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

Topics

• 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?

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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.

Topics

• 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

Questions from listeners

• 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)

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

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This week Jon leads a discussion of real world development. We talk about how our development practices in our jobs and personal projects match up with the way we’re “supposed to be” developing. Topics:

• What are the non-negotiable practices that we always use on any code we write?
• Jon isn’t always Test Driven. Does that make him a bad person?
• Where do code reuse and maintainability stack up when it comes to other real world priorities, like hard deadlines and short technology lifespans?
• Is there a place for “forms over data” development? How about System.DraggyDroppy?

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Herding Code 21: Real World Development

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This week we talk to Ted Leung. Ted works on dynamic languages and tools at Sun Microsystems and is a member of the Apache Software Foundation. We discussed a variety of issues, including:

• Ted’s wild ride through Apple, Apache, the Open Source Application Foundation, and Sun
• How open source development can benefit software companies as well as the development community
• How open source has worked for Apple, Sun, and IBM
• Microsoft and open source
• JavaFX
• Chandler: what is it, what it does well, and where it disappoints

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Herding Code 20: Ted Leung on Open Source in the corporate world

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