• Kevin asks Rob and James to share their views on NoSQL and the use of object and document databases.  James challenges the idea that all data must reside in a relational databases. Are ORMs so last year?   What’s going to be happening in 2020?
• Rob claims he wouldn’t accept a ride to the bar in an 18-wheeler.  Whatever!
• Jon asks what we’re saving with object databases – don’t ORMs abstract the database away?  So what’s the point?
• James pimps TekPub
• Rob talks it bit about domain-driven design and how we marry relational tables to object-oriented system. K Scott fails to see how the choice of a UI pattern is influenced by the type of database one is using. Rob explains.
• Jon asks about maintainability and supportability issues and what’s your boss going to think if you suggest moving away from your current relation database solution. James gives examples on why non-relational solutions are easy to maintain and support.  Rob talks about quick ramp up time, scalability and performance like he’s given the speech 1000 times before.
• The guys pleasantly discuss MSDN.and VB.and ASP.NET Web Forms.
• K Scott shares his opinion on the future of MVC, Web Forms, Silverlight and Sharepoint as they will exist both inside and outside of the firewall.  Scott K, James and Rob also offer their opinions (shocking) and Jon’s chance to interject is taken away when the luminous “Page Lifecycle” crashes down upon him. 
• James and Rob dig a little deeper into object and document databases and normalized database nightmares are exchanged.
• Kevin asks how versioning works in an object database, the guys speak of Json and Bison, and serialization and deserialization.  James speculates that object databases will ultimately be more popular than document databases.
• Rob addresses the idea that he’s condescending and rude.  The group talks about opinions and share their views on recent technical debates – ASP.NET MVC vs Web Forms, VB vs C#, ORMs vs Stored Procedures, and Jets vs Sharks. Can’t we all just get along?
• Rob and James pimps TekPub again.
• K Scott kicks off a flash lightning round – one question about VB6.
• Rob answers Twitter question from @elijahmanor about TekPub’s technology stack and elaborates about video options.
• James pimps DotNetKicks.

Show Links:

• Rob Conery’s Blog
• James Avery’s Blog
• Hello from 2020
• Ayende
• db4o
• MongoDB
• DocumentDB ??
• mongomapper
• CouchDB
• redis
• NHibernate Profiler
• NHibernate
• TekPub
• AutoMapper
• MVC or Web Forms? A Dying Question
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM
• Dynamo
• Bison
• MUMPS
• Victory in Software Development
• Ask the Mountain to Come to You
• Whither Alt.Net?
• Art of War, Sun Tzu
• MVC Storefront Series
• Git
• Cucumber
• BDD
• Javier Lozano
• Elijah Manor
• SubSonic
• @BillGates
• DotNetKicks
• The Lounge
• Joe Brinkman

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 71: James Avery and Rob Conery on NoSQL and a bunch of other stuff

Length: 1:18:38

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

• Sean talks about how Fluent Migrator originated from Migrator.NET
• Sean discusses how the benefits of a semantic model in Fluent Migrator
• K Scott and Sean discuss how you’d start using Fluent Migrator in a project
• Sean talks about some useful features, like InsertData\
• Jon asks about support for different databases
• Scott K asks about the benefits of a migration framework over a simple directory of T-SQL scripts
• We take a question from Aaron Lerch (@aaronlerch) on Twitter about how Fluent Migrator would work with Fluent NHibernate
• Kevin asks about Schema Update
• Kevin and Sean talk about possible inefficiencies with objects being added, changed, and removed in successive migrations
• K Scott asks about extensibility hooks
• Scott K asks about stored procedures, functions, user defined types, etc.
• Jon asks about how Fluent Migrator relates to other .NET migration frameworks
• We take a question from Aaron Jensen (@aaronjensen) on Twitter about the benefits of a migration framework since T-SQL is already a DSL
• Lightning round: K Scott starts the lightning round by asking what refactoring operations everyone uses most
• Lightning round: What’s your favorite VM software? (spoiler: VirtualBox wins by a wide margin)
• Lightning round: What’s your favorite movie that involves an android?

Show Links:

• The Fluent Migrator github repo
• Sean’s blog: http://schambers.lostechies.com
• Sean’s photo blog: http://www.full-fx.com
• Migrator.NET
• RikMigrations
• SubSonic Migrations
• 31 Days of Refactoring
• VirtualBox
• Josh Coffman
• Steve Hodgkiss

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 70 – Sean Chambers on Migrations in .NET

• Scott talks about the frustrations in working with “HTML Specialists”
• Scott discusses the team issues caused by specialists in a software team who aren’t in touch with the entire product development cycle
• The problem with handoffs: loss of workability
• Eventually, things turn to the technology issue involved in working with HTML and CSS
• Are HTML tables necessarily evil
• Scott and Scott K discuss whether CSS purity is a premature optimization
• Jon and Scott discuss whether clean markup can be deferred until the end of a project
• Scott talks about the lunacy of delivering design work as “final”
• Scott talks about how optimization fights with workability
• Scott enumerates some of examples of websites which might not benefit from accessibility
• Jon posits that tables might not be easier than CSS design, it’s just what we learned first
• Scott K talks about how CSS floats drive him nuts
• Scott talks about how crazy CSS is when viewed as a programming language
• K Scott talks about some technological workarounds like lesscss
• Scott talks about how he doesn’t see Silverlight as an improvement, because it brings along a lot of other challenges
• Scott talks about how working in teams and in “small batches” solves the problems with handoffs
• Scott talks about the joy of a January 1st project date

Show Links:

• Scott Bellware’s Blog
• Scott’s consulting company, ampersand GT

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 69 – Scott Bellware on HTML Specialists

• How will the guys manage the show in 2010?  Google Docs and listener requests?
• Are you bitter because today’s coder has little appreciation for how rough devs had it 10 years ago?
• Phone wars. Big, smart ones. Will Android dethrone the iPhone?
• Place your bets!  Biggest box office hit in 2010: Ironman 2 or The A-Team Movie?
• You don’t see the Fail Whale quite as often, but it’s still fun to listen to the guys continue to complain about Twitter and its clients.
• Next ten years – will C# continue to rule the .NET roost?
• Ever ask WolframAlpha “Who uses this site?”
• What secret project is John Lam working on?  Will IronRuby live on?
• You love maps, right? K Scott does too.   Who knew?
• Ever wonder if the iSlate will take over the (Kindle) world?
• Are you planning to improve your skill set in 2010? How?
• Really? Jon’s default search engine is Bing! How’s about that Infinite Scroll!

