Herding Code

Episode 71

This week on Herding Code, James Avery and Rob Conery join the cast in a lively discussion about NoSQL, TekPub, the new DotNetKicks and the technical debate du jour, ASP.NET Web Forms vs ASP.NET MVC.

• 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!

Episode 70

This week on Herding Code, we talk to Sean Chambers about migrations in .NET with Fluent Migrator.

• 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

Episode 69

This week on Herding Code, Scott Bellware returns to talk about . 

• 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

Episode 68

In this episode of Herding Code, the gang talks about what happened last year and what they think will happen in the years to come.  Oh, and K Scott brings us the first lightning round of 2010!

• 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!

Episode 67

You're interested in web application scalability and availability, right?  Of course you are!  Well, you're in luck because Udi Dahan - enterprise development expert, SOA specialist and author of NServiceBus - joins the guys on this week's episode of Herding Code. 

• 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!

Episode 66

What do Brad Wilson and Scott Densmore have in common?  They're expert .NET developers, a couple of Mac fanboys, and they're both joining the guys on this week's episode of Herding Code.  Listen in while Brad and, yet another, Scott talk about the Mac, Windows, and the ins and outs of iPhone development:

• 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!

Episode 65

Episode 64

The guys grill Phil on ASP.NET MVC2, and introduce a new segment: Abusive Questions From Twitter!

• 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

Episode 63

Episode 62

In this episode of Herding Code, Jon and Scott Koon pair up with Miguel de Icaza and Geoff Norton of the Mono Project and discuss MonoTouch:

• 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!