Herding Code

Episode 91

This week on Herding Code, K Scott, Jon, Kevin, and Scott K field your questions. That's right – it’s a Listener-Powered Lightning Round! Whether you were interested in their opinions on Microsoft LightSwitch, energy drinks or how the current economic downturn affects quality and craftsmanship, this week’s conversation is being directed by you!

Thanks, listeners, for all of the great questions:

• @mattcasto - What does the herding code crew think of LightSwitch
• @detroitpro - What do you know of orchard? w/ @loudej on board it could be something. #HerdingCode
• @detroitpro - Thoughts on Nu (gems in .NET) #HerdingCode
• @MachaHack - If you were going to learn to program all over again, what would you do differently?
• @mattcasto - What's your favorite energy drink? #herdingCode #lightninground
• @JimHolmes - Cake or Pie? (In honor of @stevehorn )
• Ross Jempson - Why all the fuss about Microsoft.Data? 
• Ross Jempson - How did you get banned from chat.meta.stackoverflow? 
• Ross Jempson - I have a friend, here in Australia that queued up from 11:30pm one night for 11 hours to get an iphone4.  Is an intervention required?
• @JimHolmes - Failing cake or pie, do y'all think this downturn gives companies pause to rethink approaches to quality and craftsmanship?

And the show wraps with the prospect of turning urine to gold…

Show Links: 

• LightSwitch
• Orchard
• Nu – Gems for .NET
• Microsoft.Data
• David Fowler
• WebMatrix
• Razor
• chat.meta.stackoverflow
• @ehexter
• MvcConf
• @shanselman
• James Senior
• F5

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

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Herding Code 91: Listener-Powered Lightning Round

Episode 90

This week on Herding Code, the boys talk with Sara Chipps about Girl Develop IT, a comfortable place where women can learn at their own pace and not be afraid to ask "stupid questions." Listen in as Sara talks about repairing the wide gender gap in development through her series of classes which help women gain knowledge and get involved in software development.

Note: Since we recorded this, Sara was named one of the Top 15 Developer/Hacker Women to Follow on Twitter by Mashable. Congrats!

• Sara kicks off the show by introducing us to Girl Develop IT and its target audience – female entrepreneurs who needs to higher and work with developers and professional women who wish to switch careers and become coders.
• Kevin asks the focus on building projects/products.  Chipps speaks to the series’ curriculum – HTML/CSS, JavaScript, design patterns, data structures and Ruby on Rails.
• Jon asks why Ruby and Rails over ASP.NET MVC and C#?  Good question since Sara is an ASP.NET and C# developer after all.
• The guys and gal talk about the early success of the program.
• Kevin shares that most of the Herding Code hosts are fathers of daughters and asks a twitter question about providing classes and turning girls to coding. Sara expresses the overarching strategy of Girl Develop IT which is to develop rock star programmers which girls can look up to.
• This sparks a conversation about media not telling the real story about developers. Are they any sexy cool female (or male) coders on TV? Is there any way to be a normal girl and a coder?
• Jon asks about dereferencing a pointer in high school.
• Scott K asks about the differences in teaching women compared to men?  Do the gender have different learning styles?  Sara talks about getting the women in the group feeling comfortable to answer questions. 
• The group talks about conferences and open source projects and the percentages of women there within. 
• Sara talks about extending the Girl Develop IT course materials to other chapters.
• Jon asks why this sort of thing (teaching focused on women) isn’t already being done. Sara speaks to what’s happening in the community and the typical women’s group.
• The guys ask “if you can’t get to Girl Develop IT, how can women get involved and learn?” How about online learning?
• The cast considers pretending to be women on Stackoverflow?
• Scott K asks what’s next for the Girl Develop IT? Will the course begin to venture outside of the web space? Lisp development for women perhaps?
• Chipps offers the bundl.it elevator pitch, answers a Twitter question about Mono and the conversation quickly digresses to challenges in international domain registration.
• Sara shares her excitement about last year’s Concept Camp and announces this year’s return.  Be on the lookout for CONCEPT CAMP 2010: A DEV ODYSSEY, puns and steak sponsorship!
• Sara talks about the success of the Devs for Wendy fundraiser held of software developer and loving mom, Wendy Friedlander.
• The show wraps with the boys asking Sara for advice on raising daughters around computers and software and code.  And then Chipps pimps the October release of Computer Engineer Barbie.

