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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:

• Paul Stack blog
• @stack72 
• SQL Compare
• Team City
• Feature switch library – NFeature
• Flickr feature toggles
• Chef
• Puppet
• Octopus deploy

Show notes by @rossfuhrman – thanks!

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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!

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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

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:

• Morten Kromberg – @mkromberg
• Dyalog APL
• APL on Wikipedia
• Conway’s (very concise) Life
• TryAPL

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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:

• Roy Osherove – @royosherove
• 5whys blog
• http://leanpub.com/teamleader

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

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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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Herding Code 136: Code52 with Paul Jenkins, Brendan Forster, and Andrew Tobin

Show Notes:

• Jon starts by asking how this whole idea got started.
• Brendan explains the timeline of a one week spin up cycle for a project.
• Jon asks if the projects just die at the end of a week, and if people are continuing to work on past projects. Paul and Andrew talk about the continuing work on all projects, including MarkPad .
• Jon says he thinks the concern of abandoned open source projects is overblown – collaboration is good, working
• Jon asks about the projects they’ve done so far, and the guys run through the list.
• Brendan explains how the different projects are selected.
• Jon asks about how technologies are selected. Brendan says that it’s all based on who shows up, and Andrew mentions the wide variety of technologies that have been covered so far.
• Paul says that the "bite sized projects" have been a good way for developers who are new to open source to get started. Jon asks how new developers can get ramped up, and Brendan lists some of the onboarding resources. Andrew explains that it’s hard to write much documentation when the projects are running for a week. Andrew mentions some of the Git documentation they’ve got written up.
• Scott K says he’s got a ton of personal projects that he doesn’t have time for. Everyone talks about the benefit of getting a team on a project for a week.
• Jon asks about some of the common frameworks that they use over and over. Paul talks about MahApps.
• Scott K asks about non-CLR project, like some crazy project in obscure languages. Brendan says the main focus is on building something useful in a week, which usually leads towards common languages. Brendan says that projects in other languages really need a "champion" to show up and lead the project for a week – and the door’s open.
• Jon asks about the community reaction overall. The guys talk about the wide attention, as well as some negative reactions from onlookers who want to see other technologies represented.
• Jon says he thinks there was some pent up need for energy in the .NET open source space, and asks if that was part of the reason for getting this started.
• Jon asks Paul about the "Mah" name he’s used for his open source projects.
• There’s a discussion of developing while hungry, including the Pretzel project name and the "Jon should make me a delicious cake" incident.
• Andrew talks about the GTFO project – GitHub Tools For Outlook
• Jon asks about the .NET developer community in Australia. Is it  as huge as it seems?
• Question from Twitter – @wolfbyte asks: "How do you balance the shifting of tools / ideas / processes against the goal of attracting people to open source development.
• Another question from @wolfbyte: "Are you guys tired yet?" (Yes!)
• Jon asks if there’s thought as to how to scale things going forward to all the work doesn’t fall on Paul/Brendan/Andrew for all projects. Is there a possibility to bring in guest leads for a week?
• There’s a discussion of HattersGonnaHat and the Konami code. Jon announces a new KDD movement: Konami Driven Development.
• Some discussion of Windows 8 development (update: the 3/5 – 3/12 project is Windows 8).
• Would it be possible to do more cross-platform work? Silverlight?
• What will the future projects be? Jon campaigns (in vain) for his Diff/Merge 2000 project proposal.
• Jon asks for more information about how they run all the behind-the-scenes communications and infrastructure. GitHub, App Harbor, JabbR – all are low friction and low / no cost.
• Jon asks about the amount of work involved in accepting pull requests.
• Brendan talks about the test coverage in code submissions. Paul says that having testing frameworks in place makes it a lot more likely that people will write the tests.
• Brendan wraps with a call to look at Code52.org and get started. Jon pledges to fly to Australia in luggage class, then offends everyone by confusing Australia with New Zealand.

Show Links:

• Code52 site (@code_52)
• Code52 JabbR room
• Andrew Tobin – blog, twitter
• Brendan Forster – blog, twitter
• Paul Jenkins – blog, twitter
• Code52 projects to date:
• MarkPad – A Markdown editor for
• jibbr – A Jabbr bot designed for collaborative
• Ideastrike – A collaborative idea voting site
• Samurai – A tiled, turn-based player-vs-plaryer game with an MVC 4 backend and the beginning of Windows Phone and iOS front ends
• Pretzel – A static site generator with Markdown and Liquid (and Razor on the way)
• metro.css – A CSS bootstrap package to simplify building web applications with a Metro look
• Carnac – A utility that displays keyboard shortcuts as you type them
• GT4O – An addin for managing Github tasks inside Outlook.
• i18n Packages for MVC4 – NuGet packages to simplify internationalization in ASP.NET MVC applications
• MyFinances for Windows 8 – A Javascript-based application for WinRT
• GitHub post – A New Coding Project Every Week at Code52
• #HattersGonnaHat
• Konami code
• MahTweets
• MahApps

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 135: Remco Mulder and Jeff Schumacher on Continuous Testing

Show Notes:

• Scott K kicks things off with a horrible old school BASIC joke.
• Remco explains how NCrunch got started because he was living under a rock.
• Jeff explains how Giles got started by finding AutoTest and seeing it not maintained (in reality it was).
• Remco talks about the number of test frameworks.
• Jon asks Remco about adding MSTest support – Remco groans about how difficult MSTest was to integrate with NCrunch.
• Jeff mentions that xUnit’s test runner is complete for backward compatibility.
• Jeff talks about Machine Specs and avoiding versioning hell with Impromptu Interface.
• Jon asks about each library’s approach to Continuous Testing and to explain it to a laymen.
• Rem explains what Continuous Testing is in relation to NCrunch.
• Scott comments on a "strange situation" of testing compiled code creates slow tests and asks about any shortcuts Rem or Jeff have taken.
• Jon comments how NCruch & Giles gives immediate feedback as he’s coding.
• Jeff mentions that Giles has the ability to filter tests so that you only see what you want to see.
• Remco explains how NCrunch attempts to determine impact to order how tests are run so the most pertinent tests run first.
• Jon gives his quick history of the testing feedback cycle: separate project phase, then repository check-in step with continuous integration, local test runers, and now tests running as we write the code. Are we done? Where can we go from here?
• Jeff comments about how Continuous Testing is like the red squiggly for code problems.
• Scott asks about alternative language support for NCrunch and Giles.
• Remco mentions that Salesforce.com has a Selenium "cluster" to continuously run UI tests.
• Remco talks about Visual Studio integration for NCrunch.
• Jeff talks about a branch that supports Mono.
• Jon talks about Roslyn, and Scott K reminds us that Mono was doing compiler as a service long ago – 2008?
• Remco jokes about clippy.
• Jeff talks about Continuous testing and Pair Programming.
• Jeff wanted to get to the point where he didn’t think about the tooling but only the tests and the code.
• Jeff talks about Visual Studio magazine and an article about Continuous Testing.
• Jon comments how easy NCrunch is able to setup and get going.
• Remco wants to make Continuous testing really really easy to get people to start using it.
• Jeff recommends looking at all the different continuous testing options, mentioning Greg Young’s Mighty Moose.

Show Links:

• Jeff Schumacher – blog, twitter
• Remco Mulder – blog, twitter
• NCrunch
• Giles
• Mighty Moose from Greg Young
• Continuous Testing: Think Different [Visual Studio Magazine online]
• Project Roslyn

Show notes by Ben Dornis. Thanks!

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Herding Code 134: Brad Wilson on ASP.NET 4 Beta and ASP.NET Web API

Show Notes:

• Brad starts with a rundown of what was in ASP.NET MVC 4 Developer Preview, including HTML5 Default Template features, Adaptive Rendering, Mobile Template, Display Modes, NuGet package based installation, and Task<T> based Async Controllers.
• Jon asks about the ASP.NET Web API integration. Brad talks about the effort involved and why it’s useful.
• Jon asks for clarification as to what ASP.NET Web API offers over hand writing services using ASP.NET MVC.
• Brad talks about Content Negotiation and why it’s useful.
• Jon asks about things that Web API has in common with MVC like filters and model binding.
• Jon asks about the testability of Web API. Brad explains that it’s much more lightweight and has a lot less use of statics, making it a lot more testable.
• Brad talks about the hosting models for Web API, including both web and selfhost. He explains that it’s pluggable, so you can write your own host, and explains the use of HTTP Message Handlers.
• Jon asks about the relation of ASP.NET MVC 4 to .NET 4.5. Brad explains how parts were backported to allow for using .NET 4.5 features on .NET 4.
• Jon asks about the query composition support, which gives support for OData query syntax. Brad explains how it’s used, and distinguishes the query syntax from the rest of OData format.
• Brad explains how ASP.NET Web API is the future of WCF Web API, and that the ASP.NET team and WCF teams have merged.
• Brad talks about how Web API can be used outside of ASP.NET. Jon asks how to get Web API into another project type, and Brad talks about installing Web API via NuGet.
• Jon asks for more information about how NuGet is used in the MVC installation system. Brad talks about how NuGet and VSIX can be integrated.
• Jon asks about why NuGet Package Restore is useful.
• Jon notes that creating new projects is slower due to NuGet installation. Brad says this may be improved, but even if it isn’t he thinks that the tradeoff is more than worthwhile, since in the real world people aren’t creating new projects every day.
• Jon asks for a bit more information about the Display Mode Provider.
• Brad talks about the installation options for ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta and how it relates to the .NET 4.5 developer previews.
• Jon asks about Go Live license, Brad says it’s there.
• Jon asks about new features in xUnit.net. Brad talks about the last release and what’s in the roadmap for the next release.
• Brad mentions that he’ll be speaking at NDC this summer and talks about the Wrox MVC 4 book.

Show Links:

• Brad Wilson – blog, twitter
• ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta info
• xUnit.net
• Henrik’s blog

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 133: Derick Bailey on Backbone.js

Show Notes:

• Derick starts off by explaining what Backbone is not: a JavaScript MVC framework.
• Backbone provides a way to structure and organize your code, separating responsibilities in to easily recognizable pieces.
• Derick points out that Jeremy Ashkenas, the creator of Backbone, said that Backbone is a library. The distinction Derick references is: "a framework calls your code, you call a library’s code."
• Kevin asks what are the main parts of Backbone. Derick mentions models and collections, views, routers, and some helpers: backbone.sync, backbone.events, and history.
• Kevin asks for a clarification on what a single-page application is. Derick cites Gmail as the canonical example.
• Kevin asks if Backbone is mainly used for single-page applications. Derick explains that it is very flexible and can be used as much or as little as necessary for any kind of application.
• Jon asks if using Backbone is an all or nothing proposition or if bits and pieces can be brought in over time.
• Kevin asks for a comparison to other similar JavaScript libraries/frameworks.
• Jon asks if there are any template or boiler plate projects for getting started with Backbone.
• K. Scott asks about Derick’s Memento plugin, which allows you to store and restore your model’s state.
• Kevin asks Derick why he thinks Backbone has become so popular.
• Jon asks about the process and requirements for creating Backbone plugins.
• Jon asks about the debugging story when using Backbone.
• Kevin asks about tools and approaches for testing Backbone.
• Kevin asks if there are any sources for best practices for Backbone.
• Twitter questions from @elijahmanor: "In what type of applications would you not recommend using Backbone?", "Do you plan to consolidate your blog posts into a Backbone book?", "Have you done any mobile development with Backbone?, "Do you use Require.js alongside Backbone?"
• Kevin and Derick discuss server-side rendering of JavaScript with Backbone for the purpose of being easily findable by search engines.
• Derick talks about the on-site training and training videos that he offers.

Show Links:

• Derick Bailey blog
• Twitter
• Backbone
• Jeremy Ashkenas – Founder of Backbone
• Zepto.js
• Backbone.js Is Not An MVC Framework
• SproutCore
• Batman.JS
• Ember.js
• JavaScriptMVC
• Agility.js
• Knockout
• Spine
• CoffeScript
• Knockback
• Dericks Backbone data binding plugin
• Bocoup – Introducing the Backbone Boilerplate
• Backbone mailing list (Google Group)
• Backbone.Marionette
• BBCloneMail on GitHub
• BBCloneMail live on Heroku
• Backbone.Memento
• Underscore.js
• Joey Beninghove
• QUnit
• Jasmine
• jasmine-jquery
• Sinon.js
• Rob Conery refactors the Backbone.js todo list sample
• Derick’s list of Backbone resources
• Require.js
• backbonetraining.net
• watchmecode.net

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 132: Phil Haack, Keith Dahlby and Paul Betts on Git for Windows developers

Show Notes:

