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Herding Code 51: Greg Young on Our Grand Failure – Thoughts on DDDD

This week the guys talk to Greg Young about what he calls “our greatest failure”.

  • Greg talks about how we’ve failed our so completely that they now base their success on our always failing in the same way. He starts with your classic Hello World use-case, the common sex change
  • Greg talks about how we’ve forced our customers to work with data when they’re naturally behavior-centric
  • The problem with losing the historical record – we’ve lost the value of context and intent
  • Scott K asks about determining software behaviors by observing user behavior
  • Greg describes how Command Separation and the Event Sourcing pattern can help in solving this
  • K Scott asks about how this fits in with REST-ful architectures which are generally data-centric
  • Jon asks about the UI space efficiency of designing for behavioral interaction instead of data interaction
  • Some examples from HR: Jon likes to promote people, K Scott enjoys discussions of termination procedures
  • Kevin asks how what Greg’s proposing is different from task based UI’s we’ve already seen
  • Jon asks how to sell this to management, who sometimes doesn’t feel the need to share business process information with the software developers
  • Greg and K Scott talk about how data-centric style applications lose valuable context – educational tracking, shopping carts, medical records, and financial systems.
  • Scott K and Greg talk about how data-centric applications don’t handle histrory well. Greg points out that there’s a big difference between an event and a snapshot model.
  • Jon asks how we persist this kind of event information – do we need to move away from relational databases?
  • Greg talks about why the implementational details are less important than grasping the high level concepts.

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Download / Listen:

Herding Code 51: Greg Young on Our GRAND Failure – Thoughts on DDDD

[audio://herdingcode.com/wp-content/uploads/HerdingCode-0051-Greg-Young-on-Our-Grand-Failure-Thoughts-on-DDDD.mp3]
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Herding Code 50: Damien Guard on LINQ to SQL, Entity Framework, and Fontography

This week the guys talk to Damien Guard, a developer working on LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework. After discussing data access for a while, they talk about the programming font Damien publishes, Envy Code R.

  • Damien assures us that LINQ To SQL is not at all dead and talks about some of the new features in LINQ To SQL 4.
  • Damien discusses the T4 templates in EF/VS2010 as well as the LINQ to SQL T4 templates he’s released on CodePlex as L2ST4.
  • New features in EF 4 (LINQ operators, ObjectSet)
  • Additional LINQ To SQL mocking with ITable<T>
  • Some general discussion of query performance optimization in L2S and EF, including some enhancements in v4.
  • Code-only configuration to enable fluent configuration for EF
  • Kevin compares the code-only configuration to Fluent NHibernate
  • K Scott asks about how code-only configuration would enable TDD with EFF
  • Damien talks about the challenges of TDD and DDD when developing a framework
  • Jon asks the “Should L2S be on CodePlex” question
  • Damien mentions Matt Warren’s LINQ IQueryable Toolkit
  • Jon asks about the experience and improvements to migration from L2S to EF
  • K Scott asks about common L2S mistakes
  • Jon asks about POCO support in EF
  • Kevin bemoans the lack of support for refreshing a L2S model when your schema changes
  • The talk shifts over to the programming font Damien designed, Envy Code R
  • Damien explains the intricacies of TrueType, bitmap fonts and hinting
  • Discussion of font editing software, from FontLab ($500) to FontForge (free, open source), and Microsoft Visual TrueType (free, weird license agreement which must be faxed in)
  • Damien’s crazy font hack to get italic comments in Visual Studio
  • Jon asks about the new typography features in Windows 7, including the new DirectWrite API
  • Damien prefers Mac font rendering for quick glances, Windows for long use
  • Discussion of how fonts affect eyestrain
  • Jon talks about font rendering on Kindle and how he’s using it as an RSS aggregator

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Download / Listen:

Herding Code 50: Damien Guard on LINQ to SQL, Entity Framework, and Fontography

[audio://herdingcode.com/wp-content/uploads/HerdingCode-0050-Damien-Guard-on-LINQ-to-SQL-Entity-Framework-and-Fontography.mp3]
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Herding Code 49: Search with Bing and Wolfram Alpha

Have you binged, bunged or banged using Microsoft’s Bing? Any idea the type of questions you should feed Wolfram|Alpha? This week on Herding Code, the guys talk about “new search things that have happened upon the Intertubes.” Are you planning to catch the Google Wave? Hear the cast’s thoughts on Google Wave and much more in this week’s Lightning Round.

  • Jon digs into the Bing’s core feature list and shares that he is generally impressed with the specialty searches around travel, health, traffic, images, shopping and maps.
  • When it comes to search, the guys ask if Microsoft can really complete with Google. And does it really matter?
  • Scott K talks about Microsoft rebranding and questions what Microsoft is doing with its web properties? He compares Microsoft to Google which does everything web-based. Kevin chimes in and state that he doesn’t use a single Microsoft online property and Microsoft just doesn’t have a good story for this space.
  • The guys discuss usability features in Bing – specifically image and video search, search history and preferences.
  • K Scott brings up Bing’s nice use of Silverlight and speak to tweets stating Bing is Microsoft’s way of tricking you into installing the Silverlight plugin.
  • Jon and Scott K talk about conspiracy theories.
  • Jon kicks off a conversation about Wolfram|Alpha and shares how you can ask just about anything and you will even get an answer if you know exactly how to phrase the question.
  • Kevin states that calling Wolfram|Alpha a search engine is a misnomer. Really, it’s a computational knowledge engine made for academics by academics.
  • Scott K calls out that anything claiming to be related to search must live up to Google. After all, you google information. You don’t altavista.
  • K Scott compares Wolfram|Alpha to a restaurant where the food’s not great but the atmosphere is pretty funky.
  • Jon and Scott K discuss search aggregators, explorer federated search and Kevin compares Wolfram|Alpha to Stack Overflow.
  • K Scott comments on search in general and how competition is a good thing. K Scott is not completely comfortable with Google dominating the market share. It’s the same uncomfortable feeling he had when Microsoft dominated the browser wars and look how that turned out. Take note!

Compliments of K Scott, another Lightning Round Strikes!

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Scott K’s Wolfram queries:
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
Do these pants make me look fat?

Jon’s Wolfram queries:
GDP of Moldovia divided by Ernest Goes to Camp box office?
Escape velocity of Saturn divided by top speed of a cheetah?
Population of Vatican City divided by the square root of the number of hours in a leap year?
How to cook a Welshman?

K Scot’s Wolfram queries:
How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

Jon Udell’s Wolfram query:
(H1N1 Mexico Deaths / Mexico Cases) / (H1N1 US Deaths / US Cases)

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 49: Search with Bing and Wolfram Alpha

[audio://herdingcode.com/wp-content/uploads/HerdingCode-0049-Search-with-Bing-and-Wolfram-Alpha.mp3]

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!