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Herding Code 202: Ahmet Alp Balkan on Docker

The guys talk to Ahmet Alp Balkan about Docker, containers, building an ASP.NET 5 image for Docker, and working on the Azure Linux team at Microsoft.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 202: Ahmet Alp Balkan on Docker

Show Notes:

  • Working on the Azure Linux team at Microsoft
    • (00:17) Jon introduces Ahmet and asks what it’s like being on the Azure Linux team at Microsoft. Ahmet explains what his team does. Ahmet’s mostly a Unix stack developer, he doesn’t use Windows on a daily basis.
    • (02:20) Jon asks Ahmet if it’s strange working on open source and Linux and Microsoft, and if there are a lot of legal requirements.
  • Intro to Docker
    • (03:48) Jon asks Ahmet to describe how Docker works, and how it compares to traditional virtual machines.
    • (05:54) Jon asks about how the Docker works with the Linux filesystem approach. Ahmet explains namespaces in Linux and describes how namespaces provide separation between instances. One benefit is that each instance is really lightweight, so you can have hundreds of instances on one physical machine.
    • (09:47) K. Scott asks about a specific example deploying a Ruby on Rails application. Ahmet describes two options for creating a creating an image – either doing it manually or using a dockerfile. K Scott and Ahmet discuss inheritance chains for containers.
    • (13:35) Kevin asks about how inheritance works when you’ve got an application that relies on services in different parent containers – is there communication between them? Ahmet describes how the application files are based on diffs from each container level. Rather than modifying a running container, you should instead define and deploy a new instance.
    • (17:07) K. Scott asks how different configuration between machines is handled.
  • Docker on Windows
    • (18:13) K. Scott wonders how containers will work on Windows due to the registry. Ahmet talks about how it’s more difficult on Windows, since on Unix everything is a file; Jon remembers the previous interview with Kenji at Spoon about how they’re virtualizing the registry with their container system.
    • (20:40) Jon points out that since Docker images run on top of a host, they’re not portable between different hosts on different operating systems.
  • ASP.NET 5 Docker image and User Mode sandboxing questions
    • (21:21) Jon asks Ahmet about his work on creating an ASP.NET 5 Docker image.
    • (23:10) Scott K. asks about the difference between Docker images and running in user mode. Ahmet explains that Docker does run in user mode, so things are kept separate due to user mode sandboxing.
    • (25:14) Kevin asks if the host operating system has visibility to the running containers.
    • (26:12) K. Scott asks if there were any technical hurdles in creating the ASP.NET 5 Docker image. Ahmet talks about how the image was built and the general process of developing with Docker instances.
  • Getting started with Docker on Windows
    • (30:15) Jon asks about different ways of getting started with Docker – Boot2Docker (running on top of VirtualBox), spinning up a Docker instance on Azure, etc.
    • (31:54) Jon asks about Ahmet’s work on getting the Docker client on Windows. Ahmet talks about some of the differences in Windows operating system API’s, including Go language differences.
    • (36:00) Scott K. says he’s excited about Docker because it sounds a lot simpler than some of the deployment issues he deals with.
  • Docker in production and container orchestration
    • (37:17) Kevin says he’s heard that running Docker in production is more difficult than running it in development. Ahmet talks about some of the orchestration efforts that are underway, and talks about container linking and the datacenter operating system approach.
    • (43:14) Jon asks about Mesos. Ahmet describes what Mesosphere is doing and how it relates to orchestration.
    • (44:50) Jon asks if Azure orchestration will be similar. Ahmet says they want to play really well with the other schedulers out there.

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Herding Code 201: Kenji Obata on Spoon, application virtualization, containers, and flying little airplanes

Jon meets Kenji and Trevor at a small airfield in San Diego to talk about Spoon, an application containierization and streaming platform for Windows. They discuss different virtual machine approaches, Spoon’s features, the container movement, and flying airplanes.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 201: Kenji Obata on Spoon, application virtualization, containers, and flying little airplanes

Show Notes:

