Herding Code

This week we talk to Chad Myers and Jeremy Miller about the FubuMVC project.Topics

What is FubuMVC?

History of the project

Built to take advantage of static typing

Composition over inheritance

Dependency injection tricks

IFlattener for JSONification

Application of SOLID prinicples in FubuMVC and AltOxite

View engines

TextboxFor and no magic strings - advantages for refactoring support

Thin controllers, fat models

FubuMVC as the Ruby On Rails for ASP.NET

Benefits and problems of using generics for static typing

Use of meaningful generic type names rather than ugliness

Testing tools for Javascript

FubuMVC's Behaviors

Partial rendering strategies

Why they're using NHibernate for AltOxite

IOC benefits

Strategies for Javascript management

qUnit for Javascript unit testing

How do I sell this to my boss?

Why FubuMVC as opposed to Microsoft's ASP.NET MVC?

Why MVC isn't just classic ASP revisited

Benefit of FubuMVC - removing choices through opinions

Ways an open source MVC framework keep up with Microsoft

FubuMVC futures and misc. benefits

Use of Rake as a build script

Links

FubuMVC

Chad's blog

Jeremy Miller's blog

QUnit (cross browser testing tool)

Download / Listen

Herding Code 31: Chad Myers and Jeremy Miller on FubuMVC

K Scott leads the discussion as we look back at 2008, and speculate wildly on what 2009 has to offer.

Note: Scott K's taking a podcasting break to change diapers and stuff.

Google Chrome

Kevin's new iPhone

Kevin's Firefox extension addiction

Hulu

IE8 - better than expected, but still a ways to go

ASP.NET MVC

Silverlight 2

Oslo

Azure

Visual Studio 2008 SP1

ADO.NET Data Services

REST is finally accepted in the .NET world

The Seinfeld / Gates ads

OpenID

Netbooks (Oragami at last?)

Twitter's recovery

Overhyped stuff: Surface, cloud computing, multi-core madness

Functional programming

DI/IOC hitting the Microsoft mainstream

[sidebar - the tradeoff between DI benefits vs. Silverlight XAP size]

StackOverflow

[sidebar - frustration with Microsoft forums]

Windows 7

Office 14

Project Pink? (Zune on Windows Mobile)

[sidebar - frustrations Zune]

WPF in Visual Studio

[sidebar - is there a correlation between unmanaged code and lame Microsoft products?]

SiteLauncher Firefox add-on

Mary Jo Foley on Project Pink

Herding Code 30: Year-end wrapup

This is the second half of our discussion with Miguel de Icaza about Mono, Moonlight, open source, and other fun stuff.

When re-implementing .NET, do you match re-implement known bugs?

The test / regression system to maintain compatibility

How do you support so many platforms

What parts of Mono are written in managed code? Which are written in C?

Support for iPhone and Xbox

Mono's static compilation options

Differing agendas in open source development

Microsoft's emerging open source strategy

How the web has driven open source strategies and assumptions

Why Mono used licensed codecs instead of using a library like ffmpeg

Font distribution in Linux

Frustrations with the Windows multimedia API's

What Miguel thought was insteresting at PDC

When will we be able to run ASP.NET MVC on Mono?

When will we get to use the C# 4.0 dynamic features in Mono?

How does Novell make money on Mono?

Miguel's blog

The Mono Project Home page

Miguel's presentation at PDC

An example of a static linker product for .NET Postbuild 2008 ($1599)

Herding Code 29: Miguel de Icaza (part 2)

This week we talk with Miguel de Icaza about Mono, Moonlight, and other fun stuff.

Overview and update on Mono

Mono's roots as a tool for desktop applications on Gnome / Linux

The need for a package manager in Windows

Managed operating systems (like Microsoft Research Singularity)

New areas of focus for Mono - portability and extension

Mono's use in cross-platform gaming

SIMD optimizations in Mono

Mono's implementation of the C# compiler as a service

How the Mono team determines what to work on next

Breaking changes in public API's

Framework design

Mono's relationship with Microsoft

The state of Linux desktop application development

Silverlight as a platform for desktop applications

When will Moonlight ship?

The challenges of building the Mono compiler

The Linear IL compiler enhancements in Mono 2.0

Miguel's blog

The Mono Project Home page

Miguel's presentation at PDC

Herding Code 28: Miguel de Icaza (part 1)

Kevin leads a discussion on what every web developer needs to know.

