Eat Sleep Code Podcast

On this episode of Eat Sleep Code, Craig Stuntz discusses his technique of using fuzzing to discover bugs in software. Craig shares his perspective on where fuzzing fits in the QA process, and why bug discovery is so critical to quality software.

On this episode of Eat Sleep Code, James Chambers unpacks the highlights from Microsoft Build 2017. The importance of AI and Machine Learning for developers is discussed. James shares his interest in using software for humanitarian efforts.

00:55 EC: Yep. So tell us a little about yourself, James. What do you do? Where do you work?

01:00 JC: I actually am an independent consultant and I work primarily in the space of ASP.NET Core these days and I do a lot of work in Azure. And I guess I’ve got the MVP award a couple of time or so, and recently released my fourth book with good friends of mine Dave Paquette and Simon Timms on the topic of ASP.NET Core.

01:25 EC: So Dave and Simon, you do a lot of work with these guys. You have a little bit of a show that you do as well on Channel 9.

01:31 JC: We do. We call ourselves the ASP.NET Monsters. We’ve got these little caricatures that are done. Anyways, so we have this cartoon persona where we go on and we code and pretend to know what we’re doing and share what we’re learning about ASP.NET Core with other people. And so yeah, we’re about 100 episodes in on Channel 9 and plugging along.

01:48 EC: Nice, congratulations.

01:49 JC: Thanks.

01:50 EC: It’s a great show, especially if you’re a.NET developer. Tune in and learn some cool tips and tricks. I learned a little bit about a cool open-source project that you guys had called GenFu.

02:05 JC: That’s right. So it’s a data generation library, it’s available on GitHub and via NuGet and it’s for.NET core. We’re working on back-porting it to support other frameworks as well, but what it does is you can basically take any type of entity and say give me a list of that entity, and rather than filling it in with nonsense data, it will actually do its best to intelligently recognize known properties, and then using an internal database, fill those with either random values that are generated or generated based off of values in the database. So it gives you realistic looking test data and sometimes that can make a strong impression when you’ve got a first draft of a prototype or you’re working with some sample data. So a handy little utility. I’ve been using it, some form of it, for over 15 years and then I finally got poked to put it out there a couple of years ago and Dave and Simon stepped in and that’s really where we started collaborating, and it’s just evolved from there.

Find out more at http://developer.telerik.com/content-types/podcast/monster-build-recap/

On this episode of Eat Sleep Code, Michael Crump and Clint RutkaS from Microsoft discuss their project Windows Template Studio, a new getting started experience for Universal Windows Platform.

01:44 EC: This week there's a lot of amazing things being announced at Build. You guys are working on something that is coming out of this Build week. Why don't you give us a little introduction to the Windows Template Studio that you guys are working on?

02:05 CR: Okay, so Windows Template Studio is a... Helps out your File New experience. With UWP development, the templates basically that you have access to is a blank application. And for most developers, that could be a bit overwhelming and it helps... To build up a scaffolding for where you need to be can take multiple hours to just to get it functional when you're adding in, let's say six pages of background task, wanting live tiles. Let's say you wanna add in some, use the MVVM Light framework and add in suspend and resume. To do all that and to test it and validate, it takes multiple hours. We know this 'cause we actually asked one of our documentation experts to build an app and record it from start to finish. It took him about three hours. And we built out a dynamic generation tool that can do it in about 20 seconds with full clicking from start to finish.

03:13 MC: And I was just gonna add on to that last... That little piece is that I think a lot of the times that people get caught up in, "Okay, if I want to add X, Y and Z feature, I have to spend a ton of times in the documentation. I have to... " The typical developer may go and decide, "Oh, I'm gonna top this in and Bing or Google it. And it will hit me over to Stack Overflow, and I want to try to maybe find something that looks similar and then copy and paste. Or go try it, F5, and then go back to maybe some documentation." This is definitely designed to get you to that F5 experience, with the pages, frameworks and features that you need.