Show Links: 

• Sara Chipps, @SaraJChipps
• Girl, Develop It!
• Catherina Fake
• Kodu 
• Small Basic
• NYC Ruby Women’s Group
• Seattle Mind Camp
• Stackoverflow
• CONCEPT CAMP 2010: A DEV ODYSSEY
• Infragistics, Infamous Steak Sponsor
• Matt Podwysocki
• bundl.it
• Jeff Norton
• Simone Chiaretta
• Devs for Wendy
• Charles Petzold
• Miguel Castro
• Peter Laudati
• Steve Bohlen
• Rachel Appel

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

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Herding Code 90: Sara Chipps on GirlDevelopIT and Girls Developing Software

Episode 89

This week on Herding Code, the guys talk with Vaidy Gopalakrishnan about IIS Developer Express.

• The show kicks off by explaining the IIS Developer Express name.  Why not just IIS Express?
• Vaidy provides an overview of IIS Developer Express and explains it is a lightweight, self-contained version of IIS for web developers.  
• Vaidy speaks about the WebMatrix which includes IIS Developer Express along with the Razor ViewEngine and SQL 4 Compact Edition.
• K Scott asks about IIS Developer Express and its relationship to ASP.NET Development Server (which you may still be calling Cassini).  Vaidy notes that Express will likely integrate with Visual Studio in the future and responds to a Twitter question asking why wasn’t Cassini further developed rather than building out the new product.
• Vaidy notes that IIS Developer Express is based off of IIS 7 which triggers a conversation about Hostable Web Core.
• K Scott and Jon pepper Vaidy which a number of questions including whether or not MSDeploy will work with IIS Developer Express.
• The guys review the environments for which IIS Developer Express and WebMetrix are supported.
• Vaidy talks about IIS.Net.
• Vaidy walks Jon and K Scott through debugging your .NET web applications with IIS Express.
• Jon asks about running IIS Express from the command line. Vaidy talks about the configuration mode vs the application mode.
• Vaidy talks about SSL support, self-signed certificates and custom certificates.
• Jon asks about IIS Express user interface and how it’s implemented.  Guess what. It’s WPF.
• Vaidy speaks to IIS Developer Express logging and how it differs from the full version of IIS.
• K Scott asks if there are IIS Express extensions like FastCGI or UrlRewriting. Vaidy explains that all IIS7 extensions should be compatible except when the extensions were not designed to run on XP.
• Jon wants more. What’s next for Vaidy and IIS Developer Express? 
• The show wraps with talk about distribution and redistribution of WebMatrix and IIS Developer Express.

Show Links: 

• Vaidy Gopalakrishnan
• Introducing IIS Developer Express
• Introducing IIS Express
• IIS Developer Express FAQ
• Debug Your .NET Web Project with IIS Express
• Fun With C# and HP Laserjets, K Scott
• WebMatrix
• Razor
• SQL 4 Compact Edition
• Hostable WebCore
• NetShell
• www.iis.net
• Thomas Deml

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

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Herding Code 89: Vaidy Gopalakrishnan on IIS Developer Express

Episode 88

This week on Herding Code, the guys talk with Microsoft MVP, MSDN Magazine columnist and Programming Entity Framework author Julie Lerman about what’s new in Entity Framework 4. 