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 68 – New Year Shenanigans

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

• Jon kicks off the show by asking Udi if one can run a high-availability and high-scalability site (like stackoverflow.com) on two servers with ASP.NET?  Udi asks “how high is high” and talks about the importance of defining the scope of the architectural problem.
• Udi comments on the how site behavior (high reads or writes, static or dynamic content, etc) dictates the way availability and scalability concerns can be handled.
• Udi talks about how websites can be broken into fragments and how one can take advantage of content distribution networks and caches.
• Udi stresses that high-availability inherently makes scaling more difficult and how scalability is a multidimensional cost function.
• Kevin asks about common scalability mistakes and solution patterns. Udi replies with talk of SOA, web services, REST, one-way messaging, pub/sub and offloading things to the background in an asynchronous way.
• Kevin follows up with additional questions: Why don’t more developers turn to messaging patterns to solve their scalability issues and can one introduce scalability changes incrementally?
• Udi discusses the scalability patterns employed by RIA Services for Silverlight and gives his opinion on Azure as a scalability system.
• Scott K asks about geographical distribution and Udi gets to the heart of the matter – high-availability means writing data to multiple places which means you are slowing your system down.
• K Scott asks Udi about the AppFabric service bus provided by Microsoft and how it compares to already available distributed cache solutions like .NET Service Bus, MassTransit, and NServiceBus.

[Note: The sound quality for Udi's voice is kind of rough. We tried to clean it up, and this is as good as it's going to get. Just pretend we're talking to him on a CB and things will be fine]

Show Links:

• The Software Simplist
• NServiceBus
• Udi Dahan Scales Web Applications! on .NET Rocks
• Reverse Proxy
• Content Distribution Network (CDN)
• RIA Services for Silverlight
• Azure
• AppFabric Service Bus
• .NET Services Bus
• MassTransit
• Rhino Service Bus
• Dublin

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 67 – Udi Dahan on Scalability

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

• In case you’ve never heard of them, Brad and Scott D introduce themselves and share their interest in the Mac and iPhone development.
• Brad and Scott D talk about Objective-C as it compares to other languages including SmallTalk, C, Ruby, Python, and C#. 
• In order to be a great Cocoa developer, do you need to be a good C developer?  Brad and Scot D discuss.
• The guys talk about pointers, memory management and the benefits of following language conventions.  Not to be a shill, but Brad notes the brilliance of P/Invoke.
• The guys talk through Interface Builder, Xcode, Blend, Visual Studio, the difference between Mac and Windows developer workflow, and the passion around UIs in the Mac world.
• Scott K asks about ADO.NET vs Core Data. Jokingly, he asks if there’s even a way to save anything using Core Data.
• The group quickly discusses available charting APIs for Cocoa and Core Animation libraries.
• Brad and Scott D explain that Mac plists are sets of name/value pairs or bastardized xml and Jon asks for clarification on how Mac installations work under the hood.
• Kevin asks if MonoTouch is best for C# developers due to language familiarity, the benefits of the rich libraries, garbage collection and potential productivity gains.  Brad and Scott D agree that learning the CocoaTouch platform is most crucial. In comparison, one’s language choice a insignificant. So, if one already knows Objective-C, is MonoTouch a waste of time? 
• The show starts winding down with a quick discussion on how MonoTouch may be providing views to run on Android, the status of Moonlight and the unbelievable pace in which the Mono team develops.
• The group leaves iPhone-land to talk about real-life work. Brad talks about the ASP.NET MVC 2.0 Template and Model Validation work he’s been up to, and Scott D notes he’s been working on bringing ASP.NET MVC applications the cloud – the Azure Cloud, that is.

Show Links:

• Brad Wilson’s Blog
• Scott Densmore’s Blog
• Xcode
• MonoTouch
• Cocoa Bootcamp
• Big Nerd Ranch
• Aaron Hillegass
• AppKit
• NeXTSTEP
• Wil Shipley
• Carbon
• Rory Blyth
• Matt Gallagher, Cocoa with Love
• Marcus S. Zarra and Matt Long, Cocoa Is My Girlfriend
• Core Data
• Miguel De Icaza
• Moonlight

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 66 – Brad Wilson and Scott Densmore on iPhone Development

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

• Scott H talks about how, other than the obvious request to get Scott Koon removed from the show, there’s no need to fear any changes to Herding Code.
• Scott H bemoans the fact that people are so quick to attribute opinions to “working for the man”.
• The group discusses whether Scott’s demonstration of a datagrid in Scott Guthrie’s PDC keynote constitutes “selling out”.
• Scott K asks about what Jon’s new job is, and what Scott Hanselman’s STO group does. Scott Hanselman describes the difference between all the different developer community program manager groups at Microsoft.
• Scott K asks about the lack of diversity on the STO team, and whether there will be more of a focus on data programmability in the future.
• Kevin asks if working for Microsoft makes it tougher to criticize Microsoft. Scott K asks if working for Microsoft makes it hard to criticize competitors.
• Scott Hanselman talks about the irritation of ad hominem attacks which discount opinions under the assumption that they’re job-motivated.
• Scott H mentions that he’s been test driving Linux and other operating systems on his netbook in passing, which prompts a 5 minute geek-fest between Scott H. and Scott K. about Linux driver troubleshooting.
• Scott K asks Jon what his top priorities are in his new job.
• Scott K comments on the recent lack of focus on Web Forms, e.g. all the PDC videos he saw were using ASP.NET MVC.
• Scott H clarifies who exactly is on his team, and how useful it is to have a team that’s got internal Microsoft access but is separate from the product teams.
• Scott K takes us on a discussion of Microsoft certifications – whether the STO team can add some more realism to certifications. Best part: Scott K inadvertently complains about some of the VB6 exams that Scott H had written.
• Scott H and the gang finish thing off with a discussion of certifications, education, and interviews as indicators of effectiveness as a programmer.

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 65 – Scott Hanselman on his Ninja Squad and Jon’s new job