  • Application virtualization and Xenocode’s origins
    • (00:17) Jon says hi to Kenji and describes his first interaction with Kenji – a blog post he wrote in 2007 titled "We should be virtualizing Applications, not Machines" and Kenji’s response saying that’s exactly what they were doing at Xenocode. Kenji describes application virtualization and lists some of the vendors working in that space.
    • (1:51) Jon asks about the spectrum of virtualization – starting with virtualizing the entire machine and file system and dialing back. Kenji describes how Xenocode started with a solution that would allow for deploying .NET applications without requiring a separate .NET framework installation. This had minimal virtualization – just enough to virtualize the .NET framework.
    • (06:07) Kenji describes the work to move from virtualizing the .NET framework to supporting application virtualization for any arbitrary Windows application, culminating with virtualizing Office.
  • Moving from application virtualization to application streaming
    • (08:24) After solving virtualization for any Windows application, Xenocode moved on to tackling application delivery – solving long downloads, installation, and application conflicts. They also wanted to do this all over the web, which was the genesis of Spoon. This had a lot of appeal to business users rather than just coders, so they rebranded from Xenocode to Spoon.
    • (11:15) Jon asks about application streaming with the example of Office Click-to-Run. Kenji discusses Click Once and how that relates to MSI installers. While some application streaming solutions solve the problem of "click button, run application" they are still installing on the computer so you hit problems with conflicts between applications.
    • (13:20) Spoon applications are portable because they’re not installed on the local machine. Kenji and Jon discuss how installing an using an application start changing the state of the machine in many places outside of the application directory – registry, user profile, etc.
    • (14:30) Kenji describes how many of their enterprise customers have complex legacy applications which blend several technologies and don’t always follow best practices.
  • Docker and containers
    • (15:35) Kenji talks about how they’ve grown from looking at the smaller, targeted problem of virtualizing and deploying a single application to a holistic view of containers as a fundamental part of the development and deployment process.
    • (16:30) Kenji says that the excitement around Docker has got the community thinking more about application virtualization. Jon asks Kenji to explain how Docker-style virtualization is different from traditional virtual machine virtualization. Kenji explains how Docker was originally built on Linux lxc in which the kernel can segregate itself into several namespaces. Jon asks how it relates to file system virtualization, and Kenji says that since in Linux there’s an "everything is a file" philosophy, it’s easier to segregate things this way.
    • (18:10) Kenji says that there’s really no virtualization engine in Docker, it’s more of a set of scripting languages around Linux features. Kenji says that perhaps Docker’s biggest contribution is the term "container" since it’s more consumer-friendly and makes it more obvious that containerized applications are portable.
    • (19:55) Jon says that his experience with Spoon is that it felt like git for virtual machines. Kenji says that Docker actually uses git for storage. He explains how the storage needs of application virtualization lend themselves to git-like storage.
    • (21:44) Kenji says that containers on Windows are more difficult because there isn’t an lxc feature in the kernel. Fortunately, Spoon already has a vm engine that can provide that.
  • Advantages to running in user mode
    • (22:12) Kenji mentions that Spoon is running in user mode rather than kernel mode, and explains why it’s important to segregate and run child systems in user mode without any need for kernel access. Users don’t need any special privileges to install Spoon applications, and even if there are security issue in the virtualized applications, they’re always just running as an unprivileged user the host operating system.
  • Getting started with Spoon
    • (24:10) Jon talks about the user experience on Spoon.net – quick install with no permission prompts, and a console window pops up.
    • (25:24) Kenji points out that because Spoon started with virtualizing desktop applications, the Spoon container approach works well with any Windows application, including GUI applications.
  • Virtual networking features
    • (26:12) Jon asks how he can add add to a Spoon VM once he’s created it. Kenji points out one approach by spinning up another VM and connecting them using Spoon’s virtualized network feature. He talks about how you can use the virtual network features to point your application with multiple VM’s all using virtualized networking and the virtual DNS service.
    • (29:20) Jon talks about how virtual networking on other systems like Hyper-V can be problematic because it’s messing with the host operating system’s network adapters and networking configuration.