• The show begins with Julie providing a broad look at the new features and improvements around the EF designer, the run-time, POCO support and disconnected entities.
• Julie talks about her world of database-first development and learning about persistence ignorance, repositories and domain driven development.
• The group talks about the history of Entity Framework and how it is more than a typical ORM.
• K Scott and Julie dive into the designer support for database-generated entities and starting with a blank slate for POCOs.  Julie notes that one can create the DDL in the Visual Studio designer and then generate the database from what is modeled.
• The group talks about green field vs legacy database development and Jon comments on migrations and updating models.
• Scott K asks about hurdles such as generated code being overwritten when using the designer. Julie speaks to updating the model from the database and using views rather than tables to generate the model.  Julie shares complications around foreign keys and RIA services and managing large models in the designer.
• K Scott brings the talk back to POCOs and Julie discusses code generation templates customization with T4 templates. 
• Jon mentions the Visual Studio Extension Manager and how adding template items from the online gallery is just so easy.
• K Scott asks Julie about Code First development with EF 4 CTP4 and compares Code First to  Fluent NHibernate.
• The conversation jumps between versioning, plain old PHP objects, ALT.NET kerfuffle and the Vote of No Confidence.
• Julie and K Scott speak to the two types of POCO support, virtual properties, dynamic proxies, lazy loading and select n + 1.
• Jon asks about EF’s context lifecycle management for ASP.NET and the complexity around disconnected entities.  Julie shares her recommendations on change tracking, entity state properties, self-tracking entities and persisting to the database.
• Julie talks about her book, Programming Entity Framework, the rewrite for EF 4, her Data Points column in MSDN Magazine and the MSDN Development videos.
• The show wraps with comments about Domain-Driven Design and the Norwegian Developers Conference talks.
• Postscript – Jon calls Julie back to talk about the new CTP 4 release.
• Julie talks about how some of the changes are specific to code-first, and others enhance to the core API in CTP 4 to facilitate use of code-first.
• Julie describes the DbContext and DbSet, how they relate to ObjectContext and ObjectSet, and how they’re so much simpler to work with.
• Julie then talks about how the code-first changes make it possible to remove a lot of code because the model is inferred, but you can override things using model builder code or attributes.
• Jon and Julie talk about the Ugly Buddy class, which allow adding attributes to an EF model.
• Julie talks about how the conventions have gotten a lot smarter.
• We talk about Scott Guthrie’s post, and how he’s demonstrating how to take maximum use of the EF / Code First approach.
• We wrap up by talking about improvements in how updates are handled. There’s support for a few workflows – manually keeping them in sync, having EF drop and create, and have EF drop / create / populate. However, as far as we can tell, this drop doesn’t include a migration system.

Show Links:

• Julie Lerman’s Blog
• Programming Entity Framework
• Vermont .NET User Group
• Testability and Entity Framework 4.0
• LLBLGen Pro
• Frans Bouma
• EF Feature CTP4 Walkthrough: Code First
• Fluent NHiberate
• T4 Templates
• Node
• MongoDB
• Raven DB
• Entity Framework Vote of No Confidence
• Scott Bellware
• PluralSight
• MSDN Development Videos
• Julie’s MSDN Data Points Column
• Rob Conery
• Greg Young
• Norwegian Developers Conference
• Eric Evans
• Entity Framework 4 CTP 4
• ScottGu’s post on Entity Framework 4 Code-First with CTP 4
• Julie’s post: What I’m Loving in Entity Framework 4 CTP 4
• List of slang terms for police officers

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

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Herding Code 88: Julie Lerman on Entity Framework 4

Episode 87

This week on Herding Code, the guys talk with Jeff Atwood about his new Area 51 venture, the running of Stack Overflow, the community of Q & A sites, and memories of the glockenspiel.