• Phil starts with the new <%: code block syntax, IHtmlString, HtmlString, MvcHtmlString
• Jon asks about DisplayFor, EditorFor improvements
• Phil discusses validation improvements – validation extensibility and client-side validation
• MVC 2 is built on .NET 3.5 SP1
• Phil talks about the productivity focus for MVC 2
• New minimal templates, minimized web.config
• Phil comments on the recent trend in software development towards streamlining – Windows 7, Snow Leopard, and how that’s also being applied to MVC and Webforms
• Phil talks about his work on the Webforms Menu Control to clean up the markup, and how developers will opt-in to new but possibly breaking features
• K. Scott asks about the new Areas feature 
• Phil talks about Virtual Path Providers working in medium trust, but not until .NET 4
• Kevin asks about what other features weren’t available due to maintaining .NET 3.5 support, and Phil ruminates on how the dynamic keyword could work
• Phil speculates how named parameters could be helpful
• Scott K asks about when MVC will get more opinionated, perhaps including dependency injection by default.
• Phil talks about how MVC has never really been weak on the Model side, and how often people are really complaining about data access. Nothing new on that now, but it might be a focus in MVC 3.
• Jon asks about bringing in some focused project templates.
• Scott K (again) asks Phil about bringing dependency injection into MVC. Phil talks about why it’s not in there yet, and that you should vote for it in connect if you want it.
• Phil discusses how bugs are prioritized on the ASP.NET team.
• Scott K asks if Phil has a favorite feature. Phil likes the HTML Encoding syntax best of all.
• Kevin asks the standard “when will the Spark view engine replace the webforms view engine” question.
• Jon asks about which frameworks and community projects Phil’s taking inspiration from.
• Phil talks about how he’s using Subtext to get personal experience with how the new features are working.
• Scott K asks about adding in auto-mapping
• Jon introduces a new Herding Code segment: Abusive Question From Twitter. We start with one by @alanstevens: why we should care about ASP.NET when there are so many other web frameworks out there?
• Scott K talks about how people conflate languages and platforms.
• Scott K tries to sneak in an abusive Twitter question, but fails.
• Kevin asks what’s changing to make TDD work better in .NET and Visual Studio.
• K. Scott talks about how he’s converted his blog over to run on Subtext.
• Phil talks about his experiences in developing Subtext, and how that’s been a great way to get exposure to other open source projects and developers.
• Jon asks about how improving the data access system for Subtext, because stored procedures make him cry.
• Jon asks about the CodePlex foundation, and Scott K complains about how it’s not very transparent.
• Phil starts complaining about how newborn babies make it hard to sleep, and things fizzle out.

Show Links:

• Phil Haack’s Blog
• HTML Encoding Code Blocks
• Brad Wilson’s post on Enterprise Library Validation in MVC 2
• Spark View Engine
• Subtext blogging engine
• MVC Turbine
• AutoMapper
• Autofac
• Our interview with Ted Leung
• CodePlex Foundation

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 64 – Phil Haack on MVC 2

Show Links:

• Victory in Software Development
• Concept Camp 2009
• Sara Chipps
• Matthew Podwysoki
• The Inmates are Running the Asylum, Alan Cooper
• Extreme Programming Explained, Kent Beck
• Debunking the Duct Tape Programmer (Jeffery Palermo)
• WinFS

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 63 – Victory in Software Development with K Scott Allen

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

• Jon asks Geoff Norton, engineering lead on the MonoTouch project and founder of the Cocoa# and Objective-C# projects, to give the elevator speech about MonoTouch and why one might choose it over other iPhone development tools.  Geoff explains that MonoTouch is a commercial product from Novell. They have ported the Mono runtime to run on the iPhone thus allowing developers to write full native iPhone applications in languages which target the CLR.  Some might be attracted to MonoTouch because they feel C#, for example, is fluent and expressive compared to Objective-C.  Others might use the product so they can reuse existing components or code when moving to iPhone development.
• Miguel shares that there is a strong pattern in Objective-C where you respond to objects through messaging between classes.  In the .NET space, you are most familiar with listening to events with attached methods such as lambda expression or delegates and MonoTouch uses this programming model and expose Cocoa API to be similar to the way C# does things. For example, the use of events, properties, delegates.  He continues by stating you also have access to .NET APIs in addition to all iPhone APIs.
• Scott K asks if there are any disconnects with which .NET APIs are available. Geoff shares that MonoTouch is not the entire .NET 2.0 BCL.  In fact, development was started with the Silverlight BCL and additional namespaces were included as development proceeded. 
• Geoff mentioned Silverlight. Jon’s Pavlovian Trigger is fired, he starts to drool and programmatically inquires about the potential of running Silverlight applications on the iPhone (even though, as Jon mentions, Apple is currently disallowing it.  Miguel speaks to the MonoTouch’s use of the Silverlight profile drops unnecessary dependencies upon the .NET framework thus providing for a leaner precompilation.  Geoff talks about what would be required to getting Silverlight on the iPhone.  Miguel states that Silverlight on the iPhone would not be a standard Silverlight experience.  Most notably, one would have to go through the AppStore and download a Silverlight enabled application rather than access a Silverlight application through the browser.
• Jon asks about the cost associated with developing iPhone applications with MonoTouch. Miguel shares that Mono and Moonlight were basically developed to improve the Linux ecosystem.  As for Mono for the iPhone, it was difficult for Novell to justify the investment for this highly desired feature request so they decided to charge for it. Geoff notes they have a 100% free, non-time limited evaluation version which works with the simulator. It’s only limitation is you can’t get your application onto the device. Please note that you get a $150 discount on MonoTouch if you register for MonoSpace.
• Jon asks Geoff for an overview on how to get started with MonoTouch development. Geoff provides the high-level steps – get the iPhone SDK from Apple, pay Apple $99 to become registered iPhone developer, load up Mono Develop, create a new iPhone project from template, start typing C# code, you will be using Interface Builder for layout, build and run.
• Scott K  calls out how Interface Builder traditionally integrates with XCode.  Geoff comments about Interface Builder with C# and the generation partial classes as code behinds which automatically connects outlets to MonoTouch engine.  Miguel speaks to the advantages of the MonoTouch approach.
• The guys talks about XIB (pronounced zib) and NIB files and freeze drying.
• Scott K shares listener questions from @hugeonion: Is there is anything that you can’t do using MonoTouch.NET that you could using Objective-C?  Can you mix Objective-C and .NET when you are writing a MonoTouch project?  Geoff gives the liberal-minded answer and then Miguel finishes with the short answer — “There’s really nothing that you can’t do with MonoTouch that you can do with Objective-C". “I guess you could argue it’s a Turing machine so you can do anything on anything.”
• Scott K asks another listener question from @shamel: What are the plans to improve the MonoTouch debugging story?  Miguel says the debugger will be available faster than you might think.  It’s coming but the decision was made to push to product out sooner than waiting for MonoTouch (and debugging, profilers, code-generator, more APIs) to be perfect. Geoff talks about the updated compiler and the ability to back-trace crashes using DWARF, the standard debugging format which Apple uses.
• Jon and Geoff talk about graphics , MonoTouch development on a Power PC Mac and static compilation. Miguel talks about coding on paper (desk checking.)
• Jon distills MonoTouch development down to two steps: binding to the iPhone APIs and then doing the static compilation to run on the iPhone.  Geoff speaks of support for generics, Cocoa#, Objective-C#, Monobjc and binding the CLR to Objective C. 
• Scott K asks if they’ll be moving Mono onto the Android. Miguel speaks of Android, Java, managed language, garbage collection, native compilation, current demand and their current focus being Mono for the iPhone. Jon asks if there’s a story for Mono support on Windows Mobile.  After all Windows Mobile does run the .NET compact framework. Jokes and laugh follow…
• Jon, Miguel and Geoff talk about MonoTouch iPhone application size.
• Miguel talks about embracing cross platform and getting Windows developers working on Mac – and looking cool at Starbucks.
• The guys discuss XNA for Silverlight, XNA game developer studio, XNA hosting on iPhone or the fact that you can’t distribution XNA games to the Zune. They also touch upon Mono running on the WII and PS2.
• Geoff and Miguel finish up the conversation comments about the MonoSpace, the Open Source and Cross-Platform Conference for Mono and .NET which will be held in Austin this October 27-30.

