This is the first half of our interview with Glenn Block. He talks about the interesting stuff he's been up to at Microsoft with Prism, Unity, and MEF (the Managed Extensibility Framework).

Links:

Glenn's Prism posts - http://blogs.msdn.com/gblock/archive/tags/prism/default.aspx

Prism - www.microsoft.com/compositewpf

Unity - http://msdn.microsoft.com/unity

MEF - http://blogs.msdn.com/kcwalina/archive/2008/04/25/MEF.aspx

MEF CTP - http://code.msdn.com/MEF

Look for an article on Prism in the upcoming September issue of MSDN magazine.

Reminder: Geek Dinner with Jon, Kevin, and Jeff Atwood at the Pyramid Alehouse in Berkeley on 8/2 at 7 PM.

Download / Listen

Episode 11: Glenn Block on Prism, Unity, and MEF (Part 1)

K Scott leads us in a discussion of LINQ, including:

What is it

How introducing LINQ to .NET changed the framework

LINQ Providers

LINQ to XML

LINQ to SQL - how it's different from EF, tips and tricks, when to use it

Links:

LINQpad

3rd Party LINQ providers list on OakLeaf Systems blog

LINQ to Everything providers list on Charlie Calvert's blog

CLINQ (continuous LINQ)

HTML Agility Pack

Evolution of LINQ (MSDN Magazine article on LINQ's history and impact on .NET)

LINQ to SQL Debugger Visualizer

Two LINQ to SQL Myths

Rob's Not So Lazy MVC Storefront

Ian Cooper's Architecting LINQ to SQL applications series

Background Motion

Linq2SQL designer refresh add-in

Also, Scott Koon was gone this week. We did our best to make sure you wouldn't notice.

Download / Listen

Herding Code 10: LINQ

This week, we catch up with Rob Conery. Topics:

SubSonic 2.1

Where SubSonic fits in the Microsoft data access tools explosion

Why LINQ to SubSonic is so durn tricky

MVC Storefront - has it made Rob a TDD believer

What else is Rob up to at Microsoft

Links:

Rob's Blog

SubSonic

Download / Listen:

Episode 9: Rob Conery on SubSonic, MVC Storefront, and the Silverlight Ninja Squad

This week, we discuss the use of virtual machines in software development. Topics:

Industry trends

VMware vs. Virtual PC (and other virtualization technologies)

Should you develop in a VM?

VM Tips and tricks

Links:

Jeff (codinghorror) Atwood's post on creating smaller virtual machines.

Keeping clean and small virtual machines

Invirtus vOptimizer

Virtual Appliance Marketplace

Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image

Virtual PC Guy's Weblog

Virtualization.Info

IETester

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 8: Virtual Machines

In this episode of Herding Code, we discuss the pro's and con's of building a startup on the Microsoft stack. We talk about a lot of issues:

Licensing cost

Availability and cost of developers

Development environments and tools

Relative costs of software vs. development time

Thoughts on whether Microsoft should ship Visual Studio Express with Windows

Those few companies who start on one stack and switch as they get larger

How, in the end, it all comes down to execution

Along the way, K. Scott regales us with the tale of his run-in with the FBI, flees the podcast, and finds a way to sneak back on the call. Shenanigans!

Herding Code 7: Why don't startups run on Microsoft? (Download)

My Podcast Alley feed! {pca-29d2d38db468bc87645363c074f2957c}

This week we argue discuss whether Silverlight is just another flavor of ActiveX, or if it's here to stay.

Listen / Download

Herding Code 6: Silverlight - Fad Or Fab?

Show #5 - Topics

Firefox 3... that's it

Listen / Downlad

Herding Code 5: Firefox 3 Release

Announcements

The Name, The Feed, etc.

This is our last podcast hosting the audio on SkyDrive, I promise. I’d planned to take care of it last weekend and a family emergency… um… emerged. You can help! Please take our super quick survey to vote on a name for our podcast.

I'd hoped we could use SkyDrive to host the audio and set up a nice podcast feed on top of it via FeedBurner, but it turns out that SkyDrive doesn't send the media type with MP3 enclosures in a way Feedburner expects, so that's out. I'm looking into other hosting options, please comment in our survey if you’ve got any recommendations. We’ve been wanting to keep our costs down so we have the option of continuing long term without requiring sponsorship, but we’ll get our site set up for you for next week’s podcast. Honest.

The Audio

I think we finally nailed the audio this week. Thanks to Joe Pruitt and others for some great suggestions on how to set this up.

Show #4 - Topics

iPhone v2 announcments from WWDC

TechEd 2008 recap by our roving reporter, K. Scott Allen

Listen

Herding Code 4: iPhoneV2, K Scott recaps TechEd 2008

Announcements

The Name

We're closing in on a name (and thus a domain and a website and a real podcast feed, etc.). Here's our current list, please give us your feedback or alternate suggestions.

BytecodePodcast

Four Horsemen On Software

Four Horsemen Podcast

Technology Roundtable Podcast

The Audio

Audio quality's a bit worse this week. We're working on it - it's harder than you'd think (you should have heard what the source audio files sounded like). Right now we use Skype for the call, but everyone records their own audio and I edit and clean it up. We use Call Graph as a backup in case someone's audio recording doesn't work. UPDATE: Fixed a problem with K Scott's audio. Much better now.

The Hosting

So far we've been hosting the audio on SkyDrive. We've been planning to host it ourselves, but I'm wondering if SkyDrive's hosting would be sufficient provided that we had a solid podcast RSS feed. This should only be a problem if you can't access the files for some reason - it's requiring a login, or blocked by your corporate network or something. Please let me know if you have problems with this episode so we can make an informed decision. Other alternatives we've considered are the Site5 Uberplan and Amazon S3. Got any input there?

Show #3 - Topics

Should developers learn C?

TechEd 2008 Keynote Announcements

Microsoft "Velocity" distributed caching solution

Listen

Herding Code 3: Should Developers Learn C? + TechEd 2008 Keynote

Thanks for your patience (and great feedback) as we get our act together here. We've decided to make the content the top priority, and get the non-content details (feed, website, branding, etc.) next. Any suggestions for website address, podcast name, or any other ways we can improve?

Last week I posted the first in a new podcast series with K. Scott Allen (a.k.a. OdeToCode), Scott Koon (a.k.a. LazyCoder), and Kevin Dente. We got some great feedback, but we decided to ignore it and continue the podcast. So here's another one!

But seriously, this one's a lot shorter (too short?) and you'll hopefully find the sound quality's improved. We've also heard from several people that, while it's easy for a group of geeks to criticize anything and everything, that doesn't necessarily transfer into useful information.

Show #2 - Topics

Google's announcement that they'll host several popular AJAX libraries

ASP.NET AJAX

AJAX Control Toolkit

Misc. IE8 issues, including changes to how they'll handle JavaScript loading

Download / Listen

Herding Code 2: AJAX Frameworks