• Jeff walks us through the genesis of Stack Overflow and how it begot Server Fault, Super User, Stack Exchange and now Area 51.
• Jeff explains Area 51 and the democratic process around establishing a knowledge-based site.  The guys talk about the old Stack Exchange pricing model and how Area 51’s approach is entirely different.
• Kevin asks if there’s a concern that Area 51 will have a geek skew – especially since there’s likely a draw from the existing geek ghetto.
• Scott K asks about bringing experts involvement into communities.  For example, including Alton Brown in a cooking site.
• Jon and Jeff talk about the model of selling software and the magical wonderland that is Coding Horror.
• Jeff talks about the Stack Overflow API and the Stack Exchange API Contest.  There are PRIZES!  The guys consider when an API is necessary and what APIs can provide.  Did somebody say community-built iPhone application for Stack Overflow? 
• Jon asks if the Stack Overflow API will support OData.  Jeff answers “yes”, and then the conversation turns to talk of data analysis and the economics of Q & A sites. Jeff gets back to the OData, “the Sharepoint of sharing data on the web”, and points us to the OData web UI which queries current SO data dump.
• Scott K notes that Stack Overflow is optimized for answerers and asks Jeff for his comments on the Stack Overflow Fatigue article.  Jeff talks about site popularity, community/user issues which don’t occur on smaller sites, and moderation tools.
• Jon asks about expertise and tag-based badges and comments that reputation is self-correcting.  Jeff stresses that the site is really optimized for those who are the best communicators and not necessarily those who are most knowledgeable.
• Kevin asks how Jeff responds to folks who have no chance of gaining enough critical mass to have their interests manifest into a Area 51 site.  Jeff shares his thoughts on community growth and launching and supporting sites with love. 
• Jeff talks about open source, driving forward and evolving his sites and the problem with trying to be all things to all people.
• Jeff fields Twitter questions about Stack Overflow SQL scalability, Stack Overflow’s testing and deployment story and how Jeff’s role has changed with the introduction of many new faces working on the app.  This triggers conversations about hosting on the Microsoft platform, the good and bad of Bizspark, the benefits of servers/hardware being cheap and general happiness with the stack.  Jeff also speaks to continuous integration and argues against unit testing all features.  Jeff speaks of the pointy-haired boss, Metcalfe’s Law, the quite guy problem and how to work with distributed teams.
• The show wraps with Jeff sharing his dependence on human unit tests, cheating, optimizing for the “mistake fixing” and Stack Overflow’s loose web development process.

Show Links:

• Jeff Atwood
• Joel Spolsky
• Jarrod Dixon
• Geoff Dalgas
• Area 51
• Stack Overflow
• Server Fault
• Super User
• Stack Exchange
• Alton Brown
• Creative Commons
• Anthony Bourdain
• Daniel Pink
• Clay Shirky
• Stack Overflow API, Stack Exchange API Contest
• Kevin Montrose
• Code Better
• Stackprinter
• Scott Hanselman
• OData
• ClearBits
• Stack Exchange OData Web UI
• Azure
• Stack Overflow Fatigue, Robert Elwell
• Steve Yegge
• Berkeley Parents Network
• @strickland
• @alexangas
• Bizspark
• Bigtable
• Dustin Campbell
• Michael Stum
• CruiseControl
• Metcalfe's Law
• Miguel de Icaza
• On Working Remotely, Coding Horror
• Ben Dumke
• Web Camps
• Is Arrogance a Factor of Success?, Phil Haack

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

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Herding Code 87: Jeff Atwood on Area 51 and Stack Overflow

Episode 86

While at Web Camps London, Jon talks to Saqib Shaikh about how he's able to develop with limited sight and what developers can do to make our applications more accessible.

• Saqib talks about his role on the Bing Team, data mining and deep links.
• Jon and Saqib talk about solving problems with a little help from Twitter.
• Saqib explains the function of a screen reader and how some people can listen to computers really fast.
• Jon asks about common frustrations around accessibly when web browsing. Jon considers the tie-in between SEO and accessibility.  The guys dive a little deeper into structuring information, images vs text and learning the few basics.
• Jon asks if there's a way to do accessibility analysis? Saqib points to the "Check Accessibility." option which is available when right-clicking on the web project in VS 2010.  (It's there. I checked.)
• Jon and Saqib talk about coding with limited sight. Saqib shares his general techniques.
• The conversation continues with talk about Microsoft product development and the importance placed on accessibility.
• The show wraps with Saqib introducing the term "Universal Design" of all things.  As a developer, you want to make your applications for the largest number of people to use. Just keep in mind that "there's a lot of people in this world, and they're all a little bit different." "It's about making cool stuff for a lot of people."