Show Links:

• Miguel de Icaza
• Geoff Norton
• MonoTouch
• MonoSpace
• Mono
• Moonlight
• Austin’s Cocoa Coders iPhone Developer User Group – Oct 27th.
• Prio Conference in Munich – Oct 29th.
• Scott Bellware
• Scott Hanselman
• Objective-C
• XCode
• Apple Developer Connection
• Cocoa
• Cocoa# and Objective-C#
• Silverlight
• Chris Toshok
• GTK+
• Jeffrey Stedfast
• Interface Builder
• Getting Started with MonoTouch
• monotouch.info
• Michael Hutchinson
• The Huge Onion
• MonoTouch Binding for AdMob (discussing binding to Objective-C from C#)
• Unity
• Cecil
• Christian Beaumont, Foundation 42
• OpenGL
• Larry Ewing
• Rodrigo Kumpera
• Mono.Simd
• DWARF
• Monobjc

Quote of the Show:

• “Do your HTTP Get and parse the result like a man!” – Miguel

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 62 – MonoTouch with Miguel de Icaza and Geoff Norton

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

Show Links:

• CodePlex Foundation
• Bellware’s CodePlex Foundation Write-up
• jQuery Foundation
• The Apache Software Foundation
• The Eclipse Foundation
• Mozilla Foundation
• Bing Visual Search
• Office Space
• NHibernate
• NUnit
• Jeff Atwood
• Damien Guard
• Google Code
• Google’s Summer of Code
• ScrewTurn Wiki
• Gimp
• Audacity
• Inkscape
• SourceForge
• Oren Eini
• Microsoft Ajax CDN
• CodePlex Foundation Board of Directors
• Miguel de Icaza, Novell
• Shaun Walker, DNN
• SugarCRM
• Rob Conery
• Bil Simser (@bsimser)
• Log4Net
• Zune HD Release
• jQuery Validation Library
• Akamai
• Barry Dorrans – Quick thoughts on the Microsoft AJAX CDN
• Brad Wilson
• Zune Pass
• Last.fm
• Pandora
• The Hype Machine
• Hanselminutiae-seven (Scott Hanselman with Richard Campbell)
• Miles Davis Kind of Blue
• Kind of Bloop

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 61: CodePlex Foundation, Bing Visual Search, Microsoft Ajax CDN, Zune HD Release

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

• Louis talks about how the Spark View Engine was inspired by NVelocity and hatched from a comment thread on Phil Haack’s blog.
• Kevin asks about the HTML-like syntax syntax in a Spark view – how it was designed, how it looks, and some of the benefits of a view engine that looks like HTML.
• Scott K asks about some of the similarities to Cold Fusion markup. After making Louis squirm a bit, Scott points out the big difference in his eyes is that Spark works as part of an MVC pattern, while Cold Fusion embedded too much logic in the markup.
• Jon sets Kevin up to look really good by asking about a feature Kevin requested – safe by default HTML encoding.
• Kevin asks about how Spark’s strongly typed ViewData and strongly typed models work.
• Jon quizzes Louis about how Master Layouts differ from ASP.NET Webforms MasterPages, Kevin tries to stump him with questions about partial page caching.
• Scott K and Louis talk about how Spark was developed, and how TDD made writing a view engine easy.
• Kevin and Louis discuss how Spark is being used to generate more than HTML.
• Jon asks about how he got all the smarts to write a parser / templating engine.
• Scott K speculates about the potential for a custom view engine enabling vendors to offer controls for MVC. Louis tells him that he’s crazy, and the two discuss options for visual designers in the MVC world.
• Jon asks some questions about how an HTML-based syntax like Spark could allow for a better designer surface, but Louis convinces him that an HTML-based syntax is probably the best design interface, both for developers and designers.
• Kevin asks Louis about the Visual Studio integration for Spark.
• Louis takes a listener question from Jeremy Miller about caching compiled views.
• K Scott asks about using Spark’s JavascriptViewResult to do JSON powered updates with the same template for both initial and update rendering. Louis points out that it’s possible to write code that’s both c# and Javascript compatible, so it can be used both client-side and server-side. We all agree that’s crazy, but the right kind of crazy.
• K Scott asks about his selection of different tracking, source hosting, etc. services for the Spark project.
• Vladislav II asks about Dynamic Language support.
• Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer asks about runtime vs. development time compilation, and how Spark runs under medium trust.
• Louis explains how Macros allow you to simulate creating reusable helpers inside your templates.
• Faustus of Byzantium asked about partials are integrated into views.
• Edward I asks about how performance compares to the Web Forms view engine, and if there are any important tips/tricks to get the best performance out of Spark.
• Ned Ryerson remembers talking to Louis at PDC, when Louis was pitching Spark to Jeff Atwood The Terrible. Jeff went with the Web Forms view engine which led to his eventual demise in 2012.
• Duke Konrad I of Masovia asks Louis about the use of multiple view engines in a website to ease transition.
• Kevin closes with some questions about Spark, such as how it plays with ASP.NET MVC 2 and where the name Spark came from.
• Postscript – Jon catches up with Louis to ask about his new position at Microsoft.

Show Links:

• Lou’s Blog
• Spark View Engine
• docu
• @loudej
• K. Scott’s post about the JavascriptViewResult in Spark
• Migrating from .aspx to .spark

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 60: Spark View Engine with Louis DeJardin

• The show kicks off with Milan’s explanation of semantic markup – thinking first about content and then presentation – and the Web Standards Trinity which includes Structure (HTML, XHTML, XML), Presentation (CSS), and Behavior (JavaScript). 
• Milan talks about Quirks Mode vs Strict Mode. Jon asks about the benefits of XHTML especially with XHTML 2 recently being shot down in favor of HTML 5. 
• Milan states that CSS has always been more of a recommendation rather than a true standard.  He asks why anyone would use skins and/or themes. Jon bites and guesses because it is a typical Visual Studio control-first option and themes (unlike cascading style sheets) are always applied last and may enforce corporate design standards. Milan also shares his frustration with the bloated, non-standard markup generated by ASP.NET Server Controls and he names names.  That’s right, DataGrid!  He’s talking about you.
• Milan provides an overview of his impressive Microsoft.com redesign experiment and speaks briefly of Section 508 and his Color Blindness Simulator.
• K Scott asks what a .NET developer should do to better adhere to web standards. Milan talks specifically about control development, ASP.NET MVC and the shift back to client-side development.
• Milan speaks his mind about Silverlight’s poor usability.  He states Silverlight is being marketed to the wrong audience and it is not a replacement for JavaScript. Milan also calls out the educational gap for developers needing to act as designers. Shall I continue?  Jon agrees but provides a rebuttal. 
• K Scott seeks Milan’s opinion on new technologies, big conferences, independent consulting, the Microsoft MVP Program and ALT.NET.  Milan shares that you’ll go insane if you try to learn everything which is coming out of Redmond and suggests that developers specialize.  Milan describes big conferences as nothing more than “booze and noise” and recommends developers avoid conferences like Mix and participate in the local community instead.  Milan talks about life as a business owner/independent consultant, job security and building one’s personal brand. Milan questions the motivation of the Microsoft MVP program and suggests it is merely another marketing channel for Microsoft.  Milan shares his positive impressions of ALT.NET and comments on the “remarkable crap” published by Patterns and Practices.  Scott K calls Milan out for being too much of a kiss-up marketing shill. Fin.