03:56 CR: And that's out of the gate. And the other great thing is, is that we call this Windows Template Studio. When your app is fully generated, you can F5 it. But all we do is build up the framework. We don't do everything for you because we can't assume what you, as a developer, want to do. So we have little to-dos. Like if you add in a background task. We have zero clue what type of background task trigger you want, or what that background task should actually functionally do. So, we add in a to-do that puts you exactly where that line of code that you need to start putting in stuff, and tell you this is where you need to do this. Or if you use a map control, we tell you exactly where to get the Bing map API key, and what variable you need to put that into. Out of the gate you can get quickly up and running to build out your app to do the cool stuff rather than the mundane stuff like building out the scaffolding.

04:55 EC: Let's try to visualize this for the folks listening. We're talking about Windows universal applications right now, so we're talking about the stuff that's in the Windows store, and you're running on your Windows desktop, HoloLens and things like that, right? So the UWP platform. And this is to augment the File New project experience where right now you get a blank application but it doesn't really do a whole lot. So you're saying it takes about three hours to build up something that's even moderately useful as a starter application. And in ASP.NET MVC, we have something that starts up. And we have things like Bootstrap installed, and some of the JavaScript libraries that we need. This Windows template studio gives us that experience, but there's a little bit more to it, right?

Read more at http://developer.telerik.com/topics/net/announcing-windows-template-studio/

Ed and Brian cover the latest news in the development community including: what happened at Facebook's F8 event, what is a software developer, Amazon's Echo Look and Machine Learning.

On this episode of Eat Sleep Code guest Lars Klint talks about his experience with Microsoft's newest mixed reality device the HoloLens. Lars clarifies difference between Mixed Reality, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. We discuss SDKs and development with Unity (3d) and UWP (2d).

02:09 LK: I'm a freelance developer, so I'm doing my own thing but it involves a whole bunch of stuff and just to rattle off a few things, I'm a fellow podcaster as well. I run a podcast as well called The Dane and The Pain and we do tech stuff. It's not as developer-centric as you guys, but it's still pretty cool tech stuff that we find around the internet. I'm doing it with a guy I've never met that lives in Alaska, which makes it really interesting and we met through social media.

02:39 LK: I run a bed and breakfast, where I live, and I also have a used car business, parts and stuff for classic cars, but I also do software, obviously. And my thing is HoloLens, at the moment. I travel around the world. I do a number of different HoloLens talks. I do a workshop. I try and get the device into as many hands as I possibly can because this is just utterly mind-blowing when you actually get into it. That's my thing in the moment, is HoloLens, but traditionally, I've come from the Windows Phone background, been doing the whole Windows Phone, Windows 10 UWP journey, along with a lot of other HoloLens developers, actually.

03:23 EC: People out there probably maybe have heard of the HoloLens or something like Gear VR or some of the other virtual reality things. Let's talk a little bit about what is the HoloLens. What exactly is this device? And why is it different or how is it different from these other things that are out there?

Find out more at http://developer.telerik.com/content-types/podcast/hololars-talks-hololens/

Ed and Brian cover the latest news in the development community including: Microsoft ends it's quest to include an object mapper. We'll look at all the ways you can build Native Mobile applications that look professional. Your favorite text editors battle it out for a place in our hearts. And JavaScript Dominates the Stack Overflow Developer survey.

01:00 EC: Let me start off with a quick update about our previous shows. We covered some issues where Microsoft was trying to come up with their own object-mapper utility to bundle with '.NET MVC and that would have been probably '.NETs' Core MVC. And most of you guys out there that build those type of apps are probably already using something called AutoMapper, so I invited Jimmy Bogard on the show to give his point of view on what exactly was Microsoft trying to accomplish with this and it turned out to be a really good show focused on app security and talking about what Microsoft's idea was. Microsoft actually decided to back off the idea and they're kinda closed on the issue for now, so it looks like they've kinda left things as is. The community provided a solution for the problem and they're just gonna leave it that way for the time being. So that discussion is over with anyway, but it made for some great content. If you wanna go back and listen to Jimmy on the show, that was last week's podcast. Like I said, there are some really great points in there about security, if you haven't caught it already.

02:19 EC: So on Developer Digest shows, we go through our weekly or bi-weekly newsletter and cover some of the topics that were discussed in the newsletter. Some of the articles we highlighted in the newsletter and just kinda give our opinions on what the content was like in those articles and our experience. So first up we have "Creating Your First Native Mobile App With Visual Studio." So this is an article by... Or an article series rather, by Rob Lawler, one of our developer advocates here and he's kinda showing the ins and outs of creating a native mobile application in Visual Studio using NativeScript.