• Paul begins with talking about why he thinks Git is cool, starting with the ability to create a clean source history that’s based on intent.
• Phil says some people who aren’t used to distributed version control get the wrong impression of rewriting history. The idea is that you’re rewriting history as you work locally to build a clean commit. You don’t generally rewrite history once you’ve pushed to the master repository.
• Keith says he tells people that when you push, it’s permanent. Until then, you can pretend you’re perfect. It’s just a save point – this reminds Jon of a quote from Dave Ward that this is like the ability to create save points anywhere in a video game.
• Scott K says this is all great in theory, but he never sees people taking advantage of history rewriting. He goes on to say that he loves GitHub but hates Git because Git hates developers – rewriting history is way too hard.
• Phil says that this makes more sense when you think of this in terms of replaying changes.
• Phil says that he really started liking Git after reading the site Think Like (a) Git.
• Paul says that he thinks this would be a lot easier to understand if you could see and work with things visually. Scott K says gitk kind of works but it’s clunky. Keith talks about gitk a bit more.
• Scott K talks about how he regularly ends up with a corrupted state and asks for recommendations. Paul says the solution is to use either git reset or git rebase and explains what they mean. Jon asks for more info, and Paul talks about git reset –hard.
• Phil talks about the importance of following an established workflow to avoid problems or getting in a state you don’t understand. He talks about the published workflow they use for the NuGet Gallery. Paul talks about how he and Phil are working on improving the interface to make it easy to follow working patterns.
• K Scott talks about one confusion is that there are so many commands and parameters. Keith says that you can get by with a tiny subset, and can grow as needed.
• Kevin asks if it’s possible to get your repository into a corrupted state, or if users are just getting confused by a valid state. Paul talks about some finer points of how things are stored and wraps up by saying really the only way to lose work with Git is to mess up or delete uncommitted changes or files.
• Twitter question from @LeeFlannery: "can you discuss how command line git for Win isn’t so scary – stop waiting for integrated VS tooling to use git." Paul talks about how the MSysGit makes things unnecessarily confusing by making you think you need to use the Bash prompt.
• Twitter question from @JavierLozano: "Why use powershell instead of bash for a console client? What are the gains?" Keith explains how posh-git gives you a Windows native experience (e.g. Windows style file paths). Phil talks about how the posh-git tab extensions give you an IntelliSense-ish experience with Git. Keith explains that posh-git does things like keeps track of which file have been added, so you can autocomplete files you’re adding rather than have to type them out.
• Scott K says that posh-git was slow when he tried to use it and asks if performance has been improved. Keith says that posh-git calls git status on every action to offer contextual tab expansions and explains how to disable that for faster performance.
• Keith talks about installing posh-git using psget, and more advanced use by cloning the posh-git repo and customizing it. Jon asks why installing posh-git in command-line didn’t work in the PowerShell ISE, and Keith explains that there are separate profiles for PowerShell command line, PowerShell ISE, and the NuGet Package Manager prompt in Visual Studio.
• Question from John Sheehan: "What are some of the other things outside of tooling that are impediments to Windows users adopting Git." Paul lists several: line endings, SSH keys, the MSysGit install, and the git commit using vi in compatibility mode.
• Keith says that MSysGit isn’t Git for Windows, it’s Git for Linux developers on Windows – it doesn’t behave like Windows at all. Keith asks who runs MSysGit.
• Phil says there are a lot of conceptual obstacles to adoption, and says that he thinks it’s necessary to make it easier to do simple things without worrying about obscure and advanced options.
• Jon talks about the frustrations in typing in the SSH passphrase and asks for suggestions. Paul talks about ssh-agent.
• Jon asks for specifics about what Paul and Phil are working on. Paul say the idea is similar features to GitHub for Mac – not necessarily in design, but featureset.
• Jon says that he likes how the TortoiseHg tooling shows the command-line version you could have typed when you perform operations in the GUI. Paul agrees that’s useful, and Keith points out that it’s available in Git Extensions.
• Scott K says that he likes the built in Mercurial server and says it’d be nice if Git made it easier to run a Git repo on Windows. Paul says that it’s really easy to set that using a fileshare. Scott K says he uses that, but it’s not as discoverable as the Mercurial webserver. Keith talks about how setting up he’s seen this set up using per-user shares.
• Twitter question from @jeremydmiller "Are you concerned that folks spend so much time debating and tweaking their Git workflow that they’ll forget to actually code?" Phil and Keith discuss two popular GitHub workflows: GitHub Flow and git-flow.
• Twitter question from @kppullin "why must line endings be so painful!" Paul explains the source of the problem and how autocrlf tries to solve that, and there’s a general about how problems occur.
• Keith talks about using gitattributes to do things like telling Git to use C# differencing with .cs files.
• Jon asks finding good, non-hostile documentation. Scott K says that all the books focus on happy path documentation rather than useful stuff. Some useful online resources are listed, including Think Like (a) Git, The Git Parable, and ProGit.org.
• Keith jokingly asks if we can talk about why Git is better than Mercurial. Jon takes the bait, and hilarity ensues.
• There’s a long discussion about the usefulness of a clean history and the ability to accurately use "blame" to understand when a bug was introduced.
• Things start to wrap up and K Scott asks for last thoughts. Paul mentions GitPad, which sets Notepad as your Git commit editor. Keith recommends Console2. Phil points out a neat hidden feature on GitHub – using T to get incremental search.

Show Links:

• Phil Haack – @haacked
• Keith Dahlby – @dahlbyk
• Paul Betts – @xpaulbettsx
• GitHub
• Think Like (a) Git
• posh-git
• Phil’s recent post about posh-git: Better Git with PowerShell
• gitk
• GitHub Flow
• git-flow
• Git Extensions
• GitHub for Mac
• The Git Parable
• ProGit.org
• ProGit chapter on gitattributes
• GitPad
• Console2

• Jon asks Chris to catch us up with what’s happened since we last talked to him, just after jsConf.us 2010.
• Chris starts with his jsConf.eu 2010 talk, including Promote.js and the reminder not to forget the roots of the Javascript community.
• Chris doesn’t speak at the jsConf.us conference, mostly because he organizes the US conference and doesn’t want to present an appearance of unfairness.
• Chris then moves on to his jsConf.eu 2011 talk, An End To Negativity.
• Chris says that the negativity is rampant in the programming community, and it feeds on itself. There are far too many people who participate in community conversation just to cheer on the fights. Our profession has a unique opportunity to create and try new things, but the negativity in the community stifles that. We need to stop the negative “hating” in private conversations, not shouting matches in online forums.
• If you disagree with a technology, put your energy to constructive use via open source contribution (fork and create) rather than writing scathing blog posts.
• Scott K says that negative discussion’s everywhere – all online discussion, politics, media. Rather than discuss ideas, people just call others idiots. Chris says you’ve got to start locally. His recommended solution involves beer.
• Matt says it’s easier to lob bombs from afar, and personal discussions solves that. Kevin says one on one discussions over beer aren’t always possible, and Chris says even the offer is what’s important.
• Jon says that he’s never tried to resolve issues one-on-one and come away convinced that the other person is just plain evil. Usually there’s some unspoken history that explains why people think as they do. Chris applies that to prejudices against Javascript that were formed by bad experiences people may have had long ago.
• Jon says he’s noticed that Chris’ speaking style is disarmingly humble. Chris says he really values humility in developers, and that the current rock star ninja terminology is too self promoting.
• Jon says that the online discussion forums like Reddit and Hacker News are all about voting up or down, which encourages negativity. Chris talks about trite these arguments often are, such as focusing on features which aren’t yet implemented in new technologies.
• Scott K. says he’s amazed at the overall positivity on StackOverflow. Chris says he thinks it’s a matter of time before it creeps in. Jon says he thinks that he thinks the vote engineering and overall problem solving focus of StackOverflow is designed to produce overall positive results.
• Jon reacts to Chris’ Fork and Create call by saying that when he’s releasing code publicly, it’s a lot harder to criticize others. Chris says that people who are busy creating don’t have time for trivial arguments, and Matt says that working publicly gives you a healthy dose of vulnerability.
• Chris talks about the negativity he encounters in putting on conferences. At jsConf.us 2011 they raised over $3000 to contribute towards increasing gender diversity and it received no attention at all, while a negative incident at the conference got a lot of attention.
• Jon says that in teaching his daughter some basic programming, he’s reminded of the fun of creation that got him started in development. That’s got to be our focus. Chris and Matt talk about how their parents spent time introducing them to computers, and would love to see parents introducing their kids to computers.
• Scott K says that he’s seen the community as a whole move from a focus on writing code to macho chest thumping.
• Jon says he liked the part of Chris’ keynote that welcomed Dart and CoffeeScript. Chris said that innovation and new languages are great since they move things forward. Chris points out that people bash on Flash, but forget that it was instrumental in the development of Javascript through things like JIT compilation.
• Scott K wonders if we’d do better to just create new languages more often. Jon says that’s tricky with Javascript since it runs on so many platforms, but Scott K says that he thinks there’s more room for extending Javascript inside the language itself. Chris says both can be powerful, and mentions ClojureScript. He says that the velocity of change for Javascript is accelerating with more frequent browser releases and the things he’s seeing in Windows 8. He says we need to embrace that change by being more willing to drop support for older browsers.
• Christ talks about how TeamJS is raising money in the Mozilla Firefox Challenge (please join in!).
• Jon reacts to Chris’ keynote question, “What would you do if you knew you could not fail,” noting that most of his personal failures come from not attempting things. Chris says that quote is inspirational to him, and agrees that we fail in 100% of things we do not attempt.
• Twitter question from @elijahmanor – “Recently Chris tweeted that the trolls may be right. What did he mean by that?” Chris says that a reaction to hype around node.js, and there’s a general discussion about node.js.
• Jon asks Chris about his reactions overall to Microsoft getting involved with things like node.js and Javascript on Windows 8. Chris says that the community sometimes has an initial shock, but Microsoft-of-new is a different company that’s doing a lot of great stuff. He says he’s happy to see talks from Microsoft developers that aren’t “Microsoft presentations.”
• Matt talks about a recent node.js talk focused on maximizing node.js hosting efficiency.
• Jon asks Matt and Chris to give us a heads up on some emerging technologies in JavaScript land. Matt mentions emscripten, jsmad, and RiverTrail.
• Jon asks if people (himself included) will eventually realize that Javascript isn’t inherently too slow for these computationally intense applications. Scott K and Matt talk about how things like V8, JITing, and investment by big companies continue to make Javascript faster and faster.
• Jon asks Chris what trends he’s noticing, and he mentions dynjs, pdfjs, and jslinux. He mentions browser vendors moving towards extension systems based on Javascript. Jon talks about how he thinks Mozilla’s XUL was so far ahead of the game, using HTML/CSS/Javascript as a development platform.
• Matt brings up JSIL (a compiler that transforms .NET applications to Javascript). There’s a discussion of Javascript as a VM for other languages. Matt mentions Microsoft’s Volta initiative.
• Chris and Scott K talk about putting other languages in the browser. Chris says that Javascript has been battle tested in a way that no other language has.
• There’s a discussion of the node.js work that Microsoft’s been doing – not just getting it to run on Windows, but in making Windows / IIS hosting for node.js compelling.
• Jon asks Chris and Matt for their current recommendations, and an argument over spring beers erupts.

Show links:

• jsConf.us, jsConf.eu
• Chris Williams’s Blog, @voodootikigod
• Matt Podwysocki’s Blog
• Promote JS
• bcrypt
• Issue 28
• The Problem with Implicit Scoping in CoffeeScript
• Raganwald: CoffeeScript is not a language worth learning
• ClojureScript
• TeamJS donating to the Mozilla Firefox Challenge
• denser – an experiment with high density server side java script
• Erik Corry – Garbage Collection in JavaScript
• emscripten – an LLVM-to-JavaScript compiler
• jsmad – a Javascript MPEG audio decoder
• RiverTrail – a ParallelArray abstraction for JavaScript
• Atwood’s Law
• dynjs – (almost) 100% invokedynamic js impl
• pdfjs – PDF Renderer in Javascript
• jslinux – Linux shell running in Javascript
• Mozilla XUL
• JSIL
• Microsoft Live Labs Volta

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 131 – Chris Williams and Matthew Podwysocki on the Javascript community

• Dave runs Markkup, a consulting company and is building Loggr, SaaS application that provides real time logging and monitoring.
• He was one of the founders of Chili!Soft, which was an implementation of Classic ASP that ran on Linux, Solaris, IBM software, and Windows.
• Dave tells the story behind Chili!Soft, which is now Sun Java System Active Server Pages.
• Dave goes into the main features/benefits of Loggr.
• Jon asks about reports and queries provided by Loggr.
• Dave mentions there is an HTML5 version of the dashboard that works well on a tablet as well as an iPhone app. There is also an Android app in the works.
• Jon and Dave discuss the freemium model that Loggr employs.
• The guys move to talking about the stack that Loggr is developed on.
• It is built on ASP.NET MVC2.
• It uses Backbone.js for the client side JavaScript.
• MongoDB is used as the database.
• SignalR is used for the client-server communication to provide live user monitoring.
• Kevin asks about the decision to build a startup on the .NET platform.
• The guys touch on the VB.NET vs C# debate.
• Jon asks about the backup/redundancy story for MongoDB.
• Dave talks about the HTML5 client vs the native iOS app vs the Android app.
• Jon asks about the experience developing the iOS and Android apps.
• There are agents for .NET, Java, ColdFusion, PHP, Ruby, JavaScript.
• You can configure log4net to log to Loggr.
• Dave mentions Loggr uses Rapleaf to display demographics for a user, such as age and gender.
• Loggr also uses FullContact to display the social networks and avatars of a user.
• Jon asks Dave for advice for anyone interested in starting a similar venture.
• Jon asks about the Loggr road map.
• Jon asks about the business and marketing side of Loggr.
• Jon asks if any companies are leveraging the Loggr APIs to create other offerings.
• Jon asks if there is any demand for customers to host Loggr internally.
• Kevin asks if there have been any issues related to versions of the Loggr APIs.
• Kevin asks about downtime and SLAs.
• Jon asks about the process to get started with Loggr.

Show links:

• Loggr @loggrnet
• Dave Weaver’s blog @davidweaver
• Markkup
• Joel on Software post about Chili!Soft
• Sun Java System Active Server Pages (formerly Chili!Soft)
• Mission Research
• Blog post referencing Google Analytics
• Irony on CodePlex
• Loggr code on Github
• Backbone.JS
• MongoDB
• Official MongoDB C# driver
• SignalR
• MonoTouch
• Mono for Android
• Nlog writes to Loggr
• log4net
• Rapleaf
• FullContact
• Evernote
• Exceptioneer

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 130: Dave Weaver on Loggr – a realtime analytics service built with MVC MongoDB and SignalR

This week’s show notes were typed up by @RossFuhrman – Thanks!!!

• Rob talks about how Nu helped shape the direction of NuGet.
• Chocolatey is a tool for installing system wide applications such as Notepad++ or Git.
• Rob explains that it is built in PowerShell on top of NuGet.
• The guys talk about the simple process to install Chocolatey and install an application.
• Rob explains how Chocolatey was born.
• John S. asks what the process is to create a new Chocolatey package.
• The PowerShell command to install Chocolatey is: iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString(“http://bit.ly/psChocInstall”))
• Jon G. asks what Chocolatey does behind the scenes when installing a package.
• Jon G. asks how to use Chocolatey to uninstall software Chocolatey installed.
• John S. asks if Chocolatey has been used in a way that wasn’t expected.
• The guys discuss the various ways of setting up a process to install multiple packages at once.
• Rob explains the difference between Chocolatey and Ninite.
• Kevin asks about the silent installs and how it works if the application doesn’t support silent installs.
• Kevin asks about the update story.
• The guys discuss learning and understanding PowerShell.
• Rob discusses the Chocolatey integration with Web Platform Installer.
• John S. asks about the reason behind writing Chocolatey in PowerShell.
• Kevin asks about Microsoft’s package manager, CoApp and how it relates to and is different from Chocolatey.
• John S. and Rob discuss how Chef, Puppet and Chocolatey could be used to spin up a new machine for a production deployment.
• Kevin asks about the fact that Rob is the owner of most of the Chocolatey packages and how he keeps track of updates to all those packages.
• Rob talks about the Chuck Norris framework and the following components of the framework:
• WarmuP -allows you to define templates for entire projects and change them as technology changes and you learn new things.
• UppercuT – is a conventional automated .NET build framework (templated NAnt). UppercuT is the insanely easy to use build framework.
• RoundhousE – is an automated database deployment (change management) system that allows you to use your current idioms and gain much more.
• DropkicK – is a fluent deployment framework that seeks to make deployments easier.
• Jon asks if the company Rob and Dru worked for when they were working on these projects was receptive to their open source development.
• Rob will be speaking on NuGet at CodeMash (it’s sold out) in January.