Show Links:

• Milan’s Blog
• @MilanNegovan
• ASP.NET Resources
• Microsoft.com Home Page Design: Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 
• Developing Web Applications with ASP.NET and Web Standards
• Bait Station Ahead  – How to keep your sanity in this onslaught of new technologies
• Color Blindness Simulator
• A List Apart
• Smashing Magazine
• Section 508
• Josh Holmes
• Joe Stagner
• Ted Neward
• South by SouthWest
• Bill Buxton
• Steve Andrews
• Alan Stevens
• Keith Elder
• Mary Jo Foley
• ASP.NET MVC
• MEF
• Patterns & Practices
• Implementing the Singleton Pattern in C#
• Boston Code Camp
• Connecticut Code Camp
• Utah Code Camp
• Richmond Code Camp

Book Recommendations from Milan

• Universal Principles of Design
• Non-Designer’s Design Book
• Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
• Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works
• Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 59: Web Standards with Milan Negovan

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

When we last left our heroes, Jeremy Miller, Ward Bell, Rob Eisenberg and Glenn Block were in the thick of their discussion.  Jeremy had just finished explaining the role of the Screen Conductor and Ward was ready to start flushing out implementation strategies.  That is, implementation strategies which might work across most solutions. 

But thankfully, Glenn starts by stepping back a bit and asking how the presentation patterns discussion fits in the context of mainstream development.

Will the guys provide a single answer to the age-old question, “Which came first the View or the ViewModel?”  Is there a one size implementation which fits all solutions?  Will this conversation ever end?  Find out this week on Herding Code.

Show Links:

• Jeremy Miller, Dovetail Software
• Ward Bell, IdeaBlade
• Rob Eisenberg, Caliburn, Blue Spire
• Glenn Block, Microsoft
• Expression SketchFlow
• Expression Blend
• Balsamiq Mockups
• Jonas Follesoe
• NDC2009 – Norwegian Developers Conference
• Windsor
• Pattern and Practices
• Build Your Own CAB Series by Jeremy Miller

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 58: Presentation Patterns with Jeremy Miller, Ward Bell, Rob Eisenberg and Glenn Block (Part 2)

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

• Kevin asks the four guests to introduce themselves and then turns the podcast up to 11.
• Jeremy kicks off the conversation with the “View First vs ViewModel First” discussion.  Jeremy talks about Views, ViewModels, Presenters, Behaviors, Implementation Detail, Separated Presentation, Passive View, iView Interface, Screen Activation, and User Controls… In summary, he’s pro-ViewModel or Presenter first.
• Ward asks if anyone wishes to defend the View First position.
• Rob shares that he tends to create his View and Presenter at the same time (although he’s mostly a Model kind of guy.)  Rob also calls out that he does a lot of prototyping in his workflow.
• Ward talks about where his development always starts – sketching out the UI with his clients.  The ViewModel is ultimately developed to support the interaction discovered in sketching. 
• Rob agrees. Talks more about prototyping first, gathering requirements, user feedback, workflow, architecture and conventions.
• Jeremy considers application navigation, behavioral aspects of screens and the contract for view.
• Glenn calls out the difference between Balsamiq mockups and screens which are maintained by a designer in Blend.  Which approach best supports the tooling experience, maintainability, and testability?  Glenn references Jonas Follesoe and how his designer girlfriend couldn’t function unless he defined the View first.  Glenn initiates conversations about Service Locators.
• Jeremy questions whether one needs that level of detail.  Do you need to fake in a service locator for your designer experience or are there alternatives?
• Glenn stresses that we must think about the designer (albeit there aren’t many right now), consider tradeoffs with varying approaches, talks about Prism and Patterns and Practices experiences, and tooling – particularly Blend.
• Rob talks about providing simple conventions which are taught to designers in lieu of using an inversion of control containers like Windsor.
• Glenn asks what the designer would see inside of Blend in this case and Rob isn’t aware of  any limitations with this approach.  Is this an issue of designer not having sample data to work with?
• Jon shares his experience at Vertigo – applications favor design and tooling, applications don’t have complex business rules, applications are Blendable.
• Jeremy appreciates that appearance may be the most challenging aspect of some applications.  In this case, maybe View First is the most appropriate approach but having Blend driving workflow is a case of the tail wagging the dog.  We need to consider the line of business applications and in that case ViewModel or Presenter must come first.
• Glenn notes that the View being created first as part of instantiation does not correlate to whether the ViewModel drives behavior from that point on. View First is at the point of activation.  Whether the view is injected into ViewModel or the ViewModel get set into the View, the ViewModel is the guy which is in control.
• Jeremy explains the Screen Activation pattern and some fairly complex scenarios where logic is executed before the view is activated. 
• Ward states that he is not a fan of the view determining the ViewModel or the ViewModel selecting the View and prompts Jeremy by asking if a factory could pull the right pieces together and sequence them.
• Jeremy takes Ward’s queue and talks about the Screen Activator acting as the gatekeeper which puts screens together.  Jeremy reference the Caliburn approach.
• Rob clarifies the Caliburn ViewModels hierarchy and the use of screen activators and the composite pattern.
• Glenn talks a bit about complexity, CAB, debugging hierarchies, event aggregators and messaging.
• Jeremy calls out the benefit of using a composite pattern on a dashboard type application where a part of the screen may act as an application itself but an event aggregator would be best of cross-piece communication.
• Rob notes that communication in Caliburn is local – it is parent to child or child to parent and this approach can really simplify development.
• Jon and Rob discuss the approach of simply navigating between two tabs.  Would you use event aggregation, publishing event, commanding or what?
• Jeremy gives detail to the Screen Conductor role and pattern and Rob stresses the value of methods such as Initialize, Activate, Deactivate, Shutdown and CanShutdown. Jeremy and Glenn walk through an example.
• Glenn, Rob and Jeremy consider roles and patterns and if they vary from application to application.  Is there an established best practice?  Jeremy believes roles seem to be consistent but implementation changes from project to project. 
• Ward wraps up Part 1 stating that he agrees with the idea of like roles but not ready to lock into any implementation.  He suggests we call out the actors and see how it plays… 
• This conversation just won’t end.  Be sure to tune in next week for Part 2.

