Herding Code

Latest Episodes:

Herding Code 55: Nate Kohari brings Your Moment of Zen Jul 30, 2009

Show notes

Episode 55

Nate Kohari? Kanban Boards? Continuous Improvement? Zen? Stop right there! We know what you're thinking. You already heard this episode about three weeks ago on that other podcast, right? Well, think again, because this week on Herding Code, the guys pick up where that interview left off. Listen in as Nate Kohari, the creator of Ninject, talks about the technical nuts and business bolts of his new startup. Find out why Nate choose to build his online product predominantly on a Microsoft stack, how the site is going to scale, how he processes payments, and much, much more, this week on Herding Code.

Kevin sets the tone of the show and notes that the guys are going to steer clear of the questions already addressed on a recent Hanselman show. This talk will focus on technical and startup details.
Nate comments on why he build his application using the Microsoft stack. After all, most startups don't chose this path.
The guys talk about multiple browser support, jQuery, jQuery Plugins, CSS and Firefox Add-ons.
Jon asks about architectural patterns. Nate talks about ASP.NET MVC with the Spark View Engine.
Kevin asks about online payment integration? Was it painful?
Nate discusses hosting and scalability.
Scott K asks about the brains behind the operation and how her background may have inspired Zen's UI and overall flow.
Kevin asks Nate for any "words of wisdom" for those thinking about launching a startup.
Kevin wraps up the show asking Nate about what's to come with Ninject and Zen.

Zen Coupon Code: KAIZEN
50% off the first month, last to the end of July.

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Herding Code 55: Nate Kohari brings Your Moment of Zen

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

**Herding Code 54: Rob Conery interviews the Herding Code guys** Jul 18, 2009
Show notes

**Episode 54**
Let’s keep the party going! In this very special episode of Herding Code, Rob Conery puts Jon, Scott K and Kevin on the spot as he turns the tables and asks his own questions and passes his own judgments. Do you want to know how Herding Code came about? Are you curious how Rob and the guys feel Herding Code differs from the other podcasts? Have you ever wondered how the Herding Code members might map to the cast of The View? All in good fun, Rob derails the show and gives us a behind the scenes look into Herding Code productions.

The guys try to explain the value of Twitter to Rob. "Twitter makes me more productive." "You must cultivate your network." "It is all about who you follow." "Twitter is a fishing net." "I can quit at anytime."

Jon shares how Herding Code started with an inadvertent Skype conversation.

Scott K talks about Herding Code’s diverse guest list which doesn’t consist of the usual list of suspects which might be regulars on other shows.

The Kevin Dente Roast continues…

Rob compares the Herding Code with The View, identifies each cast members role and announces that Herding Code needs to build in the happy hour aspect of podcasting. Have another beer, Rob.

Jon talks about cannibalism and attacking oneself.

The guys discuss Rob’s new spokesmodel spokesman position at Microsoft, ongoing Kona development and a bit about community outreach.

Are you missing K Scott? Tune into this week’s show to find out what he’s doing now. You may be utterly surprised.

Show Links:

Rob Conery

Jeff Atwood

Scott Hanselman, Hanselminutes

John Resig

Phil Haack

Alan Stevens

G. Andrew Duthie

Greg Young

Shawn Wildermuth

Joe Brinkman

Shaun Walker

DotNetNuke

TechSmith, SnagIt, Jing

V8 JavaScript Engine

Leon Bambrick – New Synchronization Idea Overlooked By Microsoft Live team

Glenn Block

Ted Leung

Markus Völter

Matt Podwysocki

Shawn Burke

Bertrand Le Roy

Stephen Walther

DotNetRocks

Elegant Code Podcast

**Download / Listen:** Herding Code 54: Rob Conery interviews the Herding Code guys *Show notes compiled by* Ben Griswold. Thanks!

Herding Code 52: The Alan Stevens and G. Andrew Duthie Debate Continues! Jul 01, 2009

Show notes

Episode 52

In this corner, Microsoft Developer Evangelist and author, G. Andrew Duthie. In the other corner, C# MVP, ASP Insider and Open Space Technology facilitator, Alan Stevens. This week, G. Andrew Duthie and Alan Stevens bring their recent "Real Software Development vs Microsoft Bubble Development" Twitter debate to Herding Code. It's all the open and honest, fun-loving, snarky banter without the 140 character limit.