Show links:

• Chocolatey.org
• Rob Reynolds @ferventcoder
• Guest Host John Sheehan
• Nuget
• April video for creating a new Chocolatey package 6:46
• Keith Dahlby
• James Tryand
• Octopus
• Vagrant
• Ninite
• Web Platform Installer
• Pester
• CoApp
• Chef
• Puppet
• Change Detection
• Chuck Norris Framework
• Dru Sellers @drusellers
• Fluent Migrator
• Tarantino
• CodeMash

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 128: Rob Reynolds on Chocolatey and the Chuck Norris Frameworks

This week’s show notes were typed up by @RossFuhrman – Thanks!!!

• Scott asks Corey to start by explaining his software journeyman thing, or as Scott calls it “couch surfing in return for coding.” Corey describes how he transitioned from a traditional software developer job to training and speaking.
• Scott describes his experiences at a Coderetreat in Seattle – a series of 45 minute pair programming exercises with Conway’s Game of Life under a variety of constraints.
• Corey explains how Coderetreat got started at CodeMash 2009 as a way to intentionally practice writing beautiful code outside of the pressure of day to day work.
• Corey talks about how deleting your code at the end of every 45 minute session means you can concentrate on learning rather trying to complete anything.
• Jon asks if people are working towards any kind of graphical output, and Corey says that the focus is really on the code, and learning how to respond to changes and constraints.
• Twitter question from George Dinwiddie (@gdinwiddie) “What was the most interesting starting point for the Game of Life” Corey talks about people often start with traditional object oriented noun/verb approaches in the morning and move towards an outside-in mentality in the afternoons. He’s seen some interesting work with functional languages such as Clojure and J.
• Jon asks about the breakdown of programming languages that he sees people using.
• There’s a discussion of how setup and install can often eat up a lot of time at this kind of event, and Corey talks about how that’s not such a problem here: people show up with working development environments, are working at the testing level, and can just pair with someone who
• Jon asks what common patterns he sees people learn. Corey talks about some big changes in TDD focus and application design.
• Scott and Corey talks about the benefit of pairing with a lot of people at differing skill levels.
• Twitter question from Steven Proctor (@stevenproctor) “How often do you get to pair at these events” – Corey says that the facilitator role means you don’t get to pair, so he’s only been able to a couple times.
• Kevin asks how new pairing is to attendees, and if there’s any specific focus on learning how to pair better. Corey talks about some specific exercises which focus on paring techniques, including a Mute session (no talking, all communication through code) and Find The Loophole (in which the the coder purposefully tries to write the wrong algorithm while passing all tests).
• Scott says he
• Twitter question from from Maggie Longshore (@MaggieLongshore) “How he makes each code session unique so it doesn’t get monotonous. Share some tips for facilitators.”
• Jon asks about the upcoming Global Day of Coderetreat on December 3. Corey explains what will be going on worldwide, and how he’ll be exploiting a flight over the international date line to attend the full day sessions in both Sydney and Hawaii.
• Jon asks about some of the guidelines for listed hosting a Coderetreat, including a good (non-pizza) lunch and no cost to attendees. Corey says that in some cases there’s a deposit which is fully refunded provided you show up.
• Jon asks Corey how people can find out about a Coderetreat near them, and if it’s still possible to set up a Coderetreat if there isn’t one in your area. Corey says yes, and points us to Coderetreat.org for all information about the Global Day of Coderetreat on December 3.
• Jon asks Corey about his MercuryApp, a micro-journaling system with analytics that he and Sara Gray run.
• The guys chide Corey for slacking off by setting his Global Day of Coderetreat so low, and he talks about his difficult decision to exclude astronauts this time around.

Show Links:

• Coderetreat.org (Global Day of Coderetreat site)
• Coderetreat.com (Information on the Coderetreat format)
• Corey Haines (@coreyhaines)
• Conway’s Game of Life
• J Programming Language
• MercuryApp

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 128: Corey Haines on Global Day of Coderetreat

• Kevin and K Scott both just got MacBooks, they discuss what they are doing with them, such as using the emulator to test HTML5 apps for iPhone/iPad.
• Jon asks, “When you get a new mac, you open it up and rainbows come out of it. Do you have to install anything? How does that setup process work?”
• Kevin talks about development tooling such as HomeBrew and XCode. They discuss different tools and apps that they need to do development.
• Jon asks about twitter apps. K Scott uses the browser; Kevin is using the official Twitter app which seems pretty good except when it won’t launch the browser when clicking on the links in tweets.
• When upgrading, do you go through fresh install or remove programs? Jon talks about using Ninite to install programs you use a lot such as 7Zip, Audacity, Chrome, FileZilla, Skype, etc, because it manages everything for you and you don’t have to click through all the install dialogs.
• Also talks about using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer to get all of the web development stuff.
• They talk about the pros and cons of using Microsoft Office, and discuss using the Mac apps or Google docs or Office.Live.com.
• Jon is using Mesh to share between computer and sky drive; what kind of file sharing? K Scott is using Dropbox, says Live Mesh is important because of the remote desktop feature of Mesh. They talk about different file sharing companies and features, and talk about iCloud.
• Jon talks about the Windows Home Group feature, and how easy it is to share files, printers, media, etc., and talks about doing backups. Uses Space Sniffer to find big files.
• Jon got an SSD, so he made the old drive his D drive and used the SSD as his primary drive. If the SSD failed (which it did), he could just boot off the D drive.
• They discuss the placement of the files on the computer, whether to move to a second hard drive or partition, etc., and whether to use Libraries; they talk about searching for files in Windows. Some software apps disable the file indexer in Windows. When you install on an SSD, they disable some services like defrag, prefetch – it also disabled search.
• K Scott asks what kind of SSD Jon is using that is failing. Jon says it’s an OCZ Vertex 2, but he’s not sure it’s the drive versus the computer – gets blue screen on Windows, thinks it might be a hardware problem with his evil computer.
• Jon asks if they use Hibernate or Sleep? How often do they reboot?
• Kevin never uses hibernate. Jon will have a bunch of stuff running and will hibernate to save the battery on his laptop. Kevin thinks it burns slowly enough on Sleep, only hibernates when doing a full day of travel. Not worth it for a couple of hours.
• With newer laptop (16gb of ram), hibernating is a big deal. Jon ended up setting hibernate file size and tweaking the hibernate settings.
• MacBooks have pretty good battery life. The Air says it has almost 8 hours remaining; thinks that’s a little high, but it’s pretty good. Jon’s ThinkPad W520 is big, but gets around 7 hours, doesn’t have to worry about battery life; some optimizing settings make it difficult to use a projector.
• They discuss how often they repave their machines and the effect of using beta versions of software, how they go about getting back to work after repaving. How do you save your settings and reapply them after repaving?
• K Scott – windows get stuck off screen, can’t get them back on the main screen. Kevin has a utility that can help with that; it’s on his blog. Shows list of off-screen windows – can pick one and it will move it back to the main window.
• Jon finds uninstall really works pretty well now, whereas before it was just a cruel joke.
• K Scott talks about pulling pictures off of a Windows 6 phone. Doesn’t attach as an external drive, it installs Windows Mobile Device Center. Nooooo!!!!!
• Jon finished his office and moved into it. What about a standup desk? Found something simple from IKEA that could be used for part of the day. They talk about the idea of a standup desk.
• What about doing your work on a treadmill with a laptop? (Idea from a Neal Stephenson book). What if you did that for 15 to 30 minutes a day? Several people on twitter responded with information about their setups doing this.
• Simple way – found something for forty bucks on amazon that the laptop would rest in. Would just walk, not jog. Others have taken the control thing apart and put in a desk. Let us know if you’ve tried something like this.
• They discuss ergo keyboards, and using Synergy or Input Director for sharing a keyboard and mouse across multiple computers.
• K Scott has a problem with the keyboard on the Mac; bothers his hands, especially when using it for hours. They like Lenovo keyboards.
• Jon – some keys don’t map between Mac and Windows. Kevin uses a Microsoft ergo keyboard with the Mac, and out of habit still uses those keys, and it sometimes has a weird impact.
• They talk about Vim and Mac Vim.
• Jon switched from using a mouse to using a tablet. Mouse is what really hurts your wrist. Kevin moved his mouse to the left for years for the same reason. K Scott likes the TrackPoint pointing stick on the Lenovo.  Kevin’s never been a fan of the trackpad on the laptops, but the Mac trackpad is brilliant.
• Talk about using different software to help readability, like Readable, which uses Google web fonts. Can customize it to meet your needs. Makes it easier to read web pages.
• Jeff Atwood posted a blog entry about backlights behind the monitor like LED glowstrips. You can have a dark workspace and lower the contrast using backlights.
• And now for something completely different . a lightning round.
  • What’s your favorite browser?
  • What’s your favorite Javascript library this week?
  • Did Adobe really kill Flash? Does the lightning round really work? Does anyone expect the Spanish Inquisition? Why do people keep making websites that exclusively use Flash, especially restaurants? Is the future of video really animated gifs?

Show Links:

• Homebrew (OSX)
• Ninite (Windows)
• Web Platform Installer (Windows)
• Dropbox (Web)
• Windows Live Mesh (Windows, Web)
• Front And Center! (utility from Kevin that locates offscreen windows)
• Ikea Utby Bar Table
• REAMDE (book which mentions treadmill desk)
• treadTray
• Llewelyn Falco’s Treadmill Desk
• Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000
• Mouseless Computing (blog post from Jon)
• Synergy
• InputDirector
• Boot Camp mappings for Windows
• VIM
• Readability
• Readable
• Bias Lighting (Jeff Atwood)
• Backbone.js
• Raphael
• Underscore.js
• Flash to Focus on PC Browsing and Mobile Apps; Adobe to More Aggressively Contribute to HTML5
• Animals Being Dicks (animated GIF’s)
• If We Don’t, Remember Me (cinematic animated GIF’s)

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 127: Setting up your Computer and Work Area

This week’s show notes were typed up by @RobinDotNet – Thanks!!!

• 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:

• Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror http://www.fakeplasticrock.com http://codinghorror.com)
• Separating programming sheep from non programming goats
• An Empirical Comparison of the Accuracy Rates of Novices using the Quorum, Perl, and Randomo Programming Languages
• RocksmithRocksmithRocksmith / Rock Band 3
• Penny Arcade – Extra Credits
• Joi Ito: Leadership in World of Warcraft
• Khan Academy
• Codecademy
• Roblox game
• Roblox Stack Exchange
• Roblox Studio
• World of Goo / World of Goo Level Editor
• SE Podcast #23 – James Portnow
• Loss aversion
• The Sunk Cost Fallacy
• 59 Seconds
• Battlefield 3
• XKCD – The Problem With Wikipedia
• John Resig joins Khan Academy
• Xbox Kinect
• Dance Central 2
• Your Shape 2012
• Braid / Braid – All 8 Stars
• Yars’ Revenge
• Bitcoin crash

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 126: Jeff Atwood on Video Games and Gamification

This week’s show notes were typed up by @rossfuhrman – Thanks!!!

• 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)

Download / Listen:

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

This week’s show notes were typed up by @RobinDotNet – Thanks!!!

• 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:

• Glimpse: git repo, Glimpse for ASP.NET NuGet package, Glimpse for ASP.NET MVC NuGet package
• Anthony van der Hoorn (@anthony_vdh)
• Nik Molnar (@nikmd23)
• CodePlex documentation for adding Glimpse manually
• NLog
• ELMAH
• mvc-mini-profiler
• Firebug
• Fiddler
• C4MVC talk on Glimpse
• Fluent Security

Download / Listen:

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

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

• 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:

• NancyFX git repo, NuGet package, Google Group, @NancyFx
• Andreas Håkansson (@TheCodeJunkie)
• Steven Robbin (@Grumpydev)
• Nancy, Sinatra and the Explosion of .NET Micro Web Frameworks with Andreas Håkansson

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 123: Andreas Håkansson and Steven Robbins on NancyFx

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

• 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)

Download / Listen:

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

• 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:

• Sara Chipps (@sarajchipps)
• Girl Develop It
• The Madagascar Institute
• Aptana
• Hamptons Hackathon for Humanity
• Commuting In Traffic

Download / Listen:

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

• 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:

• Ryan Stewart (@ryanstewart)
• Adobe Labs
• Adobe MAX
• HP Quick Test Pro

Download / Listen:

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

• 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)

• 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
  • BrainScript
  • Shakespere
  • COMEFROM
  • TwoDucks
• 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

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 118: Paul Betts on SassAndCoffee

• 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:

• Approval Tests project site
• Llewellyn Falco (blog, @isidore_us)
• Approval Tests blog
• Teaching Kids Programming
• Agile 2011

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 117: Llewellyn Falcon on Approval Tests