Show Links:

• Jeremy Miller, Dovetail Software
• Ward Bell, IdeaBlade
• Rob Eisenberg, Caliburn, Blue Spire
• Glenn Block, Microsoft
• Expression SketchFlow
• Expression Blend
• Balsamiq Mockups
• Jonas Follesoe
• NDC2009 – Norwegian Developers Conference
• Windsor
• Pattern and Practices
• Build Your Own CAB Series by Jeremy Miller

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 57: Presentation Patterns with Jeremy Miller, Ward Bell, Rob Eisenberg and Glenn Block (Part 1)

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

• K Scott leads the discussion asking about developing with Eclipse. Jon asks how Eclipse’s plugin model compares to that of Visual Studio.
• K Scott introduce the topic of model-driven development and DSLs. Markus steps back and takes some time to talk about terminology.
• Markus shares why UML can’t be used to appropriately describe one’s domain and jokes that Microsoft has been ignoring UML for years but that are now gravitating toward it just as everyone else is moving away.
• Markus discusses the difference between modeling and programming.
• Kevin asks Markus his opinion of Oslo and M, the Oslo Modeling Language. Markus says it is difficult to compare Oslo to Textual Modeling Framework (TMF) found in Eclipse, talks about code generation being incorporated (or not) into Oslo and shares his thoughts about competition between groups at Microsoft. K Scott and Markus discuss their concern with Oslo becoming an extension of SQL and the mixed messages Microsoft is sending.
• Markus talks about the blurring lines between External vs Internal DSLs.
• K Scott and Markus discuss productivity gains when incorporating modeling into one’s development.
• Markus shares the things which changed and influenced his career – design patterns and modeling. Markus stresses that building languages and generators is more applicable to software development than learning the API-of-the-day. K Scott and Markus talk about learning, focusing on the important stuff and separating technical and domain concerns.
• Jon asks about Microsoft Axum. Markus explains Axum as “Erlang for .NET” and expands upon the benefits of concurrent and functional programming.
• The show finishes with Markus providing a very nice overview of Product Line Engineering.

Show Links:

• Markus’ Site
• Markus’ Blog
• Software Engineering Radio
• Code Generation Conference
• Steve Cook
• DSL (Domain-Specific Language)
• UML (Unified Modeling Language)
• OMG (Object Modeling Group)
• Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)
• OOPSLA (Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications)
• Eclipse
• Textual Modeling Framework (TMF)
• Oslo
• M (Oslo Modeling Language)
• Don Box
• DSL DevCon
• Scala
• Converge
• Laurence Tratt
• MPS (Meta Programming System)
• Jetbrains
• Textual DSLs and Code Generation with Eclipse Tools (Markus’ DSL DevCon Presentation)
• Visual Studio 2010
• WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation)
• MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework)
• DSL Toolkit
• Martin Fowler
• Gang of Four Book
• Microsoft Axum: “Erlang for .NET”
• Microsoft Axum
• Erlang
• Pipes and Filters Design Pattern
• Product Line Engineering
• SPLC (Software Product Line Conference)
• Models Conference

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 56: Markus Völter on Model-Driven Development, DSLs and Product Line Engineering

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

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

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

Show Links:

• Nate Kohari’s Discord & Rhyme
• Nate Kohari on Twitter
• Ninject
• Zen
• Lean Software Development
• Hanselminutes
• Nicole Kohari
• James Avery
• Mike Eaton
• Jayme Davis
• Sean Chambers
• NHibernate
• LINQ to NHibernate
• jQuery
• jQuery UI
• Ruby on Rails
• Mono
• ASP.NET MVC
• Phil Haack
• MonoRail
• Spark View Engine
• jQuery Metadata Plugin
• BrowserShots
• Xenocode
• IETester
• Firefox Firecookie Add-ons
• amCharts
• Chart Basics
• CSS Browser Selector
• Akamai
• Google CDN
• Rackspace, Rackspace Cloud (Mosso)
• Amazon CloudFront
• BrainTree Payment Solutions
• Telligent
• The Dip by Seth Godin
• Mary and Tom Poppendieck
• 37signals

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 55: Nate Kohari brings Your Moment of Zen

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

• The guys try to explain the value of Twitter to Rob. “Twitter makes me more productive.” “You must cultivate your network.” “It is all about who you follow.” “Twitter is a fishing net.” “I can quit at anytime.”
• Jon shares how Herding Code started with an inadvertent Skype conversation.
• Scott K talks about Herding Code’s diverse guest list which doesn’t consist of the usual list of suspects which might be regulars on other shows.
• The Kevin Dente Roast continues…
• Rob compares the Herding Code with The View, identifies each cast members role and announces that Herding Code needs to build in the happy hour aspect of podcasting. Have another beer, Rob.
• Jon talks about cannibalism and attacking oneself.
• The guys discuss Rob’s new spokesmodel spokesman position at Microsoft, ongoing Kona development and a bit about community outreach.
• Are you missing K Scott? Tune into this week’s show to find out what he’s doing now. You may be utterly surprised.

Show Links:

• Rob Conery
• Jeff Atwood
• Scott Hanselman, Hanselminutes
• John Resig
• Phil Haack
• Alan Stevens
• G. Andrew Duthie
• Greg Young
• Shawn Wildermuth
• Joe Brinkman
• Shaun Walker
• DotNetNuke
• TechSmith, SnagIt, Jing
• V8 JavaScript Engine
• Leon Bambrick – New Synchronization Idea Overlooked By Microsoft Live team
• Glenn Block
• Ted Leung
• Markus Völter
• Matt Podwysocki
• Shawn Burke
• Bertrand Le Roy
• Stephen Walther
• DotNetRocks
• Elegant Code Podcast

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 54: Rob Conery interviews the Herding Code guys

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

• Jon kicks off the show asking Rob for some clarity on his job at Microsoft. Rob refuses to answer the question and unveils his plan to completely derail the podcast.  This leads into the first ever Kevin Dente Roast.
• After things settle down, Rob announces SubSonic 3.0 and the “technical part of the podcast” is initiated.
• Rob talks to SubSonic details – specifically, ActiveRecord, REST Handler, Linq engine, SimpleRepository, templating system, the use of the iQueryable Toolkit, the new docs site, and auto migrations.
• “What’s so difficult about building a freakin’ expression parser?”  Rob states that coding is hard and the fact that LINQ leaves him a little afraid. He then speaks a little Mandarin and speaks of going shopping.
• Jon and Rob have a discussion about the use of ORMs and performance concerns.  Rob states No one ever got fired for using Microsoft and adds a quick comment about SubSonic’s failed acquision of NHibernate
• Scott K asks what it is like to write your own provider for SubSonic and notes that a SQL Data Service provider would allow one to scale to the cloud.
• The guys field listener questions from Jeff Atwood (“Why is SQL so awesome?”) and Chip Cray (“How has your view of DDD changed since you started the StoreFront?”)
• The conversation comes full circle with Jon asking Rob (again) about his job at Microsoft and if he’s paid to work on SubSonic.