Show Links:

• Saqib Shaikh
• Bing
• JAWS (an acronym for Job Access With Speech) Screen Reader
• SEO Toolkit
• ARIA
• HTML5
• Clint Nelson from Startup Weekend

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

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Herding Code 86: Saqib Shaikh on Accessibility and Developing with Limited Sight

Episode 85

While at Web Camps London, Jon grabs a quick 15 minute interview with Clint Nelsen to talk about Startup Weekend .

• Clint gives the elevator pitch and a brief history of Startup Weekend.
• Jon talks about how they are incorporating Startup Weekend into Web Camps. The guys talk about project implementation.
• Clint talks about Startup Weekend growth, reach and staff and facilitator involvement.  Clint talks about the management aspects of Startup Weekend.
• Jon asks the types of application which Startup Weekenders are pitching. The guys talk about monetizing iPhone and iPad applications and Jon asks about Windows 7 Phone apps.
• Clint talks about the benefit of having developers at Startup Weekend knowing a common framework/language.
• Jon asks about Startup Weekend success stories like Twitpay and Foodspotting.
• Clint talks about community building, relationships, launch support and current startup funding ratio around 5%.
• Client and Jon talk about startup thinking in the Microsoft community and building a business around MS technologies.

Show Links:

• Startup Weekend
• Clint Nelsen / @clintnelsen
• Marc Nager
• Franck Nouyrigat
• Web Camps
• Twitpay
• Foodspotting
• Microsoft Bizspark
• SXSW (South by Southwest)
• HERDING CODE EPISODE 7: WHY DON'T STARTUPS RUN ON MICROSOFT?
• Global Entrepreneurship Week

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

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Herding Code 85: Clint Nelson on Startup Weekend

Episode 84

This week on Herding Code, the guys talk to Jeff Cohen, Mike Moore, and Scott Bellware about why and how they've moved away from Microsoft development and into the Ruby community.