• Eric explains how he’s been working on – and now runs – the team that works on the networking components for Internet Explorer.
• Kevin asks Eric to clarify what portions of IE he works on. Eric explains that he’s on fundamentals, which includes things like networking and security, not rendering or the DOM.
• Jon asks Eric about his development focus. Eric says that his main focus is on C#.
• Jon references an interesting bit of Eric’s MIX talk about Fiddler – Fiddler is an HTTP proxy, so it works with all browsers and devices.
• Scott mentions that he’s used Fiddler for low-level network debugging. Eric talks about the broad range of Fiddler users.
• Eric mentions that Fiddler’s used for security testing, and there’s a discussion of fuzz testing. Eric describes "dumb fuzzing" and "smart fuzzing".
• Jon asks how Fiddler is used with mobile devices.
• Jon asks Eric if he’s taking advantage of any "internal" info or API’s as a member of the IE team.
• Jon talks about how the plugin system has really paid off for Fiddler over the years. Eric talks about how he’s supported both a Javascript and a reflection based .NET plugin system.
• Eric mentions how he’s tested a "pure .NET 4" version of Fiddler, and talks about the Fiddler itself runs on Fiddler Core, which is really close to running on the .NET client profile.
• Jon asks Eric about some of the interesting things he’s heard built on top of Fiddler Core. Eric mentions some testing extensions, ELMAH use, and FiddlerCap.
• Jon asks what IE9 features Eric is taking advantage of. Eric talks about IE9′s support for the X-Download-Initiator header, which allows tracing why a resource was requested.
• Eric talks about Fiddler now proxies Cassini traffic for ASP.NET developers, and Jon mentions how he saw from internal bug reports that Eric was driving ASP.NET debugging issues with pre-release versions of IE9.
• Eric mentions that the issue with IE9 betas and Cassini was due to IPv6, and since the podcast was recorded on IPv6 day, the conversation shifts over to a discussion of IPv6.
• Jon asks Eric about IPv6 use in the real world, and Scott K asks about issues with SSL over IPv6.
• Jon asks about IE’s and Fiddler’s support for HTTP verbs beyond GET and POST. Eric talks about how he had to drop some strict enforcement of protocols for non-standard verbs since actual usage often didn’t follow the specs.
• Jon asks Eric about the 100 Continue response. Eric explains why it’s there, and how he handles it in Fiddler, and how IE handles it.
• Jon asks about the Accept header, asking Eric’s opinions on its use and how IE9 handles it. Eric explains how he doesn’t think Accept really works, because proxies and servers don’t correctly handle them.
• Scott K asks about the advantages of being able to analyze aggregate HTTP traffic for a large organization like Microsoft. Eric explains that there’s not really a lot of opportunity for IE, but he does get advanced notice on Fiddler issues from internal Microsoft use against pre-released software.
• Kevin asks about the "Fiddler has detected a protocol violation" error. Eric explains that it’s helpful in debugging issues which browsers will attempt to hide due to being very liberal and forgiving with respect to protocol violations.
• Eric explains that there was an HTTP 0.9 version which didn’t have HTTP headers, and talks about how his awareness of protocol violations on major websites came in handy. He mentions that he’s thought about an HTTP-Lint module, which would be a lot more strict with respect to protocol violations.
• Question from Twitter – James Schmidt – "Will we see Fiddler features move over to IE Dev tools?
• Jon asks about the common import / export format that IE F12 dev tools and Fiddler share… kind of.
• Question from Twitter – Luke Foust – Hear about developing a side project inside Microsoft.
• Jon asks Eric about some of his other freeware applications, including SlickRun and a popup blocker (big in Brazil!).
• One of Eric’s freeware applications was a utility to tweak the number of simultaneous downloads IE would use, which prompts Jon to ask about how simultaneous browser connections have evolved over the years.
• Question Jarrod Dixon – "Possible to open source SlickRun? I use it a lot and would like to add some features?"
• Kevin asks if Eric would consider open sourcing Fiddler at some point.
• Eric wraps up with a description of what’s in the works for Fiddler. Kevin asks for auto-update.

Show Links:

• Eric’s IE Internals blog
• @ericlaw on Twitter
• Fiddler (Web Debugging Proxy) website
• Fiddler blog
• The Devil Went Down to HTTP: Debugging with Fiddler (MIX11)
• MIX11 release notes for Fiddler
• Post: Fiddler is better with Internet Explorer 9
• IE and the Accept Header
• IE9 Standards Mode Accepts only text/css for stylesheets (HTTP 406 post Eric mentioned)
• Some of Eric’s freeware at Bayden Systems
• SlickRun
• Producing Open Source Software (book)

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 116: Eric Lawrence on Fiddler, IE Internals, and HTTP

• Jon asks Glenn for a quick overview of how WCF Web API fits in with REST.
• Darrel talks about how he got into REST in support of desktop systems.
• John asks Darrel about how HttpListener is working for him.
• K. Scott asks Darrel why he’s doing all the work to plumb RESTful services rather than just going with something like SOAP.
• Glenn asks Darrel how his RESTful services are more "evolvable" than previous technologies he’s used.
• Jon asks Darrel what REST means to him. Darrel says it means that there are just two things that the client and server couple on: media types and link relations.
• John says that very few people he interviews describe REST as how Darrel just did. Glenn talks about how his understanding of REST evolved when he more closely studied Roy Fielding’s original dissertation.
• Question from Twitter (@stevenproctor – Steven Proctor): "Do nice http paths really make an architecture RESTful? Wasn’t there something about next available commands too?" Glenn and Darrel talk about how this is the fundamental concept of hypermedia.
• Jon ignites a firestorm by asking why people who care about REST dislike how OData is implemented. Chaos ensues.
• Darrel explains how OData’s format doesn’t match with some important RESTful principles like link relations and metadata discoverability.
• Glenn points out that OData is an API that takes a constrained view of of HTTP, which offers a tradeoff which many developers find beneficial.
• Scott K asks the guests how many non-demo OData feeds are actually available.
• Scott K asks why not just use JSON instead of OData, and Glenn explains how the important difference is around metadata – JSON is just untyped data.
• Darrel talks about the concept of serendipitous reuse, and how common media types offer better reuse than untyped JSON data.
• John asks if anyone is actually putting the client re-use case into practice in the real world, and Darrel plugs the REST Fest. Glenn points out that just having multiple versions of a client working against a spec is a significant advantage, talking about HTTP 1.0 and HTTP 1.1 as an example.
• Jon asks  if a microformat approach could work, and eventually an RDF discussion breaks out.
• Glenn talks about how many people view REST by mapping HTTP verbs to CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operations, and they’re missing the importance of linking and hypermedia.
• Kevin asks where people "lose the path" with REST, and what are the most important concepts to stick with. Darrel comes back to the hypermedia constraint as the most important concept that’s commonly missed.
• Glenn points out that your architecture is up to you, and you don’t have to follow RESTful principles, but there’s a problem if you don’t and claim your API is RESTful when it isn’t.
• John points out that there are few examples of RESTful systems really paying off in practice. Glenn and Darrel point to Jon Moore’s Oredev talk about real business value to Comcast, and Jon mentions Glenn Block’s MIX presentation about device support based on content negotiation.
• Glenn explains that opportunities are emerging as we’re moving beyond the browser, and he sees a lot of opportunity for WCF Web API’s to shine here.
• Darrel describes another example of how a RESTful API could guide a common user experience across platforms, using Twitter as an example.
• Kevin asks for public examples of good RESTful API’s. Darrel mentions Sun’s cloud API and SteamCannon; Glenn says that ATOM PUB is the best public example.
• K. Scott asks about building RESTful clients.
• Kevin asks about the practicalities of clients navigating hypermedia.
• Question from Twitter (@kellabyte – Kelly Sommers): "I’m curious how REST might fit with an application that is wanting to store events and event sourcing. Is REST common for this?"
• Question from Twitter (@gsogol – Jeff Sogolov): "How about Rest in the enterprise? Securing Rest services with Saml or oAuth? Also impersonation."
• Jon mentions how WS-* defined methods for securing portions of message for different access and asks if REST handles that kind of scenario. Scott K, Glenn, and Darrel discuss.
• The show wraps up with a discussion selecting architectural styles based on concrete benefits.
• Darrel pimps REST Fest 2011, August 18 – 20.
• John mentions his upcoming talk at DevLink on August 17, and Monospace July 23-25.
• Glenn mentions the Portland Code Camp and //build/.

Show Links:

• Glenn Block (MSDN blog, CodeBetter blog, @gblock)
• John Sheehan (blog, @johnsheehan)
• Darrel Miller (blog, @darrel_miller)
• http://wcf.codeplex.com
• http://restsharp.org/
• Roy Fielding’s dissertation on REST
• http://microformats.org/
• ALPS http://amundsen.com/hypermedia/profiles/
• RDF (Resource Description Format)
• Jon Moore’s talk at Oredev 2010: Hypermedia APIs
• Sun Cloud API
• SteamCannon
• REST Fest 2011
• DevLink
• Monospace
• BUILD conference
• http://www.odata.org/producers

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 115: RESTravaganza with Darrel Miller, Glenn Block, and John Sheehan

• Kevin asks Trevor to explain what CoffeeScript is. Trevor explains how CoffeeScript helps you to write the same code you would have in JavaScript, but more quickly and with less effort.
• Kevin ask if people like CoffeeScript because they hate Javascript. Trevor talks about the strong reactions people had to the addition of CoffeeScript support for Rails, and how CoffeeScript is not a dumbed down Javascript, it’s really just a cleaner syntax for exposing the functional power in the that underlies Javascript.
• Scott K talks about the time and political pressures that shaped Javascript, in some ways hiding a powerful language behind a mandated Java-like syntax.
• Kevin asks about the language inspirations behind CoffeeScript. Trevor talks about how it’s drawn inspiration from Ruby, Python, Haskell, and Erlang.
• Jon asks about how CoffeeScript support is technically added to Rails – where is the compilation happening? Trevor explains  how the coffee-script and execjs gems select the Javascript runtime.
• Jon asks a question from Twitter by @darrencauthon about using CoffeeScript on Windows and .NET.
• Scott K asks about other languages that compile down to Javascript, and what will happen when Javascript as a language. Trevor talks about Objective-J and Traceur.
• Kevin asks about how you can debug CoffeeScript code.
• Jon talks about the Try CoffeeScript interactive compiler on the CoffeeScript.org site and asks resources for learning more about CoffeeScript.
• Scott K asks if CoffeeScript leverages more advanced Javascript features if they’re available, and if there are language facilities for extending the language. Trevor talks about how CoffeeScript is just Javascript, so you can leverage the extensibility features that are already available in Javascript.
• Kevin drops back to asking some basics: why is CoffeeScript so special? What’s with the new function syntax?
• Jon talks about how nice it is to just delete parentheses, braces, and semicolons. Trevor talks about how in general CoffeeScript code is 2/3 as verbose as the equivalent Javascript code.
• K Scott asks about how CoffeeScript simplifies scope issues, and Trevor talks about how CoffeeScript is very opinionated about scoping.
• Scott K asks about type coercion. Trevor mentions the wtfjs.com site, talking about how Javascript’s type coercion can be surprising at times.
• Scott K asks about how DOM manipulation is handled. Trever explains that CoffeeScript works great with jQuery, and any other Javascript library available.
• Jon asks if it’s possible to do CoffeeScript compilation in the browser, and asks if that’s possible / practical for standard applications.
• Jon mentions the SassAndCoffee project for .NET.
• Jon asks if there are any Javascript to CoffeeScript converters. Trevor says he doubts there will ever be a good one, but after the show sent Jon a link to js2coffee (link below).
• Scott K asks about JSLint support. Trevor talks about how CoffeeScript works with JavaScript Lint.
• Kevin asks if CoffeeScript has been used as a DSL, and Trevor mentions CoffeeKup.
• Jon asks what happens if CoffeeScript hits a compiler error.
• Kevin asks about split between front-end vs. back-end use for CoffeeScript.
• Jon some a question from Christopher Deutsch (@cdeutsch) about how to sell CoffeeScript to a team – is this today’s flavor, tomorrow’s legacy headache?
• Kevin talks about how he likes the => function, and Jon mentions how he likes the @ operator as well.
• Kevin asks about the object orientation features in CoffeeScript, and Trevor mentions how the class keyword is used.
• Jon says the he sees a lot of similarity between CoffeeScript and SASS. Trevor talks about how both reduce repetitions.
• Jon asks if jQuery could take advantage of CoffeeScript.
• Trevor mentions how you can buy his book and mentions a recent article he published in PragPub.
• Trevor’s upcoming talks: O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo in NYC in October and Oredev in Sweden in November.

Show Links:

• Trevor Burnham (Site, @coffeescript, @trevorburnham)
• CoffeeScript site
• Hacker News: Rails 3.1 shipping with CoffeeScript
• StackOverflow: CoffeeScript on Windows
• StackOverflow: How can I compile CoffeeScript from .NET?
• Objective-J
• Traceur
• GWT (Google Web Toolkit)
• The CoffeeScript Wiki
• List of languages that compile to JS
• RailsCast: CoffeeScript Basics
• PeepCode: Meet CoffeeScript
• Trevor’s book: CoffeeScript: Accelerated JavaScript Development (Amazon, direct from PragProg)
• wftjs.com
• js2coffee (Javascript to CoffeeScript compiler)
• MiddleMan.rb - Middleman is a static site renderer that provides all the conveniences of a modern web stack, like Ruby on Rails, while remaining focused on building the fastest, most-professional sites possible
• SassAndCoffee: project, NuGet
• JavaScript Lint
• CoffeeKup
• Sass
• PragPub: A CoffeeScript Intervention
• O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo in NYC in October
• Oredev in Sweden in November

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 114: Trevor Burnham on CoffeeScript

This episode of Herding Code the guys talk to Mark Russinovich about his new book (Zero Day), modern malware like Stuxnet, his experiences discovering the Sony rootkit, Sysinternals tools, and computer security in general.

• K Scott asks Mark about how he decided to write Zero Day. Mark talks about how early, unsophisticated viruses still caused a lot of damage, and it got him thinking about what a virus attack motivated by a terrorist agenda could achieve.
• K Scott talks about the shift to financial motivation in malware, and Mark mentions the book Zero Day Threat which discusses financially motivated malware.
• Kevin asks Mark about his motivation for writing fiction in general, and how big a shift it was from technical writing.
• K Scott talks about how he read the book while travelling, and how it did a pretty good job of terrifying him.
• Mark mentions how the Stuxnet virus validated some of the scenarios he’d been using in the book, how sophisticated Stuxnet is, and how that level of sophistication in malware authoring is available for hire, cheaply.
• Scott K asks about the threat that malware like Stuxnet could come back on the entity that released it, and Mark mentions that collateral damage is definitely a factor, but that the Stuxnet authors were apparently unconcerned by it.
• We take a question from listener @mattd78: "what does mark think of Linux and has he ever analyzed the source code to compare it to windows"
• Scott K asks how the malware targets have changed with the explosion of mobile devices.
• K Scott asks Mark about how he uses Sysinternals tools when studying malware.
• Jon asks about how live.sysinternals.com works to allow running the tools without an explicit download / install step.
• Jon asks Mark whether he does all his testing in virtual machines or uses physical test machines.
• K Scott asks Mark about Rootkit Revealer – how it got started, and how Mark discovered the Sony rootkit. Mark tells an interesting story about a cat and mouse game he was engaged with against a rootkit writer who went by the name of Holy Father, who kept coming up with ways to hide from Rootkit Revealer.
• Mark talks about the interview he did on NPR about the Sony rootkit fiasco.
• Kevin thanks Mark, on the behalf of Windows developers everywhere, for the Sysinternals tools. When Kevin tells Mark that they’ve saved his butt over and over, Mark says he’s heard that feedback so many times that they used "save your butt" on advertising over the years.
• Kevin asks Mark if working at Microsoft has made things easier. Mark says not so much – it’s often quicker for him to disassemble and use dynamic analysis than to look at the source code.
• Jon asks if Mark has any security feedback for .NET developers. Mark says that if you’re purely in managed code, you need to focus on logic problems like SQL injection.
• K Scott asks if Mark has anything he’d like to promote, and Mark talks about the upcoming book Windows Sysinternals Administrator’s Reference.
• Jon asks Mark what’s the point of running antivirus software if it’s not going to be 100% effective.
• Kevin asks Mark if he’s working on a sequel to Zero Day. He is!

