul says no.
Jon mentions that he appreciated all the thanks that Paul had in the readme, and Paul talks about how great it feels to thank people.
Jon asks what's next for SassAndCoffee, and Paul says he wants to add Compass.
Jon (jokingly) mentions that he's a fan of BrainScript and asks for support.
Paul and Jon discuss some of the nuttier esoteric languages they've seen.
Jon asks what else Paul's up to; Paul talks about the Reactive Extensions book he's working on with Jesse Liberty. Jon asks Paul a bit about what's new and interesting with Reactive Extensions.
Jon asks Paul about the interaction between Reactive Extensions and Interactive Extensions, and Paul explains by way of a Reactive Extensions history lesson.
There's a discussion on the (intentional) lack of a ForEach operator in LINQ
K Scott tells his terrifying story from NDC in which Eric Lippert was sitting in his talk.
Scott K asks about Reactive UI, another of Paul's projects, an MVVM framework which leverages Reactive Extensions.

Show Links:

SassAndCoffee git repo, NuGet package
Paul Betts (@xpaulbettsx)
Sass
CoffeeScript
IronJS
Jurassic
V8 JavaScript Engine
UglifyJS
Google Closure Compiler
Zen Coding
Mindscape Web Workbench
ASP.NET MVC 4 Roadmap
Compass
Silly language things on Esolangs.org
Programming Reactive Extensions and LINQ by Paul Betts and Jesse Liberty
Reactive Extensions
Eric Lippert's post: "foreach" vs. "ForEach"
ReactiveUI
You Are Not So Smart - The Sunk Cost Fallacy

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Herding Code 118: Paul Betts on SassAndCoffee

Herding Code 117: Llewellyn Falco on Approval Tests Jul 21, 2011

Show notes

Episode 117

This episode of Herding Code the guys talk to Llewellyn Falco about Acceptance Tests, an interesting testing framework for .NET, Java, Ruby, and PHP.

Jon talks about how much he enjoyed Llewellyn’s talk on refactoring legacy code at So Cal Code Camp, and was especially intrigued by Approval Tests.
Llewellyn explains how Approval Tests got started at a weekly coding for gun group.
Llewellyn explains at a high level the problem that Approval Tests solves.
Jon talks about what he noticed when he tried using approval tests – it’s not really so much about writing tests as in verifying output. Llewellyn how testing at the output verification level avoids many of the pitfalls of traditional unit testing.
Jon asks about the use of diff tools in Approval Tests.
Jon talks about the general flow of development using Approval Tests.
Llewellyn mentions that Approval Tests has native implementations for .NET, Java, Ruby, and PHP.
Jon asks about how the approved filetypes are set, and Llewellyn explains the overrides in Approvals.Approve().
Llewellyn talks about how Approvals makes it easy to test complex objects.
Llewellyn talks about how Approval Tests often only requires one test. Jon and K Scott ask about how that meshes with general testing practices which push towards very granular tests, and Llewellyn explains that he gets that granularity in the test coverage and results, but has the benefit of context in the test output as well.
Jon asks about how output verification works with ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC.
Llewellyn explains how the use of Approval Tests combinations rules can make it really test output based on multiple input combinations.
Llewellyn talks about how he especially likes using Approval Tests with legacy code , since it’s relatively easy to get good, working test coverage based on output rather than having to gain a deep understanding the internals of the legacy code . Jon and Llewellyn swap war stories about legacy code .
Jon asks if he should be obsessing about a bunch of extra files with the approved results hanging around. Because he is.
Jon asks about controlling file output; Llewellyn describes how namers, reporters, and writers provide flexibility.
Llewellyn mentions the Rx Koans he worked on and says that Approval Tests Koans are on the way soon.
Jon says that TDD has trained him to write tests that verify response to failure conditions.
Jon asks if Approval Tests will be available for JavaScript.
Jon asks what’s in the works for Approval Tests. Llewellyn talks about RDLC support and enhancements to the Visual Studio plugin.
Jon asks what code coverage information Approval Tests can provide.
Jon asks Llewellyn about how he get involved in Teaching Kids Programming.
There’s a discussion about why it’s important to introduce computer programming to high school aged girls with a great analogy from Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers book on the impact of birth month on competitive hockey players.
Llewellyn explains how the program works, and Jon mentions the prior show with Sara J Chipps ( Herding Code 90) about Girl Develop It.
Jon asks Llewellyn about upcoming speaking engagements

Show Links:

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Herding Code 117: Llewellyn Falcon on Approval Tests

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