  • Spinning up multi-VM environments
    • (30:28) Jon says that all of these features sound really useful for testing, because he can spin up an entire environment, test it all, and delete it, all from a script. Kenji says they’ve put a lot of focus into those scenarios, and since Spoon VM’s are so lightweight that you can spin up 20 or 30 VM’s on a dev machine. He talks about a customer that has about 20 servers in their test environment and spins them all up for tests on a single host.
  • Selenium support and legacy Windows features
    • (32:42) Kenji says they have first class Selenium test grid support, allowing web developers to run automated web tests against a wide variety of operating systems and browsers. Jon asks how this works IE versions are tied to versions of Windows. Kenji talks about the Windows version support they’ve built into Spoon, allowing a Spoon host on Windows 8 to run every IE version back to IE6.
    • (34:37) Kenji talks about Windows version support and stacks and conditional layer support in Spoon to allow wiring in complex emulation behavior so you can deliver one image that will run on a variety of Windows hosts.
  • Working with images and state
    • (35:44) Jon asks about how the "spoon run dotnet,jdk,node,nginx" support works, and Kenji says you can use that to compose an arbitrary number of base images.
    • (36:36) Kenji says that they heard a lot of customers were bringing in git support to build a project that’s hosted in git, but they didn’t really want it in the image. They added another "using" primitive to allow you to use support from an image without adding it to the base VM.
    • (37:53) Jon asks how to add features to the Spoon VM after it’s been created, in the case that he really does want them there. Kenji says that I can just save the container’s state as an image, then build another container on top of that image. Images are static, containers are not.
    • (39:01) Kenji talks about the state abstraction, allowing you to continue from any saved state id. These move between different computers, which is helpful for testing and parallelization.
  • The Spoon.net hub and what you can do for free
    • (41:00) Kenji mentions the Spoon.net hub, which is free to use for public use – similar to GitHub. Jon asks about what’s available for free use, and Kenji says Spoon.net use is unlimited (within reason).
    • (42:01) Kenji explains how their previous version required their Spoon Studio tool to configure applications, similar to App-V sequencing. Things are simplified now with Spoon – you just grab a clean image, install software on it using the standard installers, and commit the image and you’re done.
    • (44:04) Kenji highlights the advantage of having the clean image readily available, so you can easily get a clean Windows install to try or test software – just by typing "spoon run clean".
  • Trying things with "spoon try"
    • (45:13) Jon says he likes to use VM’s to get a clean machine state, and also to be  try installing some software without risk. Kenji talks about the "spoon try" command, and explains how try automatically wipes all your state when you’re done (whereas spoon run maintains state).
  • Deployment options
    • (47:38) Jon asks how IT managers roll out Spoon solutions to their users. Kenji says they provide a set of tools to integrate with existing deployment models, including support for desktop icon registration, scripting, and the web interface to allow launching from intranets.
  • Size and performance impact
    • (49:00) Jon asks about the size of a Spoon VM. Kenji says it’s essentially just the size of the installed software and the state, so it’s pretty minimal. Storage is delta-based, so it’s small. The Spoon database includes de-duplication to allow for frequently saving state without bloat.
    • (51:01) Jon asks about the performance impact due to virtualizing everything. Kenji says that since the VM’s are so lightweight, it’s very minimal. He gives examples of high-performance users, including AutoCAD and video game developers.
  • Azure RemoteApp support
    • (52:29) Jon asks Kenji about something he saw on the site mentioning that Azure support was coming soon. Kenji gives us an exclusive scoop on the upcoming RemoteApp support. This allows you to create a single base VHD on Azure with just Spoon installed on it, then use Spoon’s support to host any application via RemoteApp. He says it’s great to be able to use RemoteApp support when he’s on his Mac to run any Windows applications he needs.
    • (56:53) Jon recommends for listeners to go to Spoon.net and try it in a few seconds for free.
  • Flying little airplanes
    • (57:21) Jon notes that they’re recording the podcast at an airfield and asks Kenji and Trevor about how they got into flying. Jon notes how high-tech the plane controls are and asks how it compares to Microsoft Flight Simulator. Kenji talks about the excitement and terror of his first takeoff.
    • (1:01:29) Kenji says that an easy way to give flying a try is to contact a flight school at your local airfield and set up an introductory flight for about $100 – $150 to give it a try.