Show Links:

• Mark Russinovich (blog, @markrussinovich, wikipedia)
• Zero Day
• Sysinternals
• Zero Day Threat (book)
• The Andromeda Strain (book)
• Stuxnet
• Mark’s series on Stuxnet
• Half-Life 2 source code leak
• Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It (book)
• Rootkit battle: Rootkit Revealer vs. Hacker Defender
• Windows Sysinternals Administrator’s Reference (book)
• The Antispyware Conspiracy

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 113: Mark Russinovich on Zero Day and Computer Security

• Jeremy Miller explains why FubuMVC "deserves to exist" and explains how compositional architecture and conventions help in building complex systems.
• Josh talks about how FubuMVC diagnostics help in understanding how the conventions are being applied how FubuMVC is working.
• Jon asks about how behavior chains work, and how they relate to routes. Jeremy and Josh explain how behaviors work and how they allow you to extend policies and conventions when you need to.
• Jon asks how routes work, and Jeremy explains how they can be configured at a few different levels.
• Jeremy talks about how FubuMVC is built to leverage static features in .NET through strong typing and leveraging the type system as much as is possible.
• Josh and Jeremy talk about the advanced diagnostics which have recently been added to FubuMVC.
• Jon asks how FubuMVC diagnostics compare to Glimpse.
• Jeremy talks about the new packaging system, and how it can be used to apply complex and extensive changes just by dropping them into your application.
• Scott K asks how the new packaging system relates to NuGet and OpenWrap, and Jeremy explains how the two are complimentary.
• Jeremy and Josh talk about how their complex requirements in their active projects have driven FubuMVC’s features.
• There’s a discussion of view engines – what’s supported, what they’re currently using in their projects.
• Jeremy talks about how FubuMVC uses HTML conventions, how HtmlTags work, and how you can use jQuery-like chaining to reuse conventions.
• Jeremy talks about how authorization works with the behavior chains. Scott K asks if this can be applied at the action level rather than at the UI level, and Jeremy explains the endpoint service.
• We wrap up with a mention of Pablo’s Fiesta, this Sept 30 – Oct 2 in Austin, TX.

Show Links:

• Jeremy Miller (blog, @jeremydmiller)
• Joshua Arnold (blog, @jmarnold)
• FubuMVC on github
• FubuMVC guides
• FubuMVC on NuGet
• Pablo’s Fiesta

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 112: Josh Arnold and Jeremy Miller on FubuMVC

• Jon asks how the whole thing got started, and if John encountered any friction within Microsoft in getting this set up.
• John describes the event and calls out some of the winners from the event.
• There’s a discussion of the Glimpse project. Scott asks what it is, and Jon tries to give the sales pitch for it.
• John talks about how many of these really cool project are hampered by marketing mistakes like poor project pages and unmemorable project names.
• John mentions some of the areas for improvement – less background noise, bigger space. Some of that was due to overwhelming response – stopped counting at 500 attendees, ran out of food 3 times, etc.
• Scott asks if a next step should be an open source conference for .NET. Jon mentions that there are some benefits to piggybacking with a "real" conference so the bosses will pay for us to go.
• Scott asks if there’s any point to having sessions at a conference, since the real value at the conferences is in the networking and conversation. There’s a discussion about how an open space is cool, but something of this scale isn’t likely to self-organize.
• Scott talks about how the ALT.NET Seattle event in Seattle is including open source hacking, proposing that larger conferences do this as well.
• John mentions the Twitter list he’s created for all Open Source Fest participants.
• We take a question from Tony Champion, asking what John would do differently in future events.
• John and Jon discuss the difference between consuming and participating in a conference.
• John pimps the Silverlight MIXer event he runs at MIX.
• Jon asks if there should be venture capital folks at future open source fests. John said said that it was important to keep clear of any ulterior motives at this first event, but it’s possible that may happen in the future.
• John and Jon talk about the difference between "official" events and sponsorship driven events.

Show Links:

• John Papa @john_papa
• Recap of Open Source Fest at MIX11
• OSF Project List
• InfoStrat.MotionFx  – Joshua Blake
• Silverlight Media Framework – Tim Greenfield
• Glimpse – Nik Molnar and Anthony Van Der Hoorn
• DirectCanvas – Jeremiah Morrill
• Farseer Physics Engine – Jeff Weber
• WiiMote Library – Brian Peek
• StackExchange Data Explorer – Sam Saffron
• RestSharp – John Sheehan
• Some MSDN Magazine articles on NHibernate (for Scott K)
• John Papa’s OSFMix11 Twitter List
• Tony Champion
• Silverlight MIXer

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 11: John Papa on the Open Source Fest at MIX11

Note: We recorded in quietest spot we could find – there’s some background noise, but it’s worth it.

• Geoff and Jarrod talk about their past job experiences, including building (gasp) 911 software with Visual Basic 6.
• Jon asks how things worked at the beginning – did people work on separate areas? Was there a plan?
• How do you share data when developing with a remote team? Geoff talks about how they started with the Database Project type, but moved to SQL scripts, ending with a migration tool. Jon gets to say “idempotent”.
• Geoff and Jarrod talk about how they’ve moved form Subversion to Mercurial.
• Jon asks how code moves from local development to a production server. Geoff talks about the build and deployment process.
• Kevin asks how much the process has changed over the years.
• Geoff talks about how features first hit Meta, then the “others” tier (everything but StackOverflow), then to StackOverflow.
• We talk about how they’re using Redis, including the newly open sourced redis-sharp library, and some of the tricks that are used to keep the cache performant, including gzipping cached data.
• We talk about how they do performance tuning, how costly queries are tracked, etc.
• Geoff talks about how search was moved from SQL Server Full Text indexing to Lucene.NET in order to move the load off the database server.
• Jon asks about how they’ve integrated the ASP.NET stack with open source front-end and utility software.
• Jon asks how the the IT and collaboration works with the growing distributed team.
• Jon asks how bugs are tracked, and the talk about how they use the Meta sites for tracking issues. Jon is sold on the concept and asks if he can install a local instance of Meta for his own bug tracking concepts, but the guys just laugh at him.
• Jon asks for more specific on the performance monitoring systems the team uses, and Geoff gives him the rundown.
• Jon asks how things have changed as the team has grown and buckets of funding money keep rolling in.
• Geoff explains how they handle multi-tenancy, now that they’re hosting lots of sites. Jon is amazed to hear that it’s just one big application which switches data structures and display based on the url.
• Geoff mentions that they’re using Less to keep the CSS sane.
• Kevin asks how much work is involved in spinning up a new site. Geoff explains the tool they’ve got set up to generate the scripts to add a new StackExchange site.
• Jon asks about MVC 3 is working for them. They like the Razor.
• Jon asks what annoys them most about ASP.NET MVC. After some thought, they lament that the routes are defined separately from the actions, but mostly it’s just a lot of love for MVC.

Show Links:

• Geoff Dalgas @superdalgas
• Jarrod Dixon @jarrod_dixon
• Redis
• BookSleeve (Redis client library)
• Lucene.NET
• HAProxy
• Skype
• Nagios
• Cacti
• Dapper
• Sam Saffron @samsaffron
• Benjamin Dumke @balpha
• less.js

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 110: Geoff Dalgas and Jarrod Dixon take us behind the scenes at StackExchange

• Eric talks about the Harmony Hackathon came together and what they were trying to accomplis.
• Jon asks about how things were coordinated. The guys talk about how they managed the "organized chaos" of throwing a lot of developers in a room for 48 hours.
• Scott K asks how a group of alpha geeks got past selecting an IoC container in a weekend, let alone write some code.
• Jon asks for a rundown on the dependencies (Fluent NHibernate, Fluent Migrator, ASP.NET MVC 3, and some testing tools).
• Hooray for build servers!
• Discussion of machine.specifications and NUnit in order to test both high and low level code.
• Scott K asks how much actually got done.
• We talk to Vic to get the real scoop – sure the tech was cool, but did they build anything? How was it like to be the project owner with this kind of project?
• Discussion of extremely short sprints – down to 30 minutes at the end! How do you handle Pomodoro length sprints?
• We talk about Chewie, which adds some Bundler features to NuGet.
• Scott K gets the rundown on psake (build automation in PowerShell) from Eric.
• Scott K asks about what kind of interaction patterns they saw emerging.
• Scott K asks about the future plans for this project.
• Scott K asks why ALT.NET people would want to do something nice, and Jon mentions his mild surprise at the happy, friendly vibe he’d seen at the ALT.NET Seattle events he’s attended. There’s a discussion of the general spirit of the ALT.NET Seattle group.
• Jon asks for lessons learned and recommendations for other people who want to put on a similar event.
• Scott K asks about friction points with the tools the team selected.
• Razor was one of the new things that none of the developers had used before. Jon remarks that learning Razor was kind of a non-event for him, and the guys agree.
• Kevin asks about how the project lifecycle looks like when compressed to a 48 hour period.
• Eric explains what Harmony Hill does, explaining why everyone was so motivated to help out. The guys talk about how it’s nice to go beyond talking about beautiful code and actually doing something.
• Scott K asks if there were technological things the team would do differently in the future.
• The Open Source Track at ALT.NET Seattle (May 5-8) is mentioned.
• Coding alone? You must wear the Coding Solo Cowboy Hat of Shame.
• Pimp your stuff time: Harmony Hill, ALT.NET 2011, Giles, Simple.Data
• The guys ask Scott K when we’ll see the MVC generator thing he’s been working on.
• Everyone loves Simple.Data.
• Developers, developers, developers!
• Woof, woof, woof!
• Does anyone read these notes? I don’t think you do.

Show Links:

• Harmony Hill
• Bobby Johnson (@notmyself)
• Chris Bilson (@cbilson)
• Eric Ridgeway (@ang3lfir3)
• Vic Ridgeway (@ang3lsdream)
• https://github.com/HarmonyHacks/Dahlia
• Harmony Hackathon: the beginning of something big?
• Harmony Hill Hackathon: The Aftermath
• The Inception of Circle Pulling 
• Eric Lee (@saintgimp)
• psake
• machine.specifications
• Chewie
• The Pomodoro technique
• Team City
• Bundler
• Dev Null webscale database
• ALT.NET Seattle 2011
• ALT.NET Seattle 2011 Open Source Track
• Continous Integration in the Real World
• Giles – continuous testing tool
• Solution Factory
• Nancy
• Simple.Data

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 109: Harmony Hackathon

• Jon tries to get Jin and Nathan upset, but they both start by agreeing
• Nathan mentions that Photoshop is a production tool, not a design tool
• Jin and Jon talk about the value of wireframes, and how the transition from wireframe
• Nathan talks about how different clients have different demands – Quora can prototype rapidly for their own product, but some clients will require high quality graphic deliverables
• Kevin asks developers and designers work together in HTML based design – who does the HTML?
• Jon talks about how moving the discussion from images to a client accessible stage / demo server early in the project helps everyone communicate
• Jon asks both which sorts of sites work better for HTML based design because they’re mostly textual
• Jon asks Jin how he works on StackExchange proposals
• Nathan talks about how the site focus dictates the design process, and how he’s mostly done with Photoshop
• Kevin asks if there’s a place for a tool that’s somewhere between the purely visual Photoshop world and HTML: Nathan says it’d be nice, Jon says the generated HTML is always horrible, and Jin says that’s why he thinks designers need some HTML smarts
• Nathan brings up Jon’s post on the Designer / Developer Workflow Crisis, and Jin talks about his post on Web Designers and Coding
• The talk moves to a visual-first design focus can end up with a website that doesn’t provide the information the users actually want, and some favorite XKCD and The Oatmeal links are shared
• Jin and Jon talk about how your clients aren’t really the end customers of your design, the users are
• Nathan asks Jon about how he thinks the design / developer workflow should be
• Nathan, Scott K, Jon, and Jin Jin talk about how developers can involved in the development process after the "design handoff"
• Jin talks about how developers should be part of the design process, and Jon and Scott K talk about how important it is for the whole team to know the context of what they’re doing
• Kevin mentions that his wife is a web designer who doesn’t do HTML, and every hastily backpedals
• Jon and Jin talk about how the background reasons for wanting designers to know HTML can still be met by the designer knowing the constraints of the web medium really well
• Kevin talks about how today’s Ajax heavy sites aren’t really just HTML anymore
• Jon talks about how he hates the new trend towards single page applications
• Kevin says that he thinks that saying designers should know HTML is like saying developers should know how to design, but Jin says that HTML isn’t programming, it’s the medium that both designers and developers are producing for
• Jon says that he thinks developers should try to learn more design
• Scott K asks how developers can learn design, and Jin and Nathan share tips
• Jon mentions some great talks by Robby Ingebretsen on design fundamentals for developers
• Kevin asks how much of design is just natural talent
• Jon talks about how he likes design discussions among the whole dev team, and Nathan says that it’s important for the team to be able to communicate about the business and strategy for their project as well
• Nathan talks about the book Mindfulness which shows how working through a lot of ideas helps you come up with great ideas
• Jon talks about how a process that allows for continuous change throughout the project allows you to continue to shape the design as you go, and Scott K accuses him of being agile
• Jon asks Jin how he interacts with a team who develops on Windows when he’s on a Mac, and they discuss how Firebug (and similar tools) allow for cross platform development
• Jon asks what sites should be designed using Photoshop / visual design first
• Jin asks Nathan about his thoughts on 960.gs, and Jon rants about how grid systems fight semantic design
• Scott K talks about the Flex Box Model will make it easier to design with grids without giving up on semantic markup
• Jin mentions HTML5 shims, but Scott K says that doesn’t work as well for mobile
• Jin talks about how the real challenge in StackExchange design is in creating an emotional reaction, and Kevin says that’s the result he cares about a lot more than HTML