• K Scott asks the guests about why they switched. Jeff talks about how his switch from desktop development on Windows to Rails development started around 2005 and was primarily driven by the Ruby language itself. Mike agrees that it's all about the Ruby language. Scott B talks about how he straddles both worlds but only sees .NET as a smart choice for building Windows applications now. Scott B goes on to talk about how it's a philosophical thing for him as well, and how he prefers to work on a stack that's more purely open source.
• Scott K talks about the dichotomy in moving from Windows to get away from a proprietary platform and then you find yourself working on a Mac. Go Debian! Scott B talks about how Vista was a tipping point for him to move to Mac. He felt like Microsoft was too focused on shipping products - even if they weren't good products.
• Mike and Scott B talk about moving from ALT.NET to ex-.NET, and how they feel like it's fear and investments in the .NET platform that prevent more people from moving. The guys talk about the "technology treadmill."
• Scott K talks about the problems in "dropping paygrades" in moving from being a senior .NET developer to being a junior developer on another platform.
• Mike Moore asks why developers are investing in a technology that another company owns. Scott B says it's not about Microsoft owning .NET, it's about not being able to make decisions about where the platform is going. He says he sees Microsoft as a manufacturer of 21st century office equipment for large companies with the most influence. It works, but it can be heartbreaking when you see Microsoft moving into markets in a way that's not as elegant as existing technologies (e.g. Entity Framework) because you know that the surrounding industry will move there, and eventually your work will move there as well. The result is a technology treadmill.
• K Scott points out that as the average developer, you're not really in charge of where Linux, Rails, or other open source platforms are heading either. Mike and Scott B clarify; it's not about ownership so much as trusting where the Rails community is going.
• Kevin asks Jeff about some recent criticisms he's made towards Rails 3 recently. Jeff talks about all the things he likes about Rails, but says that he is disappointed that Rails is making changes designed to broaden acceptance and appeal to the enterprise. Despite that, he says that he hasn't lost faith in where Rails is headed. He brings up the relative ease of doing TDD on Rails as opposed to .NET as an example of how Rails works more like he wants to work as a developer.
• Scott K talks about how Microsoft has a conflict of interest as a tools vendor, and how a willingness to work with other IDE's makes moving to other platforms pretty easy.
• The conversation move towards talking about how Intellisense affects system and platform design. Other platforms like Rails are built so you don't need Intellisense to be productive. Rails was never built to sell anything, and that shows in the platform. Mike talks about how he had to leave the .NET platform to find a place where people really cared about getting from 12 lines of code to 4 lines of code.
• Scott B talks about how Rails committers are all building Rails applications, and points out that WPF didn't get the attention it needed until Microsoft used it in Visual Studio. He then talks about how Rails will feel free to make modifications (monkey patches) to Rails, which often graduate to plugins and then move into the core. The key is that this is a continuous process rather than focused on a big product release cycle. Scott B talks more about the Ruby/Rails meritocracy.
• The conversation shifts to the entrepreneurial nature of the Ruby on Rails community. Mike talks about how development cost is a major factor and that people who will take a risk in moving to a new platform are also more likely to take a risk in business.
• Mike and Scott B talk about how polyglot programming is much more prevalent outside of the Microsoft development community.
• Scott B talks about how ASP.NET was positioned as a competitor to Ruby On Rails, and how the two differ.
• K Scott asks how much the move away from .NET is based on culture and developers are looking for a new community with different values. Mike talks about how he was on the verge of leaving programming altogether when he found the Ruby community, and how it reinvigorated him. Scott B says that there are things about developing in the .NET space which drive burnout and, in turn, reduces passion in the community. Jeff talks about how stumbling on Ruby showed him that it was just a lot more fun than what he was doing in his current job.
• Scott B talks about how the plugin experience in Rails differs from the .NET development world - where you're often waiting for services that just aren't quite there yet.
• Mike and Scott B talk about how they like reading Ruby code. Scott B talks about how the Ruby culture places a value on making code readable to the point that it's competitive.
• Scott K talks about how programming has become a business now, but he's always liked to learn things just because it was fun. Scott B says that the skill level in the Rails world seems to be higher, but the people are less intimidating.
• Mike points out that many of the leaders of the Ruby community were previously leaders in the Agile community. Scott B talks about how he's seen Uncle Bob Martin moving to Rails over the past few years.
• Scott B then talks about the problems in toolmakers who make tools but don't use them.
• The show ends, but not really. lots of crazy speculation about starting over with a new runtime on top of .NET.

Show Links:

• Jeff Cohen (@jeffcohen)
• Mike Moore (@blowmage)
• Scott Bellware (@ampgt)
• Martin Fowler
• ALT.NET Podcast
• Curt Hibbs
• Lone Star Ruby Conf
• CherryPy
• Basecamp
• RailsConf
• Pragmatic Programmers Resources
• Scott Guthrie
• Rmagic
• authlogic
• merb
• Manifesto for Agile Software Development
• Uncle Bob Martin
• Dave Thomas
• Brian Marick
• Andy Hunt
• SOLID
• Rails for .NET Developers
• Softies On Rails
• MountainWest RubyConf
• Agile Roots
• Norwegian Developers Conference
• Monospace

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

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Herding Code 84: Ex-Microsoft Developer Panel with Mike Moore, Jeff Cohen, and Scott Bellware

Episode 83

This week on Herding Code, the guys talk with Ayende Rahien (a.k.a. Oren Eini) about RavenDB, a new Open Source (with a commercial option) document database for the .NET/Windows platform.