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Herding Code 200: io.js, Angular angst, K Scott’s new Band, Kickstarters, Containers and Old School Elite Women Coders

The guys talk about the Node / iojs fork, Angular 2, K Scott’s new Microsoft Band and other wearables, Kickstarter successes and failures, container technologies like Docker, and some recent articles about women heroes of coding.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 200: io.js, Angular angst, K Scott’s new Band, Kickstarters, Containers and Old School Elite Women Coders

Show Notes:

  • The Node / io.js fork
    • (00:41) Jon asks Kevin what’s going on with the io.js fork. Kevin says the fork is due to the Node team’s slow release cycle. Jon asks what technical things people are looking for, and whether io.js code is supposed to be compatible with Node code. Scott K lists some of the features planned for Node 0.12. There’s some general discussion about what this means long-term and whether this will be a temporary or permanent fork.
  • Angular angst
    • (06:21) Jon asks K Scott what is going on in the Angular world. K Scott summarizes why people were bent out of shape over the Angular 2 announcements.
    • (07:30) Jon asks what this all means from Angular developers – what’s actually changed? K Scott discusses how the team isn’t worrying about migration from Angular 1.x. He mentions AtScript and the guys discuss how it relates to TypeScript. Kevin asks if Google is the new Microsoft, in that everything has to be their way. K Scott says it’s feeling like MEF composition.
    • (12:09) Scott K says he thinks the radical changes are to support components and dart. K Scott says he also sees that runtime introspection looks like an important goal.
    • (13:30) Scott K talks about the migration plans and the announcements that 1.x won’t be getting any new features. Kevin says this puts Angular developers in a tough spot, because 2.0 isn’t going to be out for a while and 1.3 is the final release in that branch. Scott K says he’s stopped paying much attention to it for now while waiting for things to shake out. There’s a discussion of Durandal now that Rob’s left the Angular project.
  • Wearables and the Microsoft Band
    • (17:30) Jon asks K Scott about his new Microsoft Band. K Scott says he likes the notifications and sleep notifications. Jon asks if the sleep notifications are actionable or just telling you things you already know; K Scott says he’s notices that poor sleep for three nights in a row affect his communication skills.
    • (20:25) Jon says he hasn’t been able to pull the trigger on Pebble, even on super sale, but the Band looks really interesting. The voice input for Cortana looks neat, too.
  • Windows Phone interlude
    • (21:55) K Scott says he helped a friend pick out a Windows Phone and was impressed by the inexpensive models from Blu. Jon talks about how all the new Windows Phone models are nice inexpensive phones rather than flagship models. Jon mentions the app coverage and says that all the big apps seem to be available, the only ones he misses is an app from his bank to deposit checks.
    • (24:30) Kevin says it seems like Windows Phone is swimming upstream on apps, mentioning recent articles from Tom Warren and Ed Bott.
  • Wrap up on wearables
    • (25:55) Jon asks Kevin what he’s thinking on the Apple Watch. He says he’s intrigued and wants to play with one to see.
    • (26:55) Scott K says there’s not much you can really do on a tiny screen, so consuming content on a watch is silly. Jon says that he sees room for things like two-way communication and remotely controlling the desktop. Scott K says his Pebble is kind of like a second screen for his phone. He says there isn’t enough horsepower on a watch for voice recognition, but the other guys all jump in to say that the watches use Bluetooth to work with the voice recognition on their phones and it all works pretty well.
  • Kickstarter
    • (32:15) Jon says he’s backed ten projects, but only three of them really turned out well: gourmet marshmallows, a web-based font creation program called Prototypo, and a file manager called OneCommander. Scott’s had good success because he does some due diligence on the shipping background for the creators.
    • (35:15) Scott says he avoids tech projects on Kickstarter because he knows geeks, and he knows the overestimate what they can do: they all think they’re physicists, nutritionists, lawyers… they think they know everything, and they don’t anticipate the cost and effort to go from prototype to shipping product. Jon says he’s seen two software projects that were flawlessly executed – BitCommander (since renamed to OneCommander) and Prototypo. In both cases the creators were very communicative throughout the project.
    • (39:55) Kevin’s never Kickstarted anything because he doesn’t want more things. Jon says he usually backs things because he wants to support someone doing something cool, not because he wants a project. He says he frequently sees popular new technology Kickstarters that are recreating something he can find already shipping on Amazon for a lot less. Kevin says he finds the whole Kickstarter thing is completely fascinating, and he’s amazed that it seems to work. Scott K talks about how many game manufacturers use it to figure out how many to produce rather than to start figuring out how to produce a project. Jon mentions a Sony epaper watch that was Kickstarted just to gage interest and says that the goal of Kickstarter is to actually graduate to shipping product and lists a few; Kevin talks about the Veronica Mars movie.
  • Containers
    • (47:20) Jon talks about Docker and Rocket and asks if the guys are using them yet. Kevin says that poor OSX support (requiring VirtualBox Boot2Docker) has cooled the interest in Docker in his shop.
    • (48:55) Jon says he thinks the container approach seems like a nice middle ground between running a native process and a full virtual machine. He says that he’d like to talk to the Spoon team soon to hear about their Windows native container system.
    • (51:15) Scott K talks about the Mesos system – a distributed systems kernel. Jon searches around and finds it’s an Apache project. The idea is that you can move your Linux applications over to it, then scale across commodity hardware. Jon worries about the latency but figures eventually you overcome latency with processing power if it’s distributed right.
  • Women In Computers, Old
    • (55:05) Scott mentions an article about Margaret Hamilton, the software engineer who wrote the code for the Apollo Eleven and came up with the term hardware engineer. Scott says that the Apollo source code is up on Google Code.
    • (56:45 )Jon talks about an article he saw about the programmers who wrote code for the Colossus in World War Two, and they were all women. Kevin says he saw an article about how until the early ’80’s the distribution was even until there was an advertising campaign that was geared to boys, and things changes after that.
    • (58:20) Scott talks about an article he read about The Sotry of Mel, who was working so close to the metal that he optimized for where the memory would be located on the physical memory drum.