Show Links:

• Jin Yang (@jzy)
• Nathan Bowers (@nathanbowers)
• Life without Photoshop
• AVC (designed by Nathan)
• StackExchange sites list – e.g. TEX, Gaming, Cooking, Mathematics, GIS
• Jon: The Designer/Developer Workflow Crisis (That Everyone’s Ignoring)
• Jin: Web Designers & Coding
• Jon: Designing websites in Photoshop is like creating your dinner menu in Play Doh
• XKCD: University Website
• The Oatmeal: What I Want From A Restaurant Website
• The Oatmeal: How A Web Design Goes Straight To Hell
• Jin Yang on Hanselminutes
• Robby Ingebretsen’s presentations on design for developers: Design Fundamentals for Developers and Ten Ways To Attack A Design Problem And Win
• Jin: talent vs. hard work
• Book: Mindfulness
• Firebug and Web Developer Toolbar
• http://960.gs/
• MIX 2011

Jin’s link list for developers who want to learn more about design

• http://www.456bereastreet.com/ (accessibility)
• http://www.alistapart.com/ (web design, standards)
• http://www.drawar.com/ (design community, articles, showcases and forum).
• http://www.lukew.com/ff/ (interaction design)
• http://37signals.com/svn/posts (web app design, inspirations)
• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/ (showcases, freebies, articles)
• http://typography.com/email/2010_03/index_tw.htm (typography)
• http://retinart.net/ (graphics design)
• http://cssglobe.com/ (frontend dev)
• http://ilovetypography.com/ (typography)
• http://www.uxbooth.com/ (User Experience)
• http://scriptandstyle.com/ (frontend dev)
• http://www.thegridsystem.org/ (layout)
• http://52weeksofux.com/ (User experience, design)
• http://tutsplus.com/ (tutorials)
• http://www.zeldman.com/ (web standards)

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 108: Jin Yang and Nathan Bowers on Web Design

• Topic: The Apple Store 30% fee for App Subscriptions – who’s surprised, what apps will it affect, etc.
• The conversation shifts to Kindle, and whether content focused apps can move to HTML only.
• Topic: Windows Mobile deal with Nokia – will it help?
• K Scott thinks it’s very late for both parties.
• Jon doesn’t think there’s much loyalty in the smartphone market since people get a new phone every few years.
• There’s some discussion about where this leaves the enterprise phone market. Kevin thinks that Microsoft should just have focused on the enterprise.
• Topic: Reflector – was free, was going to be free forever, but now it’s not.
• Kevin and K Scott talk about how bad it is from a community perspective.
• Kevin wonders how many developers or updates are required to keep Reflector going?
• Jon, K Scott, and Kevin talk about what they use Reflector for.
• The guys talk about open source alternative – IL Spy, Cecil based disassemblers, JetBrains’s new decompiler.
• Kevin and Jon talk about why a $35 cost is a bigger problem than it sounds like.
• Topic: Mono 2.10 and Moonlight 4 Preview 1 released – what does it mean?!
• Topic: Watson plays Jeopardy. Jon asks if it just called into Wolfram Alpha, and K Scott wonders if has a Sean Conery mode.
• Topic: CardSpace 2.0 won’t be shipped. Nobody but Jon cares.
• Scott K talks about the LastPass. Jon asks how that work on different computers, mobile, etc.
• Topic: Internet Explorer 9 RC is out
• Jon talks about how IE9RC works better with Visual Studio now.
• Jon likes the simplified UI, but talks about a few of the annoyances he’s run into.
• Jon and Kevin talk about the tab UI handling.
• Jon talks about how some sites break on JavaScript
• Scott K brings up the blog post from Mozilla asking if IE9 is a modern browser.
• The guys talk about IE9 supported features, general HTML5 support across browsers, etc.
• Kevin says that the biggest problem with IE is the slow ship cycle. Kevin and Scott K discuss the possibility of splitting out an enterprise browser.
• Kevin talks about the GPU acceleration in IE9 and how he thinks it’s overblown.
• Jon talks about the lack of XP support for IE9.
• The guys talk about how they wish there was an IE6 standalone.

Show Links:

• TechCrunch article on the Apple store 30% App Subscription fee
• Announcement about Windows / Nokia deal
• Red Gate’s announcement that Reflector will no longer be free
• Original announcement from Lutz about Red Gate buying Reflector
• Open source alternatives to Reflector on StackOverflow
• Moonlight 4 Preview 1 release announcement
• Mono 2.10 release announcement
• IBM Watson
• Beyond Windows CardSpace
• LastPass
• Is IE9 a modern browser?
• Tim Sneath: A Modern Browser
• Interoperability Bridges
• Comparison of layout engines (HTML5)
• Can I Use
• Kelly Sommers (@kellabyte)
• Expression Web SuperPreview

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 107: Apple Subscription fees, Nokia, Reflector, Mono, Watson, CardSpace, and IE9 RC

• The show begins with Mark’s Simple.Data elevator pitch in which he explains that Simple.Data is an ORM without the O, the R or the M.
• Jon asks about Mark’s heavy use of dynamic types in the Simple.Data source. Mark talks about the Method Missing pattern in Ruby and how that translates to dynamic .NET programming in Simple.Data.
• Jon and Mark dig deeper into the code and then they walkthrough project advancement from supporting basic CRUD functions to the recent addition of database transactions.
• Mark shares Simple.Data’s current and future support for numerous relational and non-relational databases.
• Jon and Mark talk about the use of MEF, rather than a full-blown IoC container, in Simple.Data.
• Scott K and Mark discuss Simple.Data tests, their implementation and the TDD and FDD (Fear-driven development) which Mark took while developing his project.
• Kevin asks if the heavy use of dynamics instigated the need to write more tests. Mark answers by sharing his views on why coders might prefer either static or dynamic typed languages.
• Jon asks about Simple.Data adoption and code optimizations which might be required to support increased production use.
• Mark digs into Reactive Extensions and how it’s used in Simple.Data.
• Mark talks about the growing movement of simple web development projects and the tools/frameworks which support these efforts and, coincidently, answers @AaronOnTheWeb‘s Twitter-submitted question.
• @CodeReflection asks about Simple.Data support for aggregates which prompts a discussion about where/how these operations should be handled.
• @jacksonh asks about support for asynchronous operations.
• The conversation switches to Mark’s involvement with OWIN and his Crack Fix project offers an ultra-lightweight web glue for .NET, written in C#..
• K Scott notes Mark’s awesome gravitar choice Jerry Statler
• Mark closes by mentioning his participation in DDD (DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper!), Skills Matter Cloud Evening, and then Cambridge NxtGenUG (Next Generation User Group).

Show Links:

• Mark Rendle, @MarkRendle 
• Dot Net Solutions London
• Simple Data
• Microsoft.Data
• Rob Conery
• NuGet
• NHibernate
• Entity Framework
• SubSonic
• DataMapper
• autofac
• StructureMap
• Jon Skeet, @jonskeet
• Scott Hanselman, @shanselman
• Reactive Extensions
• Open Wrap
• Sinatra
• OpenRasta
• FubuMVC
• Nancy
• WebMatrix
• Aaron Stannard, @AaronOnTheWeb
• Jeff Schumacher, @CodeReflection
• Jackson Harper, @jacksonh
• OWIN
• .NET Abstractions
• Crack is now Fix
• Fix ReadMe
• Raven DB
• Frack
• Glenn Block, @gblock
• Azure
• Ryan Dahl
• Seb Lambla, @serialseb
• Jerry Statler and Conrad Waldorf

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 106: Mark Rendle on Simple.Data

• Jon begins the show by sharing Brad’s bio and then dives right in asking about ASP.NET MVC 3 Service Location.  Brad talks about DI and IoC, introduces the new feature and the implementation through such things as IDependencyResolver and Controller Activator. For the full story, you should check out Brad’s eleven part series on ASP.NET MVC 3 Service Location.
• Scott K asks why the MVC team didn’t use MEF for dependency injection. Brad comments and brings up the prospect of using NuGet to install MEF support.
• Scott K asks if MVC could ship as a NuGet package. The conversation shifts to how NuGet could allow MVC to further decouple it’s shipping schedule from that of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework.
• Everyone (Well, almost everyone. Kevin’s being surprisingly quiet.) talks about jQuery plugins in the NuGet feed and how maintaining obsolete packages could get out of hand.
• Jon asks about how the jQuery based unobtrusive validation system works in MVC 3 and asks if the ASP.NET Web Forms validation system could possibly take advantage of the new unobtrusive validation support.
• Brad talks about the ASP.NET MVC development team and his role in developing ASP.NET MVC 3.
• Jon runs through the big features which were shipped with MVC 3 – Razor, Service Location, NuGet, Unobtrusive Validation. Scott K mentions default templates are now using HTML5 doc types and Brad notes other MVC 3 features like Unobtrusive Ajax, Remote Validator, Json Model and Binding support.
• Brad talks about extensibility for view engines in project templates and the new add view dialogue features.
• Via Twitter, @gsogol asks if we will ever see fluent type configurations of filters, validations for controllers and classes.
• Jon brings up the MVC 3 Futures library and asks Brad if it includes features which he wishes were rolled into the core MVC 3 bits. Brad explains the performance benefits of using the caching version of the model metadata provider system in the Futures library.
• K Scott asks about feature requests for Display and Editor Templates and the guys talk about code based templates.
• Jon talks about his favorable experience with Razor and mentions there’s a web form to razor converter available.
• @gsogol asks if the ASP.NET MVC team looks at other MVC frameworks to "borrow" various ideas for a more productive experience.
• The guys talk about Razor Web Helpers like Web.Grid, Web.Crypto and Web.Mail which are baked into System.Web compared to the Microsoft Web Helpers which include social media helpers for Twitter and Facebook and video embedding.
• The guys talk about the bundle of awesomeness which MS released with WebMatrix, SQL Compact and IIS Express.
• The guys discuss what MVC3 offers to make testing easier and how one might unit test their JavaScript.
• Brad talks about his love for BDD-style testing with SpecFlow, he explains the Given-When-Then syntax and how TDD and high-level spec testing complement each other. Brad mentions he would likely make the Web Steps he shared at Agile Conference 2010 available online soon.
• Brad talks about MVC3 support in xUnit 1.7 and explains how xUnit compares to other test frameworks.
• The conversation shifts to Swedish death metal and the guys totally nerding out about diet and fitness.
• Brad pimps his Advanced ASP.NET MVC 3 talk at MvcConf 2 (video now on demand), teases us about his What’s New in MVC 3 talk given at the P&P submit and mentions his January talk for the .NET Developers Association about, you guessed it, ASP.NET MVC 3.

Show Links:

• Brad Wilson, @BradWilson 
• Scott Densmore, @scottdensmore
• HERDING CODE 66: BRAD WILSON AND SCOTT DENSMORE ON IPHONE DEVELOPMENT
• Patterns & Practices
• xUnit.net
• ObjectBuilder DI Framework
• Brad’s Service Location Blog Posts
• MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework)
• Ninject
• Unity
• NuGet
• Visual Studio Gallery
• Brad’s Unobtrusive Client Validation Post
• Brad’s Unobtrusive Ajax Post
• Html5
• YUI
• WebMatrix
• Web Camps
• Razor
• Jeff Sogolov, @Gsogol
• Razor-Converter Tool, Tsvetomir Tsonev, Telerik
• Phil Haack
• jqGrid,  MvcContrib Grid
• Wait, What’s Node.js Good for Again?, ReadWriteWeb
• Mary-Jo Foley
• Orchard
• PortableApps
• Html Agility Pack
• QUnit
• Jurassic – a JavaScript Compiler for .NET – was mentioned by Jon and then Scott K mentioned Node.js (shocker) and referenced two other JS frameworks. Though the framework names slipped Scott’s mind, he did mention Thomas Fuchs of script.aculo.us so we’ll offer up those two links now and there may be more to come. 
• SpecFlow
• WatiN
• Agile Alliance
• Nunit, Jim Newkirk
• Cucumber
• Arrange-Act-Assert (or "3A") pattern, William Wake
• StoryQ
• mbUnit
• MachineSpecifications (MSpec), Aaron Jenson, @aaronjenson 
• SubSpec
• The Primal Blueprint
• Good Calories, Bad Calories
• Scott Hanselman, @shanselman 
• Brian Henderson, @Brian_Henderson
• Brad’s Advanced ASP.NET MVC 3 Talk at MvcConf 2
• .NET Developers Assocation

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 105: Brad Wilson on MVC 3

• Kevin kicks off this week’s show asking Rob to tell us about Caliburn.Micro – his opinionated MVVM framework for WPF, Silverlight and WP7. Rob talks about how actions, support for conventions, and presentation roles are implemented in his opinionated MVVM framework.
• Rob explains how about Caliburn – his earlier framework built for WPF – has contributed its most important features to the easier-to-use, lighter Caliburn Micro.
• Jon brings up extensibility and inquires about how one overrides functionality in Cabiburn Micro.
• Kevin and Rob talk about view resolution and the difference between ViewModel-First and View-First development which are both offered in Caliburn Micro.
• Kevin asks designer integration and the “blendability” of Caliburn Micro.
• Rob explains the convention-based approach Caliburn Micro takes toward bindings and actions and the guys speak to the importance of diagnostic mechanisms when your coding is based on magic of convention.
• Kevin asks if that were places where the WPF/Silverlight/WP7 frameworks limited what Caliburn Micro could implement due to lack of extensibility points.
• Rob dives into IResult and Coroutines and how one can write asynchronous calls in a synchronous a manner with Caliburn Micro. Rob then answers how coroutines compare to the implementation coming in C# 5?
• Kevin asks about window management screen conductor and roles.
• The guys discuss their experience working with Silverlight and WPF.
• Jon asks about community contributions to Caliburn Micro and brings up the social aspect of open source and Mercurial projects in particular.
• The show gets its first question from the hotline from Rick who asks, “What does Caliburn do that MVVM Light Toolkit does not do?”
• Rob touches upon the Pub/Sub and window management features offered in Caliburn Micro and also talks about IoC friendliness.
• The guys talk about Rob’s elegant yet unorthodox approach to the service location in Caliburn Micro.
• Rob offers a quick preview of what’s to come next in Caliburn Micro.
• Rob notes that he’s submitted a talk for Mix11: “Build Your Own MVVM Framework with Html and JavaScript”
• The guys discuss Knockout JS and its influence on Caliburn Micro.
• The show wraps with Kevin (in Scott K’s absence) asking THE question: “Is Silverlight dead?” Tune in and find out the answer to that one…