Kevin kicks off the show by announcing our two fighters. Ding. Ding.
Alan throws the first punch - He likes Herding Code because it's about real software development rather than development in the Microsoft bubble. It's about the tool users rather than the tool builders and it's about honest feedback.
Andrew jabs back - He likes the stories from the trenches but he feels more credit must be given to the folks at Microsoft who are doing the right thing. In other words, don't always assume the worst and snark about it.
Scott K keeps both fighters on their toes - First taking jabs at Alan because some DevDiv developers dogfood Microsoft's stuff (e.g. Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0) and then lands a sucker punch on Andrew noting Entity Framework is developing in the dark. Who could have seen that punch coming?
The fight continues with talk about general disgust in drag and drop demos, the role of the Developer Evangelist, Microsoft's goals and constraints, and the need for candid feedback.
If you missed the Twitter exchange, you will definitely want to listen in as The Alan Stevens vs G. Andrew Duthie Debate continues this week on Herding Code.

Show Links:

Note: Ward Bell transcribed a part of the discussion on drag'n'drop demos here. Download / Listen: Herding Code 52: The Alan Stevens and G. Andrew Duthie Debate Continues Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

Herding Code 51: Greg Young on Our Grand Failure – Thoughts on DDDD Jun 26, 2009

Show notes

Episode 51

This week the guys talk to Greg Young about what he calls "our greatest failure".

Greg talks about how we've failed our so completely that they now base their success on our always failing in the same way. He starts with your classic Hello World use-case, the common sex change
Greg talks about how we've forced our customers to work with data when they're naturally behavior-centric
The problem with losing the historical record - we've lost the value of context and intent
Scott K asks about determining software behaviors by observing user behavior
Greg describes how Command Separation and the Event Sourcing pattern can help in solving this
K Scott asks about how this fits in with REST-ful architectures which are generally data-centric
Jon asks about the UI space efficiency of designing for behavioral interaction instead of data interaction
Some examples from HR: Jon likes to promote people, K Scott enjoys discussions of termination procedures
Kevin asks how what Greg's proposing is different from task based UI's we've already seen
Jon asks how to sell this to management, who sometimes doesn't feel the need to share business process information with the software developers
Greg and K Scott talk about how data-centric style applications lose valuable context - educational tracking, shopping carts, medical records, and financial systems.
Scott K and Greg talk about how data-centric applications don't handle histrory well. Greg points out that there's a big difference between an event and a snapshot model.
Jon asks how we persist this kind of event information - do we need to move away from relational databases?
Greg talks about why the implementational details are less important than grasping the high level concepts.

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Herding Code 51: Greg Young on Our GRAND Failure - Thoughts on DDDD

Herding Code 50: Damien Guard on LINQ to SQL, Entity Framework, and Fontography Jun 19, 2009

Show notes

Episode 50

This week the guys talk to Damien Guard, a developer working on LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework. After discussing data access for a while, they talk about the programming font Damien publishes, Envy Code R.

Damien assures us that LINQ To SQL is not at all dead and talks about some of the new features in LINQ To SQL 4.
Damien discusses the T4 templates in EF/VS2010 as well as the LINQ to SQL T4 templates he's released on CodePlex as L2ST4.
New features in EF 4 (LINQ operators, ObjectSet)
Additional LINQ To SQL mocking with ITable<T>
Some general discussion of query performance optimization in L2S and EF, including some enhancements in v4.
Code-only configuration to enable fluent configuration for EF
Kevin compares the code-only configuration to Fluent NHibernate
K Scott asks about how code-only configuration would enable TDD with EFF
Damien talks about the challenges of TDD and DDD when developing a framework
Jon asks the "Should L2S be on CodePlex" question
Damien mentions Matt Warren's LINQ IQueryable Toolkit
Jon asks about the experience and improvements to migration from L2S to EF
K Scott asks about common L2S mistakes
Jon asks about POCO support in EF
Kevin bemoans the lack of support for refreshing a L2S model when your schema changes
The talk shifts over to the programming font Damien designed, Envy Code R
Damien explains the intricacies of TrueType, bitmap fonts and hinting
Discussion of font editing software, from FontLab ($500) to FontForge (free, open source), and Microsoft Visual TrueType (free, weird license agreement which must be faxed in)
Damien's crazy font hack to get italic comments in Visual Studio
Jon asks about the new typography features in Windows 7, including the new DirectWrite API
Damien prefers Mac font rendering for quick glances, Windows for long use
Discussion of how fonts affect eyestrain
Jon talks about font rendering on Kindle and how he's using it as an RSS aggregator