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Herding Code 199: Rob Reynolds on the Chocolatey Kickstarter, Chocolatey growth and OneGet

Jon talks to Rob Reynolds about how Chocolatey has grown over the past few years, how OneGet fits in, and the Chocolatey Kickstarter.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 199: Rob Reynolds on the Chocolatey Kickstarter, Chocolatey growth and OneGet

Show Notes:

  • The state of the Chocolatey
    • (00:19) Rob explains what Chocolatey is and compares it to package managers on other platforms. Jon talks about how he uses Chocolatey to install all his programs every time he installs Windows.
    • (02:10) Rob talks about how Chocolatey has grown in the past 3 1/2 years.
  • Package Moderation
    • (02:24) Rob explains how package moderation works – whereas previously all packages were immediately published and reviewed later, now they’re reviewed by moderators before they’re listed. One common fix is just getting the naming right.
    • (05:24) Rob talks about how they’re curating the community feed. They’re currently in a grace period until December 1; some packages are that aren’t broadly applicable are being told to move to MyGet. Jon and Rob talk about other hosting options (anything that host NuGet) and benefits of using the NuGet infrastructure underneath Chocolatey.
    • (07:25) Rob talks about the checksumming features they’ve added.
  • Chocolatey Pro
    • (09:03) Rob explains how Chocolatey has grown, partly due to the OneGet announcement – they’re up to 7 million downloads now, half of them in the past six months. He talks about how the costs have grown over that time.
    • (11:40) Rob explains what the Kickstarter supports. The free / open source version will always be free. They’re also adding in professional-only feeds and a content delivery network to support the professional feeds. Jon asks and Rob explains the professional feeds work.
    • (14:50) Rob explains how the pro version includes additional virus checking via Virus Total.
    • (15:31) Jon says it sounds like most of the money is to provide for infrastructure. Rob agrees, but says some will help buy him some time to work on it. He talks about the example of Octopus Deploy – development has really accelerated since it became a full-time endeavor.
  • OneGet
    • (17:05) Jon asks what OneGet is. Rob explains that it’s a package manager aggregator and works with the Chocolatey feed right out of the box. Rob and Jon talk about the advantages of having Chocolatey support installed in Windows.
    • (20:20) Jon asks about the impact to the Chocolatey team. Rob clarifies that they’re a provider, so they build the hooks, and OneGet will read directly from their feed.
  • Windows Store
    • (21:02) Jon asks if Rob’s worried that the Windows Store will someday add Win32 app support and make Chocolatey irrelevant. Rob says he doesn’t expect it, but even if they did there are some big differences between a store and a package manager. Jon and Rob discuss package managers, meta-packages, dependency management and package uninstallation.
  • Kickstarter Benefits
    • (24:36) Jon asks Rob to explain the different Kickstarter award levels. Rob discusses Chocolatey Pro pricing and some of the higher level awards like a custom workshop. He points out that the pricing is perpetual for business accounts, so by backing the Kickstarter you’re locking in the price.
    • (29:00) Jon says that even if you don’t care about the rewards, if you’ve been using Chocolatey you should consider supporting the project. Rob describes why they came up with their goal amount, including the Kickstarter and Amazon transaction fees.
  • Wrap-up
    • (21:29) Rob and Jon mention ways you can get involved. Of course you can back the Kickstarter, but he’s also really appreciate any press or exposure.