• The shows starts with a general definition of document databases.  Ayende then contrasts RavenDB with two other popular document databases, Mongo and CouchDB, and comments that RavenDB is much more similar to CouchDB than Mongo.
• Ayende talks about how RavenDB indexes work - they're written when you store data, but not immediately after. He continues with an explanation of transactions - data is transactional, but indexes aren't.
• Scott K brings up Node.js and asked if Ayende had looked at the event driven approach over spinning up threads. Ayende talks about how RavenDB previously worked like that, but it made debugging very painful. Instead, the architecture is now focused on the end goal - RavenDB will never make you wait for a write.
• The guys take a question from Twitter about whether there are plans to support Mono. Ayende says yes, but outlines some of the changes that will be required to make that happen.
• Scott K asks if traditional RDBMS performance tweaks based on moving data and indexes to other spindles are possible and useful on RavenDB.
• Jon asks about how this relates to Reactive Extensions, and Ayende discusses how Event Sourcing works in RavenDB.
• Jon and Scott K ask some questions about storage formats - JSON, binary serialization, etc.
• The group digs into how Map / Reduce works.  Ayende explains Map / Reduce in generally terms as well as how it pertains to RavenDB.
• K Scott asks questions about indexing - how it's done, how indexes are defined and impacts of keeping a lot of indexes. Ayende talks about how indexes are essentially materialized views, and how the RavenDB query engine can use both LINQ and Lucene syntax.
• K Scott asks about transaction support, embedded support, and concurrency.
• The guys talk about the "sweet spot" for RavenDB and document databases. Ayende talks about advantages of working with a document database, and the benefits of working without a defined schema.
• Jon asks if ORM's just go away in a document database context and the conversation moves on to talking about different architectures and development strategies that come into play when working with schema-less documents.
• K Scott mentions that this seems like it would work really well with Aggregate Roots in Domain-Driven Design.
• Ayende and Jon discuss how aggregate queries compare in the context of some of the inefficient queries in MVC Music Store.
• Kevin drills a little deeper into the versioning challenges.
• Jon asks about the use of .NET 4 features with RavenDB including the Task Library and the Expando object. Ayende talks about how they made heavy use of the Dynamic keyword and MEF in RavenDB. Basically, everything except for storage and indexing is handled via MEF.
• Ayende talks about the extensibility points such as read and index previews.
• Jon begs for punishment by asking for Ayende's comments on the MVC Music Store. Ayende talks about how he prefers tutorials be very explicit about what they're not going to cover in detail. He recommends completely removing details which aren't the focus of the tutorial. Then he goes on to talk about how things like shopping carts just seem to work more smoothly with document storage rather than relational databases.
• Jon asks about the licensing models. Ayende talks about how people were unhappy with the initial pricing model due to the differing deployment expectations, and how he worked with customers to establish a pricing model that works for everyone.
• Ayende teaches the gang the term "Chinese Interesting."

Show Links:

• Ayende's Blog
• RavenDB 
• Map / Reduce - A Visual Explanation
• RavenDB - An Introduction
• NHibernate
• Mvc Music Store
• NoSQL
• MongoDB
• CouchDB
• Domain-Driven Design, Aggregate Roots
• Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx)
• Lucene.NET
• MEF
• Rob Conery
• Glenn Block
• James Avery
• Ryan Dahl, Node.js
• Extensible Storage Engine

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

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Herding Code 83: Ayende Rahien on RavenDB

Episode 82

This week on Herding Code, Cory Foy and Will Green join the guys to discuss general differences between .NET and Ruby development approaches. Is the grass always greener on the other side? Listen in on this week's talk about how languages, frameworks, tools and cultures shape the way we implement .NET and Ruby solutions and judge for yourself! 