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Herding Code 50: Damien Guard on LINQ to SQL, Entity Framework, and Fontography

Herding Code 49: Search with Bing and Wolfram Alpha Jun 10, 2009

Show notes

Episode 49

Have you binged, bunged or banged using Microsoft's Bing? Any idea the type of questions you should feed Wolfram|Alpha? This week on Herding Code, the guys talk about "new search things that have happened upon the Intertubes." Are you planning to catch the Google Wave? Hear the cast's thoughts on Google Wave and much more in this week's Lightning Round.

Jon digs into the Bing's core feature list and shares that he is generally impressed with the specialty searches around travel, health, traffic, images, shopping and maps.
When it comes to search, the guys ask if Microsoft can really complete with Google. And does it really matter?
Scott K talks about Microsoft rebranding and questions what Microsoft is doing with its web properties? He compares Microsoft to Google which does everything web-based. Kevin chimes in and state that he doesn't use a single Microsoft online property and Microsoft just doesn't have a good story for this space.
The guys discuss usability features in Bing - specifically image and video search, search history and preferences.
K Scott brings up Bing's nice use of Silverlight and speak to tweets stating Bing is Microsoft's way of tricking you into installing the Silverlight plugin.
Jon and Scott K talk about conspiracy theories.
Jon kicks off a conversation about Wolfram|Alpha and shares how you can ask just about anything and you will even get an answer if you know exactly how to phrase the question.
Kevin states that calling Wolfram|Alpha a search engine is a misnomer. Really, it's a computational knowledge engine made for academics by academics.
Scott K calls out that anything claiming to be related to search must live up to Google. After all, you google information. You don't altavista.
K Scott compares Wolfram|Alpha to a restaurant where the food's not great but the atmosphere is pretty funky.
Jon and Scott K discuss search aggregators, explorer federated search and Kevin compares Wolfram|Alpha to Stack Overflow.
K Scott comments on search in general and how competition is a good thing. K Scott is not completely comfortable with Google dominating the market share. It's the same uncomfortable feeling he had when Microsoft dominated the browser wars and look how that turned out. Take note!

Compliments of K Scott, another Lightning Round Strikes!

Twitter on the Xbox 360
last.fm and Zune
E3 (Electonic Entertainment Expo), Project Natal, Milo Demo, Peter Molyneux
Adobe's BrowserLab is a rip off of SuperPreview
Windows 7 October Release, adoption rate and boot from VHD feature
Google Wave and Google Orkut, HTML 5, Canvas and SVG

Show Links:

Discover Bing
Farecast
Powerset
Splogs
Google vs Bing Results
- http://blackdog.ie/google-bing/search.php
- http://blindsearch.fejus.com
Young Jeezy
Silverlight
Google Gears
Wolfram|Alpha
It's Time For Microsoft To Face Reality About Search And The Internet, Henry Blodget
Who is Stephen Wolfram? Go ahead and Bing him too!
Jon Udell
Stack Overflow
The Elephant in the Room: Google Monoculture, Coding Horror
Chris Pirillo
Geekologie
Engadget
Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)
Johnny Chung Lee
Adam Kinney
With Wave, did Google jump the (Microsoft) shark?, Mary-Jo Foley
Google Web Toolkit (GWT)

Scott K's Wolfram queries:
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
Do these pants make me look fat?

Jon's Wolfram queries:
GDP of Moldovia divided by Ernest Goes to Camp box office?
Escape velocity of Saturn divided by top speed of a cheetah?
Population of Vatican City divided by the square root of the number of hours in a leap year?
How to cook a Welshman?

K Scot's Wolfram queries:
How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

Jon Udell's Wolfram query:
(H1N1 Mexico Deaths / Mexico Cases) / (H1N1 US Deaths / US Cases)

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Herding Code 49: Search with Bing and Wolfram Alpha

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

Herding Code 48: Dustin Campbell on Visual Studio 2010 May 30, 2009

Show notes

Episode 48

This week on Herding Code, the guys speak with Dustin Campbell about Visual Studio 2010 Beta's "super exciting" programming, debugging and extensibility features and the F# May CTP.