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Herding Code 198: Damian Edwards on ASP.NET vNext, Tag Helpers and SignalR

The guys talk to ASP.NET team member Damian Edwards about ASP.NET vNext (the next version of ASP.NET), Tag Helpers, and what’s new with SignalR.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 198: Damian Edwards on ASP.NET vNext, Tag Helpers and SignalR

Show Notes:

  • Hello. What is ASP.NET vNext?
    • (00:18) ASP.NET vNext is the next version of ASP.NET. It’s not just ASP.NET MVC 6 or Web API 3, it’s a total rethink of the ASP.NET platform. In some ways, it’s a bigger change than the move from classic ASP to ASP.NET. In other ways, it can be pretty seamless depending on what you’re doing.
    • (01:29) Jon asks Damian to talk about what’s crazy and brand new. Damian describes the full stack in a web application, from the operating system up to the code that you write in your application and the libraries you bring in. Starting at the bottom of the stack, ASP.NET vNext is cross platform, meaning it will work and be supported on Linux and Mac.
  • Cross platform
    • (02:36) Jon asks Damian to clarify what that means – is it supported cross-platform, or does it just kind of work? Damian says that it’s first class support – they’ll ensure that it works cross-platform, there will be cross-platform documentation, and there will be cross-platform tooling (Damian mentions the Sublime plugin for ASP.NET vNext). They’ll support building and deploying ASP.NET vNext applications cross-platform.
  • Core CLR
    • (03:41) Damian continues up the stack, talking about how .NET framework is booted up. In vNext, there is a native code custom CLR loader that is decoupled form the operating system’s .NET loader. Even when you’re running on Windows, you’re not relying on the standard .NET loading mechanism.
    • (05:56) Jon mentions having seen demos where code was written on one laptop, copied onto a USB drive, and executed on another laptop, asking if the custom .NET loader is what makes that work. Damian explains that’s half of why it works – the next layer of the platform is the managed runtime itself, which is the other half of the magic. There is a new CLR based on core CLR. Damian explains how the .NET runtime runs on a core CLR and the base class libraries. The core CLR is based on the .NET CLR for Silverlight – it was already a lightweight version that ran cross-platform. There are now two options for the CLR you can run on – the full .NET CLR, or the new "cloud optimized" CLR. It’s important because it’s smaller – so small that it can be deployed with your application. Also, because it can be self-contained, multiple versions can run on the same server.
    • (10:01) Scott K asks what prevents bundling the entire application up into a single EXE. Damian talks about how .NET Native is being used in Windows Store applications and says they’re intending to look at that for ASP.NET vNext in the future. For now they’re achieving isolation by shipping the core CLR and libraries as NuGet dependencies.
    • (12:30) Scott K asks if you need to have the .NET framework installed at all if you’re running ASP.NET vNext. Damian says no, and if .NET is installed it has no bearing on your application.
    • (12:12) Jon asks how this affects IT shops that want full control over .NET framework installations on their servers. Damian says this question requires more context on what administrators would be afraid of. He describes how ASP.NET vNext will support servicing, so any urgent vulnerabilities can be patched globally on a server.
  • How does this affect existing apps? What changes?
    • (14:50) K Scott brings up a Twitter question from James on how this will affect ASP.NET MVC and Web API applications. Damian says that ASP.NET MVC 6 will include both ASP.NET MVC and Web API. Damian explains how ASP.NET MVC is on version 5 and there are some things they’d do differently today. It also previously depended on System.Web, which dates all the way back to before 2000. ASP.NET MVC 6 has DI built in. It’s OWIN compatible, so you can run it on any OWIN compatible server and run any OWIN middleware. Global configuration (web.config and System.Configuration) are gone, replaced by code-based configuration influenced by Katana. There’s also Entity Framework 7, which is a complete rewrite that doesn’t have ObjectContext or System.Entity – instead it makes model first (DbContext) foundational. EF7 also works with non-relational databases. If you have an existing application with ASP.NET MVC 5 or Web API 2, it should port over pretty seamlessly as long as you’re not working directly with underlying components like System.Web or HttpContext.