Show Links:

• Rob Conery
• Scott Hanselman
• SubSonic 3.0 is Released Announcement
• SubSonic 3.0 Download
• SubSonic 3.0 Docs
• Ruby on Rails
• LINQ
• LINQ to SQL
• Jeff Atwood, Joel Spolsky, Stack Overflow
• iQueryable Toolkit
• Matt Warren
• gzip
• Rick Strahl
• SQL Data Services
• NHibernate
• Sharding
• POCO
• Entity Framework
• T4 Templates
• db4objects
• SQLite
• Ayende
• Damien Guard
• Scott Guthrie
• David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)
• ASP.NET MVC StoreFront
• StackOverflow DevDays
• Intro music – Chicago Remix – requested by Rob

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 53: SubSonic 3.0 Release Party with Rob Conery

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

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

Show Links:

• Alan Stevens, @alanstevens
• G. Andrew Duthie, @devhammer 
• CodeStock Conference in Knoxville
• devLINK Conference in Nashville
• Community Megaphone
• Brad Wilson
• DevExpress
• JetBrains
• Damien Guard
• Scott Hanselman
• Phil Haack
• Rob Conery
• Joel Neubeck and Tim Heuer’s Silverlight Video Player
• Josh Holmes
• Windows Internet Explorer 8: Get the facts
• Microsoft Vine
• Serenity Movie
• Scott Guthrie
• Don Box
• Pete Brown
• T4 Templates
• Brian Noyes

Note: Ward Bell transcribed a part of the discussion on drag’n'drop demos here.

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 52: The Alan Stevens and G. Andrew Duthie Debate Continues

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

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

Show Links:

• Greg Young’s blog
• Command Query Separation 
• Domain Driven Design – Yahoo Group
• Herding Code Trivia Contest – (Diskeeper Pro Premier)

Download / Listen:

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

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

Show Links:

• LINQ to SQL changes in .NET 4.0
• L2ST4 – LINQ to SQL T4 templates
• LINQ IQueryable Toolkit
• Envy Code R
• TrueType
• FontLab
• Microsoft Visual TrueType
• Windows 7 font changes and Gabriola
• DirectWrite
• Amazon Kindle

Download / Listen:

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

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

Compliments of K Scott, another Lightning Round Strikes!

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

Show Links:

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

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

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

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

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

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 49: Search with Bing and Wolfram Alpha

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

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

Show Links:

• Dustin Campbell’s Blog
• Project Euler
• Visual Studio 2010 Beta 
• Visual Studio 2010 Beta Download Options (including Web Installer)
• FREE DevExpress CodeRush Xpress for C# and VB
• DevExpress’ CodeRush and Refactor!
• JetBrains’ ReSharper
• Whole Tomato’s Visual Assist X
• Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
• Visual InterDev
• Managed Extensibility Foundation (MEF)
• May F# CTP add-on for Visual Studio 2008
• F# Interpreter (FSI)
• IronRuby
• IronPython
• Perspectives in Eclipse
• IronPython Studio
• Team Foundation Server (TFS)
• SmallTalk
• PowerShell
• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 48: Dustin Campbell on Visual Studio 2010

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

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

Show Links:

• Joe Brinkman’s Blog
• I Spose I’ll Just Say It: Still Waiting For a GOOD Reason to Learn MVC
• DotNetNuke
• DotNetNuke Professional
• DotNetNuke OpenForce
• August Capital
• Sierra Ventures
• ASP.NET MVC
• Telerik
• DevExpress
• Wordpress
• Jeremy Miller
• Chad Myers
• Scott Watermasysk
• Community Server
• Scott Guthrie
• DRY Principle – Don’t Repeat Yourself
• SOLID Principles
• TDD – Test Driven Development
• BDD – Behavior Driven Development
• FubuMVC
• Oxite
• jQuery Grid Plugin
• jQuery
• Prototype
• Script.aculo.us
• Open Source Definition
• Open Source Licenses
• SCO vs Linux Controversies
• Cargo Culting
• Reflector

Download / Listen:

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

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

• Hear tales of recursive website spidering, rogue mass emailers, and hardware snafus which end in puffs of smoke
• Learn from Jon that simulating nuclear fission on a Cray supercomputer can get wildly out of control
• Find out why you should think twice before optimizing a relative’s computer on New Years’ Day
• What’s the quickest way to realize the benefits of a Transaction Server?  Why listening to K Scott’s ATM story, of course.
• Discover why you might want to rethink flying Kevin out to your company to perform any hardware magic (but if you need to reconstruct a FAT table, he’s your guy.)
• And get the most sage advice ever offered by K Scott on Herding Code.

As a bonus, the Extended Lightning Round!

• Windows 7, Windows XP Mode and Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V)
• Windows Server 2008 SP2 and Windows Vista SP 2
• Office 2007 Service Pack 2
• Microsoft Vine – It’s like Twitter for Emergencies
• Pink – Microsoft’s Smart Phone
• Glimmer

Show Links:

• TimeSnapper
• CallGraph
• VMWare Fusion’s Unity
• Virtual PC
• Parallels Coherence
• Lounge Podcast Survey

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Herding Code 46: Mistakes and News Recap 

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

• Larry and K Scott summarize their thoughts on the recent DSL DevCon
• Scott K shares that the hardest part about DSLs is defining what they are and what they aren’t. For example are SQL, CSS or XSLT Domain Specific Languages? Lucky for us, Larry provides a reasonably simple breakdown of Internal and External DSLs and touches upon Functional, Dynamic, Compositional, and Computational DSLs.
• K Scott questions why one might create a DSL and proposes that communication and productivity are primary drivers. Larry concurs and talks about the miscommunication and inefficiencies associated with programmers translating domain expert’s preferred notation or diagrams into code.  This sparks a conversation about Microsoft’s claims regarding OSLO’s order of magnitude productivity increases and the premises required for this claim to be achieved. 
• Kevin asks if DSLs and the new tools are targeted to replace developers. Don’t worry, you’re safe for now especially since the idea of letting the business people write programs has been failing since COBOL.  As Larry explains, it isn’t about putting programmers out of work, it’s all about communication, readability and offering domain experts a way to validate our code.
• Larry explains why writing a language – specifically an external DSL – is hard. 
• Jon and Kevin recognize similarities between Domain Specific Languages and Domain Driven Development and Larry speaks to their shared concepts – primarily expressing a domain in code.
• Larry answers listener questions from Shawn Wildermuth and Ben Griswold regarding the difference between an internal and external DSLs and the role of the fluent interfaces and the relationship between functional programming and DSLs, respectively.
• The guys also talk a bit about growing and roasting your own coffee, Hawaii, magazines and how a Mai Tai can disrupt one’s plan to take over the world.