Show Links:

• Rob Eisenberg, @EisenbergEffect
• Caliburn Micro
• Caliburn
• Blue Spire
• MonoRail
• Jeremy Miller, @jeremydmiller 
• Herding Code 57: Presentation Patterns With Jeremy Miller, Ward Bell, Rob Eisenberg And Glenn Block
• Build your own MVVM framework – MIX10
• Build Your Own MVVM Framework…with HTML and Javascript – Mix11
• Caliburn.Micro Soup to Nuts Pt. 5 – IResult and Coroutines
• Caliburn.Micro Soup to Nuts Part 6a – Screens, Conductors and Composition
• Matt Hamilton @mabster
• Marco Amendola, @marcoamendola
• Rick Ratayczak @RickRat
• MVVM Light Toolkit
• Ninject
• MEF
• Knockout, Steve Sanderson
• MIX11

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 104: Rob Eisenberg on Caliburn Micro

• K Scott kicks off the show asking Seb about his most popular OSS project – OpenRasta provides the 30 second elevator pitch and touches on his web framework which embraces HTTP through composition-based programming and facilitates the development of both JSON/XML services and webpage using the same fluent APIs.
• K Scott asks Seb about OpenRasta Resources, Handlers and Codecs (oh my) and Seb outlines the four (yes, 4) main components of MVC, content negotiation and browser fun.
• Scott K and Seb talk about the OpenRasta plug-in model and dig into pipeline contributors, operation interceptors and the full-flexibility of the OpenRasta composition framework.
• Jon speaks of service location which are new to MVC3.
• Jon asks Seb for his opinion on WCF Web APIs and how they compare to OpenRasta. 
• The guys talk about the distinction between the Microsoft Web and WCF frameworks and consider the creation of web services through .ASMX vs WCF.
• Seb explains Easy, Simple and Intuitive in the context of existing frameworks and APIs.
• Kevin asks about resource-oriented thinking in the .NET community. Seb response with talk of the slow adoption of RESTful architecture and poor education offered by vendors.
• K Scott asks Seb when/why he started becoming passionate about REST and Seb shares his and OpenRasta’s story.
• Through the magic of Twitter, John Sheehan asks if there are any plans to develop a OpenRasta Client. Don’t worry – RestSharp is safe for now.
• Kevin asks a second question! Does OpenRasta do anything with hypermedia? Seb speaks of generating links and advanced links and forms (i.e. Hypermedia Controls) in OpenRasta.
• Before the conversation shifts to OpenWrap, Jon asks about Seb’s thoughts on OData and it not really being RESTful. Seb offers his option and notes his NDC presentation which brings light to all that is wrong with OData.
• The conversation shifts to OpenWrap, a package management system for .NET. Seb provides a quick overview of the project and what it offers.
• The guys discuss the release of NuGet and the collaboration (or not) with the Nu and OpenWrap folks during development.
• The guys further talk about the various package management systems and the pros and cons around having more than one solution (with slightly different focuses) in the .NET space. Jon compares the situation to that of Entity Framework and NHibernate both coming to market. Seb talks about productivity.
• Seb talks about dogfooding and building and deploying a package manager with the package manager.
• Seb walks the guys through the typical workflow experience when using OpenWrap.
• Seb explains what a symbol servers (specifically SymbolSource.org) offer and how it is to be integration with OpenWrap.
• Seb provides an overview of OWIN (Open Web Interface for .NET) which defines a standard interface between .NET web servers and web applications.
• The show wraps with Seb pimping his upcoming talks on OpenWrap and OpenRasta at QCon London.

Show Links:

• Seb Lambla, @serialseb
• OpenRasta
• OpenRasta Getting Started
• A Better ActionResult – A blog post by Garry Shutler on OperationInterceptors.
• OpenWrap
• OWIN – Open Web Interface for .NET
• .NET HTTP Abstractions Mailing List
• QCon London
• Jeremy Miller,@jeremydmiller, FubuMVC
• Glenn Block, @gblock, WCF Web APIs
• Don Box
• Clemens Vasters
• OData
• Seb’s NDC2010 Talk: Using REST to Design a Better OData
• restfully
• Ian Robinson
• Kayak
• Frack
• Knack
• Fix
• Manos
• NuGet
• Nu
• RestSharp, John Sheehan, @johnsheehan
• SymbolSource.org, Marcin Mikolajczak
• OpenId

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 103: Seb Lambla on OpenEverything

• Tim gives the node.js elevator pitch and begins to explain what node offers – like event loops, evented IO, callbacks, non-blocking requests, high concurrency, and real-time scalability.
• K Scott shares that Tim’s wheat blog engine which sits on to of a Git repository was implemented using node.js.
• Tim notes the greatest use case for node is still web development and touches upon how it differs from other framework like ASP.NET and Rails.
• Scott K explains that he thinks of node as an abstraction over network programming and shares his excitement around the hundreds of interesting frameworks and modules developed with/for node.
• Jon prompts Tim to talk about the node knockout competition and the various contest submissions.
• Kevin asks for further explanation of evented IO and Tim provides further detail using a dentist waiting room analogy.
• Jon asks how one troubleshoots callbacks and loops and how one manages state with node. Tim explains event based programming and why node.js came about.
• K Scott asks if server-side js interest has recently exploded due to HTML5, web sockets and leaving connections open to the server. Tim talks about long polling and thread counts as opposed to the the node approach.
• Jon asks Tim to speak about his extensive community contributions – namely his sharing of 47 repositories including wheat, step library for flow control and hamel.js.  Not to mention the howtonode blog.
• Scott K and Tim talk about sharing javascript code between the server and client.
• Jon asks about kiwi, npm and node package managers.
• Scott K asks how the node.js and server-side javascript got so popular. Tim turns to the need for a real-time web solution, social media and community involvement and Ryan Dahl’s appealing personality and unique design strategy.
• K Scott asks about Tim’s tutorial on learning javascript through object graphs. Tim explains the importance of understanding that javscript doesn’t operate like Java and the guys talk about jQuery’s impact in learning (or not learning) javascript.
• K Scott talks about a time before kids when IBM released an OS in javascript.  Or was it Sun’s Lively Kernel?  Either way, it was before kids. You know what they do to one’s memory.
• Kevin speaks of the early, hyper-experimental days of node and asks if the community is starting to settle down and standardize on a set of libraries.
• K Scott asks for Tim’s thoughts on ECMAScript.
• Via Twitter, Jackson Harper asks about no.de, a submission by Joyent into the node knockout competition, and it’s current status.
• Jon calls out Couch and Mongo and the NoSQL movement and Tim to share the node data story. 
• Scott K and K Scott talk about running Node on Windows.
• Scott K dreams of IronJS and porting node modules to the DLR.
• Jon asks how you get started with node  and Tim recommends the friendly IRC room, the friendly mailing list and suggests a newb move to San Francisco and attend the frequent meet ups.
• K Scott asks about Tim’s everyday development environment and tools.
• Kevin asks about the Node.js sweet spot. Is it for basic web development or is it geared towards more complex, real-time scalability problems?  Tim discusses the perks and challenges of Node.js in any development undertaking.
• Scott K throws out the “E” word and asks about node’s penetration of the enterprise.
• The show wraps with general conversation about node, Harmony and Javascript and Tim kind of misses his opportunity to pimp.

Show Links:

• Tim Caswell, @creationix
• Tim @ GitHub
• Node.js
• howtonode blog
• V8 Javascript Engine
• jsconf.eu
• wheat
• Sencha Labs
• Miguel de Icaza, @migueldeicaza
• Node Modules
• Node Knockout
• Ryan Dahl, Node
• Matt Podwysocki’s Blog
• Haml-js
• CouchDB
• Step Library
• TJ Holowaychuk (visionmedia), jade, kiwi
• Dav Glass, @davglass, Node.js + YUI 3 Talk One and Talk Two @ Yahoo!
• Isaac Schlueter, npm
• Chris Williams’s Blog, @voodootikigod, JSConf 2010, JSConf EU 2010
• Learning Javascript with Object Graphs
• Douglas Crockford
• Brendan Eich
• CoffeeScript, Jeremy Ashkenas
• Rhino
• SpiderMonkey
• HTML5
• ECMAScript5/Harmony
• Jackson Harper, @jacksonh
• no.de, Joyent
• Nodejitsu
• MinGW
• Ajax.org Cloud9
• Node.js Windows Port
• MacRuby
• IRC (irc.freenode.net #node.js.), developers mailing list
• Sun Lively Kernel
• Bruce Eckel
• Express
• Sinatra

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

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Herding Code 102: Tim Caswell on Node.js

• Jon asks Kelly about her first big post, What fuels my passion for technology & writing code
• Kelly talks about her experience getting started on Twitter
• Jon asks Kelly about her post on how desktop UI’s feel boring compared to mobile UI’s
• Jon and Kelly discuss notification systems like Growl
• Scott K talks about how non-Windows operating systems have included things like multiple desktops, status widgets, etc. for a while
• The discussion moves to how Windows is focused on the mouse, and how we’d like to see desktop UI’s that are geared towards touch and keyboard
• Jon mentions Desktops as a multiple desktop interface for Windows
• Jon drops his Alt+Space keyboard secret, and Kelly counters that it’s old news
• The discussion moves on to synchronizing applications and systems
• Jon brings up Mesh, and Kelly talks about why it didn’t catch on as much as it could have. Jon talks about how there’s a chicken and egg problem with cool Microsoft API’s which aren’t used in Microsoft products, and Scott Koon talks about how he though Mesh applications seemed cool but he just couldn’t get a hold of the SDK.
• Next, the discussion moves to mobile development. Jon asks Kelly for her opinion of how Windows Phone development compares with other mobile development platforms.
• Jon and Kelly discuss the Metro UI and UI discoverability in general
• Kelly talks about performance tips for Windows Phone
• Jon asks if there is any cross-platform development between mobile platforms
• K. Scott asks about the upgrade scenario
• Darrel Miller asks via Twitter about the online brainstorming meetings Kelly had previously proposed
• Jackson Harper asks via Twitter what’s the most interesting thing Kelly has learned in the past month, and the conversation switches to node.js, threading, fibers, etc.
• The gang discusses the Await keyword, recently announced at PDC
• Scott K. asks for bets on how long until Await shows up in the Mono nightly builds
• Random speculation of whether the Async CTP actually works on .NET 4
• Kevin compares the Await syntactic sugar approach to hiding asynchronicity with the node.js approach which embraces node.js.

Show Links:

• Kelly Sommers (blog, @kellabyte)
• Desktops utility
• Hanselminutes Podcast 228 – Performance of Silverlight on Windows Phone 7
• Windows Phone 7 Developer Tips and Tricks from Jeff Wilcox (posted by Tim Heuer)
• Windows Phone "Really" commercial
• Nathan Bowers (blog, @nathanbowers)
• Darrel Miller (blog, @darrel_miller)
• REST Fest
• Jackson Harper, @jacksonh
• The Async CTP link on MSDN
• Eric Lippert’s series on Continuation Passing Style
• FAQ’s on the Async keyword

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 101: Kelly Sommers

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 100: One Hundredth Show Celebration with Queen Beatrix

[music loop during autotune bit courtesy of Incompetech]

• David describes the history of NuGet – how NuGet evolved from a web-based feature for use in ASP.NET Web Pages and the inspiration from a web-based database admin tool by David Fowler.
• Jon asks about how NuGet is related to the ASP.NET Web Admin site which was included in ASP.NET 2.0.
• David then tells about how, at Scott Guthrie’s prompting, the idea involved and how NuGet joined up up with the Nu project.
• K. Scott asks about how NuGet works in practice using the Package Management Console.
• There’s a brief discussion of the name, and David foreshadows the impending name change to NuGet.
• K. Scott asks about which packages are currently available, and what’s involved in contributing a new package.
• Scott K. asks about creating aliases, and David talks about the ability to change things via PowerShell.
• David describes some of the logic involved in dependency management.
• There’s a Twitter question from David Alpert about customizing the package installation folder.
• K. Scott asks if this is usable in all Visual Studio projects, not just web projects.
• Kevin asks about configuration transforms.
• K. Scott asks about the overlap between all the different developer installer systems – Web PI, NuGet, and the Visual Studio Extension manager. David explains how the focus of NuGet is very focused on bringing libraries into one project.
• Jon asks if they’ve seen people using NuGet in ways they hadn’t anticipated, mentioning a post by Eric Hexter on integrating NuGet and Solution Factory. David talks about how a NuGet package can include PowerShell scripts, which means you can add commands to the Package Manager console, describing how the NUnit package adds commands which allow you to run tests from the console.
• Scott K. asks about the use of NuGet for… you guessed it… Javascript.
• Kevin asks if NuGet could be integrated with the new project wizard.
• Jon asks if there’s any possible integration with Visual Studio Snippets. David explains how packages are including source code with sample code, and how this fits the use of project level source code better.
• Jon asks about Web Activator.
• K. Scott asks about how you’d run a local package repository. David talks about how you can do this by just putting packages in a folder.
• Jon asks about how a package gets officially submitted and added to the feed.
• Kevin remarks about the way NuGet is working as an open source project which accepts submissions from both Microsoft employees and the community.
• There’s a Twitter question from Elijah Manor about managing Javascript dependencies.
• Kevin is happy to see the unit test coverage in NuGet, and asks about the unit test coverage requirements for package submissions.
• Jon asks if there’s any integration of Mercurial beyond the server-side package submission.
• K. Scott asks about the possibility of future integration between NuGet and OpenWrap.
• Jon talks about how he sees a lot of opportunity for NuGet to introduce some great open source libraries to developers and development shops which might not previously have considered using them.
• Kevin asks if this is another example of a Microsoft initiative squashing existing open source projects. David talks about how NuGet was created to fill a void where they didn’t see any leading package management systems for the .NET platform.
• K. Scott asks about David’s T4MVC project. David talks about how it’s been really interesting and exciting for him as his first open source project.
• Jon asks about how T4MVC is run on project build, and David mentions the Chirpy project.
• Jon asks about how David divides his time between NuGet, ASP.NET Web Pages, ASP.NET in general, and T4MVC.
• David ends with a call for contributions to NuGet.