• Kevin kicks off the conversation noting differences between design patterns and best practices in the .NET and Ruby worlds. Kevin opens up a discussion by calling out the .NET developer obsession with persistence ignorance versus the use of the ActiveRecord pattern found in Ruby on Rails. 
• Cory talks about basic CRUD applications vs complex domains and how applications tends to model themselves after organizational structure.  Often times you will find .NET code tends to be more complex whereas simpler domains are often represented in Ruby code.
• Kevin asks about domain-driven design. Cory talks about the expressiveness of Ruby code and how the introduction of the dynamic keyword makes expressiveness a little easier in .NET.  Will talks about Ruby mixins facilitating a different development approach.  Will also comments on the ceremony of creating .NET vs Ruby classes and how easily you can express the business concerns in Ruby.
• Scott K talks about his general impressions of Rails - focus on the presentation layer first rather than a DDD approach which would focus on the model first.
• K Scott talks about manifest typing and states that there is an importance placed on types rather than behaviors in .NET coding.  Will calls out the fact that in .NET coding we often are most interested in what an object is whereas in Ruby we primarily care about what an object can do.  This ties back to static typing vs duck typing.
• Cory speaks to outside-in development in Ruby, exposure to TDD and learning Rails with Cucumber from the beginning. 
• Jon acknowledges the language and framework differences and asks how cultural differences between the two development camps might drive development practices.  K Scott talks about .NET developer dependence on the compiler rather than working with customers.
• Kevin talks about the "need" for viewmodels in .NET MVC whereas models are being passes around throughout a Rails application. Cory talks about the power of meta-programming in Ruby and the shift between classes being parsed in .NET vs classes being executed in Ruby.  He also speaks to how fundamental constructs will shape a development strategy.
• Cory talks more about meta-programming and convention over configuration.
• Kevin talks about the "No Magic String" rule, static analysis, and Resharper-driven development.  Will states you don't really need refactoring tools or even an IDE when coding Ruby. Cory talks about the emphasis on writing tests for Ruby code and how this acts as a replacement for the static code analysis testing you might get from the compiler. Scott K speculates that there's so much more code in C# so there's a larger need for refactoring tools. 
• Cory ask why we are still not testing in the .NET world? Why aren't we doing migrations?  Why are we so focused merely on what is available in the Visual Studio IDE?  Scott K feels .NET developers are still unsure of what they should test.  Scott K also thinks it is hard to mock stuff and .NET developers aren't used to writing decoupled code. Will speaks to the fact that Ruby all classes are open all the time and nothing is sealed.
• For better or worse, Jon notes that it's easy to think of the compiler as the first .NET test and, though it could be considered a crutch, the IDE provides one with a lot valuable coding help with intellisence. Cory talks about craftsmanship and how the primary audience for IDE support and refactoring tools is not the TDD developer.
• Kevin speaks to the fact there's no need for an IoC container in Ruby and Cory shares the dangers of becoming married to any framework in .NET development.
• Jon asks if Ruby development can become unwieldy because it's so easy to get started. 
• Scott K asks about new language features (for examples, lambdas, dynamic keyword, optional parameters) and how this adds to the complexity of .NET development. Will talks about complexity vs power and Cory adds that new features allows developers to approach problems differently.
• Kevin asks about techniques which can be used with the dynamic keyword.  Scott K talks about the addition of Eval() in C# 5.  Jon jokes about the "Compiler as a Disservice."  Cory talks about fundamental challenges with Dynamic and Eval() in a statically typed language.
• The guys talk about dependency injection.
• Cory talks more about craftsmanship and code quality. Will talks about values and taking a stance when promoting a frameworks and points some blame at Microsoft for giving .NET development dozens of ways to complete a single task.
• Kevin asks about the focus around Behavior-Driven, integration testing in Ruby rather opposed to the fine-grained unit testing approach often found in .NET development.  Will speaks to the outside-in testing approach but also the importance of unit testing in Ruby.
• Scott K asks if IronRuby makes .NET development easier.
• The show wraps with Will and Cory pimping their up-coming presentations in Florida and Norway.

Show Links:

• Cory Foy's Blog, @cory_foy
• Will Green's Blog, @hotgazpacho
• IronRuby
• IronRuby for the .NET Developer Presentation from MIX10
• Day of Ruby
• Cucumber
• FubuMVC
• Eric Evans
• Uncle Bob
• Cory Haines
• The Tampa Ruby Brigade, Why use IronRuby over MRI/JRuby?
• International Conference on Agile Software Development, Innovation Games
• Agile 2010 Conference
• WinDBG

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

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Herding Code 82: Cory Foy and Will Green Compare .NET and Ruby Development