Show Links:

• Larry O’Brien’s blog
• Larry’s recent article in SDTimes 
• DSL DevCon
• Lang.NET Symposium
• Chris Sells
• Meta-Introduction to Domain Specific Languages, Martin Fowler
• Using IronPython 2.0 as a script engine in MS Dynamics AX, Roman Ivantsov 
• Functional vs Dynamic DSLs: The Smackdown, Ted Neward and Bradford Cross
• Ted Leung’s overview of DSL DevCon 
• Intentional Software
• Martin Fowler’s Writings on Language Workbenches
• Intentional Software talk at Qcon 
• Intentional Software presentation at DSL Dev Con 
• OSLO Developer Center
• Eclipse
• Boo
• Herding Code 42: Scott Bellware on BDD and Lean Development
• Fit and FitNesse
• Tcl (pronounced Tickle) Scripting Language
• Functional Programming
• F#
• LINQ – .NET Language-Integrated Query
• jQuery

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Herding Code 45: Larry O’Brien on Domain Specific Languages 

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

• Scott K starts off the show with a list of free online invoicing and financial tools along with a number of services which provide free disk space.
• Jon notes that advertising and micropayments are cheap and easy to setup in minutes.
• Kevin talks about his recent endeavor, review2Q, an ASP.NET MVC application, hosted in the Azure cloud, which helps automate the management of his Netflix’s queue. It was an itch that he just needed to scratch and, with little overhead on his part, it’s now available for you, too.
• The guys discuss super cheap hosting and the numerous APIs and Services which provide tons of data available to re-mix.  They also discuss using Azure or Google App Engine to scale up as one grows. 
• Jon comments on how free site templates and store/blog theme systems can make design a snap. 
• Jon also calls out the fact that for most web developers the barrier to entry is so low.  Thus, one is somewhat susceptible to having their idea quickly copied.  This raises the question; will your investment pay off long-term? 
• Kevin jokes that there’s an alternative approach to implementing your own, self-serving solution – just wait long enough and someone else will implement your idea.
• Kevin and Jon discuss why the web is such an appealing platform to start a venture. It is all about the low barrier to entry, the instant gratification and immediacy of making your product available and easy accessibility.  Not to mention many sites are self-sustaining.
• The guys brainstorm a few one-man startup website and mobile development ideas, wonder if they would ever again hear from Jon if he came upon 4 million dollars and question whether or not K Scott has fallen asleep.

Show Links:

• Google Docs
• Zoho
• Office Online
• Skydrive
• Box.net
• Dropbox
• Google App Engine
• Markus Frind, Plentyoffish.com
• Adsense
• Kevin’s Dente’s review2Q
• Netflix
• ASP.NET MVC
• Azure
• SQL Data Services
• RSS
• RESTful API
• Trusted Database Interpretation (TDI)
• Open Source Web Design
• WordPress
• OneNote
• Yahoo Pipe
• Stackoverflow
• Hanselminutae-five with Richard Campbell
• iPhone Development
• Windows Mobile
• 37signals

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Herding Code 44: Microbusiness

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

• The guys discuss the various patterns as they relate to ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight and WPF and dig into the differences between ViewModels and Models.
• Scott K brings up the question: “What’s the difference between MVC and MVP?” and then quotes Jeremy Miller in stating, “MVP denotes a stateful conversation between presenter and view whereas MVC is just linear.”
• K Scott discusses the differences between building applications “the Rails way” and how you can build any type of application any way you want with ASP.NET MVC.
• The group fields a question via Twitter from Steve Bohlen: "ask about the (relative) importance of persistence ignorance in the M in MVC."
• The guys talk at length about action filters, custom model binders and object-object mapping.
• And the show closes with Scott K reintroducing THE LIGHTNING ROUND!

Show Links:

• Javier Lozano’s Blog
• Eric Hexter’s Blog
• LosTechies
• CodePlex
• Community for MVC
• Model View Controller
• Model View ViewModel
• Model Model View Controller
• Model View Presenter
• Jeremy Miller’s Blog
• Shawn Wildermoth’s Blog
• Jimmy Bogard’s Blog
• Rob Conery’s Blog
• Chad Myer’s Blog
• Putting the M in MVC Series
• Putting the “M” Back in MVC (with SubSonic MVC Templates)
• The Power of Programming With Attributes
• Ruby on Rails
• MVC.NET 1.0
• NHibernate
• Monorail
• ActiveRecord
• Windsor
• Linq 2 SQL
• Entity Framework
• NerdDinner.com
• jQuery
• Silverlight
• WPF
• Domain Driven Design
• AutoMapper: Object-Object Mapper
• Repository Pattern
• YAGNI
• Splitting DateTime – Unit Testing ASP.NET MVC Custom Model Binders
• A Better Model Binder
• Autofac – An addictive .NET IoC Container
• David Foley
• MVC Contrib
• ASP.NET MVC Tips – Return Specific Views for Specific Errors
• Charlie the Unicorn Goes to Candy Mountain
• FubuMVC
• WCF
• Service Locator Pattern
• Action Filters
• RIA Services
• Scott Guthrie and The Other Scott

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Herding Code 43: Javier Lozano on the M in MVC

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

• Hear the REAL last word about TDD.  You know it is more about design and little about testing, right?
• True or false?  Scott Bellware practices BDD.  The answer will shock you!
• Learn why you need let go of your inner geek and commit to being a business person.
• Discover how Context Specification can help you get a date (or your money back.)
• Pick up some catchy phases like “focal depth”, “theory of constraints”, “quality at the source”, “working forward” and “Docksiders.”
• And much, much, much more.

Show Links:

• Scott Bellware’s Blog
• Dan North
• Test Driven Development (TDD)
• Behavior Driven Development (BDD)
• SpecUnit
• NUnit
• RSpec
• Aaron Jenson
• NBehave
• XUnit
• MBUnit
• MSTest
• Entity Framework
• CodeBetter.com
• theRuntime.com
• Jay Kimble
• Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation
• The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
• The Toyota Way
• Extreme Toyota: Radical Contradictions That Drive Success at the World’s Best Manufacturer
• Mary and Tom Poppendieck
• Audible.com
• Mono
• Moonlight
• Android Development
• iPhone Development
• Monospace (or Mono Space) will be a workshop conference on Mono in Austin this fall – http://explore.twitter.com/bellware/status/1427781203
• everbetter.me will provide person to person mentoring and targeted for launch in June – http://twitter.com/bellware/status/1470820727

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Episode 42: Scott Bellware on BDD and Lean Development