The show kicks off with Jon commenting about the evolution of Visual Studio. Dustin then takes us down memory lane sharing how Visual Studio has been torn down and stitched back together over the years - this time with a new WPF-based IDE and an impressive extensibility model.
K Scott notes that F# is now being shipped with Visual Studio 2010 and teases Dustin about working on Project Euler problems in F# with his wife. (There's a hot dating tip for you.) Dustin squirms a little and then talks in more detail about the latest F# release and the many language refactorings.
Scott K asks if dynamic languages like IronRuby and IronPython are scheduled to be shipped with later versions of Visual Studio and Dustin suggests that those languages may not find benefit in doing so.
Scott K asks if Microsoft is trying to kill off the competition by introducing IDE features already provided by CodeRush and ReSharper? Dustin shares that the new extensibility model within VS2010 actually promotes third-party development and refers to the DevExpresses, JetBrains and Whole Tomatoes of the world as "partners" rather than competition.
Scott K asks if rewriting the VS2010 editor in WPF will elevate WPF's exposure inside and outside of Microsoft and effectively force the framework to continually improve. Scott K also asks if componentizing Visual Studio (think Perspectives in Eclipse) is something we might see in future bits.
Jon asks about team size and what it takes to build a product like Visual Studio at Microsoft.
Scott K calls out Parallel Programming, a highlighted new feature in VS2010, and Dustin drills into IDE support for parallel programming with parallel debugging windows and profiling views.
Kevin and Dustin talk about improved TDD support with features like "Generate From Usage."
The show wraps up with the guys beating Dustin up a bit with talk about Visual Studio issues such as the Add Reference Dialogue slowness and the "Visual Studio is busy" dialogue.

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Herding Code 48: Dustin Campbell on Visual Studio 2010

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

Herding Code 47: Joe Brinkman on Webforms vs ASP.NET MVC May 13, 2009

Show notes

Episode 47

This week on Herding Code, the guys speak with Joe Brinkman, Co-founder and Technical Fellow at DotNetNuke Corporation, about the ASP.NET MVC vs. Webforms debate, open source development, recent advancements in DotNetNuke and how to improve our industry and the community as a whole.

Joe explains that the Webforms vs. MVC debate boils down to a component based vs. object-oriented based approach to web development. Joe also shares that one shouldn't only think about Webforms when doing the comparison. After all, let's not forget web services, HTTPHandlers and HTTPModules are also part of the ASP.NET stack.
Joe speaks about the lack of a reusability model in ASP.NET MVC and Scott K offers solutions that go beyond mere copy and paste operations. Joe and Kevin explore how the absence of the component model in ASP.NET MVC is rescued by rich functionality packaged within the Javascript frameworks.
K Scott and Joe talk about core issues with Webform development. That is, ClientId management, .ASPX in URLs and maintainability concerns around Webform's event model in the code behind and forcing statefulness in a stateless web environment. K Scott notes that .NET 4.0 will offer URL routing and greater control over ClientId generation so key areas of concern may soon be addressed, but it will take further framework improvement to provide greater control over the Webform abstraction layer.
Everyone agrees that Microsoft, vendors and community will provide components to pave the way to richer, easier to implement, ASP.NET MVC applications. Additionally, advancements will continue in the Webforms space. Most notably, the guys assume there is bound to be a push towards a better Webforms testability story.
Kevin gives historical context to Webforms and why the abstraction model was revolutionary and arguably necessary. Knowing full well that hate mail is to come, Jon talks about using the "right" tool for the job and how he plans to continue to use Webforms where appropriate.
Jon and Joe summarize four big reasons why EVERY developer should learn MVC and Scott K asks what can be done with senior web developers who just don't want to learn the new framework? This leads into a conversation about honing one's craft, mentorship, leading by example, and following through with supervision and code reviews.
Now that ASP.NET MVC is in the picture, the group wrestles with what to call ASP.NET Webforms. Classic ASP.NET is kind of catchy (and a little confusing.)
Jon and Joe talk about changes in Open Source - inside and outside of the Microsoft community - over the past six years.
Scott K talks about the "promise" of being able to contribute to an open source project and asks about the managing patches - specifically on large open source projects.
The guys also dive into open source definition, licenses, legal considerations, protections around intellectual properties and implicit copyright on code.
The episode wraps up with a Joe providing a nice overview of DotNetNuke's past, present and future.

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Herding Code 47: Joe Brinkman on Webforms vs ASP.NET MVC

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

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