03:08 BR: Yeah. It's a good series, it's pretty detailed. He has four parts of it, all of which are pretty extensive. So obviously, he kind of talks about other options, being Xamarin being the obvious choice if you're a Visual Studio developer, but he explains why you might wanna consider NativeScript and goes into detail on how to actually build an app from the ground up and I loved his idea for an app. It's a Bill Murray app...

Find out more at http://developer.telerik.com/content-types/podcast/developer-digest-automapper-update-native-mobile-editors-javascript-dominates/

On this episode of Eat Sleep Code guest Jimmy Bogard shares his perspective on Microsoft's basic object-mapper. Jimmy talks about the future of Automapper and support for .NET Core & .NET Standard.

00:57 EC: So I wanted to get you on the show today, because of a GitHub issue I saw on the MVC GitHub repository. And this GitHub issue is… It reads, “Basic object mapper for simple model view. View model property mapping.” And I have a feeling that you have some opinions about this, having one of… A very popular NuGet package for ‘.NET’ AutoMapper. And it’s been quite successful. And this, to me, it looks like it may step on your toes a little bit. So I wanted to get you to talk about kinda where you’re at and how this affects you. But before we get started, why don’t you give everybody a quick introduction of who you are and what you do, Jimmy?

01:56 JB: Okay. I guess I really write code for customers for a living. I work at a consulting company called Headspring out of Austin, Texas. And nearly all of the open-source stuff I work on, is just stuff that I build to help my clients. It’s just tools I wanted to keep using, and using, and using as we go from client to client. And so, almost everything that I write and use these days with open-source is stuff I’m actually using on client projects, that I don’t wanna lose when I go to the next client.

02:33 EC: And you have this tool called AutoMapper, which is an object mapping tool. Why don’t we give everybody a quick elevator pitch. What is an object mapper?

02:46 JB: Well, the basic idea is I have two objects that look pretty similar, and my general use case was I’m building web applications in ASP.NET MVC, typically. And I have a rich domain model that’s bound to the database in some way or another, usually with an ORM, like in any framework. But then, I had this other thing I’m using to show information on the web, either for showing forms, or also posting data from the web. And you have this general problem, and that’s your backend object is generally very rich and behavioral, and has a lot of things associated with it, but the thing you’re coming in from the web, is generally not. And you typically don’t wanna mix those two things together. So about… Gosh, eight or nine years ago, I saw this issue of when we’re starting out MVC, that we wanted to have these DTOs that we use for the MVC side and have these rich backend objects. But what would be the mechanism that we copy that information from the rich backend objects to the frontend dumb DTO objects? And I didn’t wanna do that all by hand, and I looked around, and saw there really wasn’t anything that did it for you automatically. And so, I created AutoMapper as a way to automatically figure out how to copy information from one object to the other.

04:12 JB: Probably a stupid idea. That didn’t seem that complicated, but there were a few things that I wanted to have out of the box that would help us out. One of the big ones was flattening, so if you have “foo.bar.baz” on your destination object, you could just have a single property, “foo, bar, baz.” And it would automatically traverse those associations, and figure out how to flatten that object for you. It handled nulls as well. If foo was null or bar was null, it’d be able to handle that as well. And the other big thing that I wanted to do, was make sure we could test it as well. So if I misspelled something or removed a property, I could just have one line of… Just check all my configuration is valid, and all the names match up, and there’s nothing missing. And if there is, go in exception, so it’s really easy for us to test, to say, “Make sure all my mappings are good.”

Find out more at http://developer.telerik.com/content-types/podcast/automapper-net-core/

Ed and Brian cover the latest news in the development community including: Micro packages, Angular 4 launches, and is Microsoft writing its own Automapper alternative.

On this episode of Eat Sleep Code guest Trey Stout shares his story about the challenges of utilizing handwriting in software and what problems handwriting solves for users. We discuss the technology stack behind Handwriting.io and ScribbleChat, as well as the engineering involved in these products.

Ed and Brian cover the latest news in the development community including: our personal projects using chat bots and Azure Machine learning, Visual Studio 2017 features, and NativeScript 3.0