  • Development experience
    • (19:39) Scott K asks about the development experience – will this work in a new Visual Studio version, or can he just create applications in a text editor? Damian says both will work. This both allows cross-platform development and a more flexible development stack, allowing for things like cloud-based development. Of course, ASP.NET will work work great on Visual Studio. They use Roslyn to do all the code compilation either at design or compile time. This allows for deploying the entire application as source, and eliminates the need for a separate compile step during development (since the code is constantly being compiled as you work).
    • (25:15) K Scott asks how much churn he should expect if he starts developing with ASP.NET vNext today. Damian says there’s a lot of churn still right now. It won’t release until well into next year some time.
  • Questions from Twitter
    • (26:34) Iris Classon asks what features they weren’t able to include that they’d have liked to. Damian says it’s too early to answer that question, since they’re still in pretty early development.
    • (27:00) Iris Classon also asks where they looked for inspiration. Damian mentions web frameworks like Rails and Node as well as module loading in Java.
    • (27:38) Ben Maddox asks how Damian sees this improving the feedback loop for code, UI and tests. Damian says it speeds up UI feedback since all of your code is compiled as you type it and continuous testing is enabled due to the continuous compile. Both are available today with other tools or things you set up yourself, but it will be simpler in future.
    • (28:55) Steen R. asks when we’ll see cross-platform Visual Studio. Damian says there are no plans he’s privy to.
    • (29:05) Filip Woj. asks if F# will have first class support – released and supported. Damian says not for version one, although there are demonstrations of F# providers.
    • (30:40) Steen R. asks how webroot will work in practice. Damian describes how webroot works – it’s a separate directory from which your application is served. Any files not in the webroot folder will not be served by the web server. Your application or uploads folders will be separate from your webroot, so they can’t be served.
  • Portable areas?
    • (33:49) K Scott asks about portable areas. Damian says he’s not aware of something like that for ASP.NET MVC.
  • Tag Helpers
    • (35:18) Jon asks what tag helpers are. Damian describes how Razor is a templating language that’s designed to allow mixing C# and HTML. It falls down a bit when you’re using HTML Helpers and want to change the output – for instance, if you want to pass in an HTML class to an element. C# gets in the way due to things like class being a reserved word, and you miss out on any HTML IntelliSense or HTML editor smarts, because you’re just working with C# strings. Tag helpers allow you to just write HTML tags with attributes that Razor understands. These can do things like access the model metadata to emit appropriate form HTML.
    • (41:27) K Scott asks when he can start using it. Damian says that it’s in a separate feature branch now and explains how to use them and says you can ping Taylor Mullen for help – or just wait a few weeks and it’ll be in the main branch.
    • (42:59) Jon comments on how the Spark view engine provided something similar, and Damian says that Lou works right next to him and has helped with the design. They’re not trying to change the core of how Razor works or feels, just make it easier to work with HTML helpers.
  • SignalR
    • (44:10) Jon asks what’s new with SignalR. Damian runs down some of the recent releases and mentions SignalR 3 for ASP.NET vNext. He also mentions the C++ client that’s currently in development.
    • (45:28) Jon asks if ASP.NET vNext makes some things simpler for SignalR. Damian says the main impact is that things like configuration and tracing are now shared between components like Web API and MVC.
  • Wrap Up
    • (46:56) Jon asks Damian what’s coming up for him. Damian mentions some of the talks he’ll be doing at NDC London, including load testing SignalR and ASP.NET vNext.
    • (47:50) Jon asks Damian how people can keep up with ASP.NET vNext, mentioning the asp.net/vnext page. Damian also recommends the weekly ASP.NET vNext Community Standup meetings, being run as a public weekly Google Hangout hosted by Scott Hanselman and Jon Galloway.

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