Javascript - language or toolkits?

Does clean HTML matter? What are the tangible benefits?

Working with designers who only speak Photoshop

Basic usability

Tools every web developer needs

Progressive enhancement

K. Scott introduces the Lightning Round

Aggiorno - HTML refactoring tool

Search engine optimization criticism of Microsoft at SES conference

IE Tester - Test rendering in various versions of IE one one machine

Herding Code 27: What every web developer should know

Jon talks to Laurent Bugnion about WPF and Silverlight. Laurent's an expert on WPF and Silverlight, and is the author of Silverlight 2 Unleashed.

Differences between WPF and Silverlight

Thoughts on Silverlight offline

Model-View-ViewModel pattern and applications in Blend

WPF Disciples mailing list

Why use WPF instead of Winforms

Non-visual benefits of WPF and Silverlight

Benefits of the XAML format

Silverlight's VisualStateManager compared to WPF triggers

Laurent's experiences writing Silverlight 2 Unleashed

Laurent Bugnion's blog

Post about Model-View-ViewModel

Laurent's demo application on design mode virtualization

Silverlight 2 Unleashed on Amazon

Herding Code 26: Laurent Bugnion on WPF and Silverlight

While we were at the Microsoft PDC 2008 conference, we met up with the guys from the Deep Fried Bytes podcast as well as Jeff Atwood (StackOverflow, CodingHorror) for a podcaster roundtable. The first part of this discussion is over at Deep Fried Bytes (Episode 18).

Herding Code 25: PDC 2008 Podcaster Roundtable with Deep Fried Bytes and StackOverflow (part 2)

This is the second half of our interview with Phil Haack on the ASP.NET MVC Beta Release.

ModelBinders in ASP.NET MVC

Lessons learned in building MVC (question from Brian Henderson)

To what extent did the MVC team look at other frameworks like Monorail, Rails, Django, etc.

Any new features for the 1.0 release? How about 2.0?

What's next for you after MVC ships?

How is the MVC team's community-centered release style affecting other Microsoft teams?

Will MVC's TDD focus affect other Microsoft frameworks?

Would MVC be a good fit for a RESTful service system

RESTful routing

What Visual Studio features can we expect

How has one year at Microsoft been for you?

Strongly typed ActionLink having been moved to MVC futures

ASP.NET MVC

Phil's blog

ASP.NET MVC on CodePlex

Herding Code 24: Phil Haack on the ASP.NET MVC Beta Release (part 2)

This is the first half of our interview with Phil Haack on the ASP.NET MVC Beta Release.

The MVC Elevator Speech

MVC and Codebehind files

How MVC differs from Webforms

How MVC changes your development process

The difficulty in unit testing UI

What's the threshold for testing your programs?

The File / New / MVC experience

How MVC is built for extensibility

How MVC is stress tested

Is there a controls story for MVC?

ASP.NET MVC

Phil's blog

ASP.NET MVC on CodePlex

Herding Code 23: Phil Haack on the ASP.NET MVC Beta Release (part 1)

This week we talk to Brad Abrams and Tim Heuer about the Silverlight 2 release.

What's new?

The releationship between the DLR and Silverlight 2

The Eclipse for Silverlight development

The Open Specification Promise for XAML

Progress on Mono / Moonlight

The elevator speech on Silverlight

How Silverlight fits in with AJAX

Can Silverlight support separation of concerns and testability?

Will Microsoft be shipping frameworks for Silverlight?

Will Silverlight support offline scenarios

Silverlight as a "line of business" platform

The WPF / Silverlight connection

The Silverlight open source community

The Flash question

The casual gaming market

Silverlight performance vs. Javascript

Speculation on Silverlight 3 features...

The non-Windows development experience

The Silverlight story for iPhone and other mobile platforms

What's the story on Prism for Silverlight 2? What's the story for enterprise Apps? (Chris Bilson)

What's being done to encourage enterprise adoption, in a climate where many enterprise shops are still on IE6? (Eric Kemp)

What's IE's relationship with Silverlight? (Matt Hamilton)

Tim Heuer's blog post on the Silverlight 2 release

Brad's blog

ViewModel pattern in Silverlight

The Mono Moonlight project

Eclipse tools for Silverlight

Herding Code 22: Brad Abrams and Tim Heuer on the Silverlight 2 Release