Show Links:

• David Ebbo (blog, @davidebbo)
• NuGet
• David Fowler (blog, @davidfowl)
• Light up your NuGets with startup code and WebActivator
• Eric Hexter (blog, @ehexter)
• Using Solution Factory + NuPack to create Opinionated Visual Studio Solutions
• OuterCurve Foundation
• OpenWrap
• T4MVC
• Chirpy
• Elijah Manor (@elijahmanor)
• David Alpert (@davidalpert)

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 99: David Ebbo on NuGet

• Jon asks about where we can keep up with information about SineSignal.
• There’s a discussion of what Heroku is, and how Moncai relates to Heroku.
• Dale describes how he the idea got started and how deployment works.
• What’s a Moncaí? Dale explains.
• Dale explains how the infrastructure works, with Linux and Mono running in virtual environments.
• Kevin and Jon ask about how Mono hosting affects ASP.NET support.
• Jon asks about fractional CPU pricing, which leads to another cool feature – free accounts until you need to scale up.
• Dale talks about how this compares to other virtual hosting offerings.
• Jackson (still on the call from last show) jumps in with some info on running Mono from Visual Studio.
• There’s talk about future possibilities – Mercurial, Windows support (and the complexities with SSH), support for other stacks.
• Jon asks about the next steps for go-live.
• Kevin asks about batch jobs, and Dale talks about the extension points for add-on and web hooks.
• Jackson asks about local file access.
• Everyone decides that this is really cool, and the show ends.

Show Links:

• Moncaí
• SineSignal
• Dale Ragan (@dwragan)
• Heroku
• Mono Project
• MoMA – Mono Migration Analyzer
• Jackson Harper, @jacksonh

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 98: Dale Ragan on Moncaí

• The show kicks off with Harper offering an overview of the Manos Web Application Framework. He notes his preference in using frameworks like Django over ASP.NET, his appreciation  for Mono and  C# and how these factors lent themselves to the creation of Manos.
• Kevin asks what’s different and interesting about Manos compared to ASP.NET MVC.  Jackson speaks the philosophy of application development and digs into simplifying developer workflow. 
• Kevin asks what Manos includes.  Harper lists off the simple routing, template engine and a non-blocking web server.  He also notes that Manos will support any ORM and configuration management is in the works.
• The guys talk about the simple and flexible routing system and continue to conversation by digging into Manos’s html-centric templating engine. 
• Jackson walks through the developer steps to get going with Manos and is quick to note that Manos is not geared to the Windows developer.  There will be Mac and Windows support but it is being build with Linux in mind.
• Kevin and Jackson get into the core bits – what’s included from the .NET Framework and what’s custom built?  Harper calls out that he’s not referencing System.Web and his custom HTTP server is built on Tornado.
• Jon asks about session management, authentication and security.  Jackson talks about how the wish to ease deployment drove much of the implementation and custom component decisions.
• Jackson further explains his interest in creating his non-blocking web server and why it benefits such operations as long pulling.  This prompts Jon to asks if Manos is an alternative to learning Node.js.
• Jackson talks about stealing users and pie.
• Jackson talks about his strict No XML policy and how that will work into Manos’s configuration management faculties.
• Kevin and Jackson explore model binding in ASP.NET MVC and Manos.
• Jon summarize what Manos has to offer – lght-weight, more html-like view engine, the routing system is nice, non-threaded architecture and high-performance – and asks how Harper decides what gets into Manos?  Jackson explains the framework is more driven by need rather than trying to implement merely what other frameworks offer.
• K Scott asks about the challenges of working with a static language, C#, in this space.  Jackson flips the question on its head and talks about the benefits.
• K Scott and Jackson talk about open and close mustaches, type safety, anonymous types and Manos’s templating code.
• Kevin asks about inspiration and Jackson reflects on how Manos came to be – starting with a focus on development flow to his need for a cleaner view engines to ease of deployment and then his interest in a non-blocking web server.
• Jon asks about applications running on Manos and the long pulling niche.
• Jackson talks about how .NET sets itself apart from other languages when it comes to parallelism and multi-core computing.   Jon and Jackson talk about how parallel extensions are used in Manos and how Manos could be used to manage tasks on the server with C#.
• @zbowling asks about the C10K Problem and the ability to handle 10,000 connections at once.
• Scott K and Jackson discuss how have your own HTTP stack makes development and deployment a lot easier.
• The show wraps with talk of route definition management, Sinatra and Cooking for Geeks.

Show Links:

• Jackson Harper, @jacksonh
• Novell
• Mono
• Manos de Mono: The Manifesto
• Manos on Github
• Moonlight
• Django
• Razor
• Spark
• NHiberate
• Sinatra
• Tornado Web
• Parallel Extensions
• Comet
• Node.Js
• libev
• Kayak 

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 97: Jackson Harper on Manos

• Kevin wastes no time kicking the show off with THE question – “Why Veracity? Why another DVCS?” Eric talks DVCS and the future of source control, how Git and Mercurial are just getting us started and how there’s no distributed system which is good at solving problems of the enterprise.
• So, what does Veracity offer that Git, Mercurial and Bazaar do not? Eric describes record, field and constraint-based (opposed to folder and file-based) version control and how if it fits nicely inside of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM).
• Eric compares the Veracity data storage model with NoSQL and Berkeley DB. This prompts Jon to ask about where SQLite comes into play.
• Eric digs into the pluggable storage layer, “Zing” and component layers for Scrum or wikis, for example.
• Jon asks about the nightly snapshots (releases) and Eric runs us through the intentionally not-so-easy build process.
• The conversation shifts back to differences between Veracity and a Git or Mercurial. The guys talk about branching models and rebasing.
• Scott K asks about free source control hosting and the guys comment about the community and social networking aspect of Bitbucket and GitHub.
• Kevin asks if there was ever thought of building ALM tools on top of Mercurial or Git. Eric talks about DVCS functionality, licensing and what the enterprise wants.
• Eric explains Veracity’s open source license, which components will and will not be open sources and speaks to community patches.
• Jon asks if the Veracity data layer could be used to support other applications and not just version control.
• Scott K asks about dogfooding Veracity – when did SourceGear start versioning Veracity in Veracity?
• Eric explains his choice to write Veracity in C. The guys talk about cross platform development and Scott K asks about extensions and wrappers.
• Jon beats Scott K to the punch and asks why Node.js isn’t included in Veracity’s impressive technical stack.
• Kevin asks about plans to develop a Visual Studio plugin or a version control tools like TortoiseSVN.
• Eric answers a Twitter question from Andrew Tobin about migration support. Kevin ask if there will be a feature like GitSVN for Veracity.
• Kevin asks Eric to explain the need for exclusive file locks. Eric explains this need for industries like Gaming which deal with a large amount of binary files.
• Jon and Eric talk more about the enterprise and what’s important to them.
• Jon talks more about Veracity’s stack and the use of (wait for it) SVG for Veracity burn down charts.
• Scott K asks why SourceGear went with SpiderMonkey over Script Monkey or V8.
• Jon talks about portability and asks if Mono has a place in Veracity development.
• Jon and Eric talk about Scrum and the enterprise’s current interest in Agile. This topic rolls into talk of browsers.
• Kevin asks if SoureGear has concern that Microsoft may someday enter the DVCS space.
• Scott K wraps the show asking how Eric defines success for Veracity.

Show Links:

• Eric Sink
• SourceGear
• Vault
• Veracity
• Hanselminutes Podcast 231 – Eric Sink on Distributed Version Control Systems
• Git
• Mercurial
• Bazaar
• Berkeley DB
• SQLite
• Veracity Technical Overview
• node.js
• CMake, Kitware, KDE Project
• Bitbucket, Atlassian
• GitHub
• FogCreek
• Ben Pollack
• Andrew Tobin
• Perforce
• SpiderMonkey
• Script Monkey
• V8
• Mosaic

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 96: Eric Sink on Veracity and DVCS

• Jon asks about where MonoDroid is at in the product lifecycle.
• Jon asks about the install experience, which currently requires installing a few dependencies to get set up. Miguel and Joseph clarify that it’s a pretty simple setup, and explain why it currently works that way.
• We talk about the File / New Project experience, and how MonoDroid projects are structured.
• Miguel describes the API flavor for MonoDroid, and how it follows the MonoTouch and GTK# approach of keeping pretty close to the underlying API’s and pipeline – e.g. accessing images as resources. Mike talks about how API is mapped to run on the .NET primitives and collections.
• The guys talk about how software architectures vary across iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone 7. Miguel and Geoff talk about the difficulty in building real-world applications which are can share back-end code across platforms.
• The talk shifts to nerdy details about how .NET code is being deployed to the Java-based Android platform and a discussion of  the performance impacts of crossing those boundaries.
• Geoff and Mike talk about the challenges of integrating the different platforms.
• Kevin asks about what MonoDroid brings to the Android platform, since the Java runtime is already kind of similar to .NET. Miguel talks about how they’ve seen even higher developers interest in MonoDroid than MonoTouch, and everyone speculates about why that might be.
• Scott K asks about some of the challenges in implementing Mono on Android, and Mike digs into the differences in generics between .NET and Java.
• K. Scott asks about the ability to wrap or extend the Mono.Android API’s.
• Kevin asks about rather underlying services are exposed as native API’s or generalized API’s. Miguel explains why it’s necessary to expose at the native API level.
• Kevin asks more about how code can be shared between MonoDroid and MonoTouch projects.
• Jon asks about whether they’re looking at anything for Windows Phone 7. Miguel talks about the possibility of adding unsupported API’s, and Geoff talks about how this has been pretty popular on Windows XBox.
• Greg Shackles asks a question via Twitter about how developers can get involved and contribute to both Mono and MonoDroid.
• Geoff talks about the MonoMac project.
• K. Scott asks if there’s still support for PowerPC in Mono.
• Sara Chipps asks whether iPhone or Androids are more difficult to support. The surprising answer: neither!
• Everyone talks about how people will actually buy apps on their phones, and the iCircuit app comes up as an example of a great MonoTouch app that’s making some money.
• Kevin asks about the pricing for MonoDroid. The word is that it’ll be pretty similar to MonoTouch.
• Miguel mentions Manos de Mono from Jackson Harper.
• Scott K asks about plans for other phone platforms. Joseph says the plan is to go where developers go.

Show Links:

• MonoDroid
• Miguel de Icaza, @migueldeicaza
• Geoff Norton @kangamono
• Joseph Hill, @JosephHill
• Mike Kestner
• Android Development info
• Jonathan Pobst, @jpobst
• Greg Shackles, @gshackles
• MonoMac
• Sara Chipps, @sarajchipps
• iCircuit
• Manos de Mono from @jacksonh
• Courage Wolf
• Son, I am disappoint
• Gimp Clone Tool and Gimp Perspective Clone Tool
• Scanners Gonna Scan
• evercookie

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 95: MonoDroid with Miguel and the Mono gang

This week on Herding Code, the guys talk to Adam Kinney and Rick Barraza about how Silverlight fits into a world where HTML5 is finally becoming a reality.

• Jon asks about Adam and Rick’s opinions on the recent post on the Silverlight Team Blog about the future of Silverlight
• Adam talks about he sees consumer applications and games as great applications of Silverlight
• Rick talks about how how some developers are resistant to change, then talks about the longterm evolution of the internet from information provider, to application provider, and finally to operating system
• Adam and Rick talk about the Wired Article titled The Web Is Dead. Long Live The Internet.
• The talk shifts Silverlight as an application platform, not just a web plugin
• Jon asks how likely it is to be able to reuse Silverlight across web, phone, and out-of-browser applications
• Rick talks about The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It
• The talk shifts to discussion over how cross-platform HTML5 can be when it’s limited by things like video codecs and browser targeting
• Scott Koon talks about how HTML5 is a loose collection of many different technologies
• Scott Koon asks where the live Silverlight apps are – he just doesn’t see them in the wild
• Adam and Rick talks about the advantages of developing in Silverlight vs. HTML5. Rick talks about the lack of tooling for HTML5
• Kevin asks about the enterprise advantages of Silverlight development
• The guys talk about the differences between canvas/bitmap graphics vs. SVG/vector graphics
• Jon and Rick talk about the importance of having access to low level building blocks so you can build what you need
• Scott K asks what’s left that Silverlight does that HTML5 doesn’t offer. Rick talks about the tooling, Adam talks about consistent cross-browser support.
• Scott K asks about MVVM and whether Silverlight’s been taken over by architecture astronauts and propellerheads rather than the designers. Adam and Jon talk about how MVVM can make life easier for designers as well.
• K Scott talks about his experiences with an enterprise Silverlight application
• Rick talks about being a samurai rather than a swordsman – don’t be married to your tools
• Rick says that the biggest advantage of Silverlight is that it’s a programming language which was designed for applications rather than HTML which was designed for documents
• Scott K and Kevin ask whether Silverlight makes sense in public web applications
• Jon asks Adam and Rick about what they’ve been building with HTML5 and what they like about that development experience
• Rick and Adam talks about the changing environment and how the rich vs. reach question has changed

Show Links:

• Adam Kinney, @adkinn
• Rick Barraza, @RickBarraza
• Silverlight Team Blog: The Future of Silverlight
• The Web Is Dead. Long Live The Internet. (Wired magazine)
• The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It
• The Wilderness Downtown
• Do That In HTML5 – Flash Button Challenge
• HTML5, XAML, and Declarative User Interfaces (@ShawnWildermuth)
• Silverlight is the Future but the Future Isn’t Silverlight (Scott K’s blog)
• http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 94: Silverlight and HTML5

Warning: Rob Conery get pulled into this show and shares a funny story of his own.

Then stick around for an extended lightning round nerd out about home media.  The guys offer their opinions on the all-new (as of the day of the recording) Apple TV and then touch upon other home streaming options including Amazon, Netflix and Windows Media Center (whatever that is.)  Jon entertains the idea of having computers on your TV and then the guys dig into this space’s complex business model.  The show wraps with a quick review of the Windows Phone 7 RTM and Silverlight support.

Show Links: 

• Sara Chipps, @SaraJChipps
• Rob Conery, @robconery
• Zune Leap Year Failures
• Apple TV
• Amazon Video On Demand
• Netflix
• Windows Media Center
• Roku
• Google TV
• Extreme Chickfights
• Clay Shirky – The Collapse of Complex Business Models
• The Collapse of Complex Societies
• Silverlight Hack: Info on differences between Silverlight 3 and Windows Phone 7 
• Eric Hexter, @ehexter 

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 93: Computer Errors, Home Media, and The Fall of The Roman Empire