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Herding Code 92: Dru Sellers and Rob Reynolds on Nu

This week on Herding Code, Kevin, Jon and Scott K speak with Dru Sellers and Rob Reynolds about Nu, a  .NET package management system designed to solve your open source distribution/consumption issues. The guys discuss how package management is handled in other communities, namely Ruby, and how the .NET world can benefit from these same practiced.

  • Dru explains the concept of package management and how it is implemented in other communities.  He continues by exposing package management’s absence in the .NET space and how Nu came into being.
  • Rob basically shares the typical user experience and how to add open source references with Nu. 
  • Kevin asks about the decision to take on the heavy dependency on Ruby.  The guys get into the similarities and differences between Ruby and .NET packaging, the use of the Ruby Gems server and standing up their own Nu server.
  • Rob and Dru speak to the Gem Spec and how can contribute their open source packages to Nu.
  • The guys talk about dependencies, versions and package upgrade paths with Nu.  Rob and Dru also share the challenges around management of open source projects like MassTransit and NServiceBus which include many cascading dependencies and the practicality of hosting packages for contrib projects which are being updated at breakneck speeds.
  • Kevin asks about Bundler and the use of the local gem cache. Dru digs a little more into the differences between Ruby and .NET package management and introduces concepts like freezing references. 
  • Rob basically speaks to Semantic Versioning – a formalized policy on bumping version numbers.
  • Rob and Dru talk about ownership and how to get one’s packages added to the Gem server.  Scott K speaks of security, evil-doers, and lawyers.
  • The group entertains the idea of hosting their own Gem Servers.
  • Rob basically walks through another Nu usage with a RoundhousE example.
  • Kevin notes that Nu installs are focused on the release of assemblies only. Rob and Dru talk to the distribution of documentation, samples and even executables as well.
  • Dru provides the rundown of other .NET package management systems, their approaches and how they differ from Nu.
  • Jon talks about open source naming, Google Juice and asks about the origins of the Nu (Nubular) name.
  • Scott K asks what happens if Microsoft ever releases a package manager. The guys respond with talk of “bringing the awesome” and Jon shares that having more than one of something is rarely a bad thing.
  • Kevin asks about the Nu roadmap. Rob and Dru talk to stabilization, issue/request tracking, and building up their own Gem Server.
  • Jon asks about project contributors. Dru gives props to Bil Silmer for his contributions to the project.  He also talks about the development of Nu for Visual Studio and the integrated add reference experience it will offer devs.  Dru also thanks Nick Quaranto and the Ruby Community for the temporary use of their Gem Server. Jon asks how “our” use of the Gem has been received by the Ruby Community.
  • K Scott basically dies.
  • Dru further pimps Nu and requests that all open source projects submit their packages. Dru teases us with talk of TopShelf, UppercuT and Rob basically pimps database versioning with RoundhousE.

Show Links: 

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 92: Dru Sellers and Rob Reynolds on Nu

[audio://herdingcode.com/wp-content/uploads/HerdingCode-0092-Dru-Sellers-and-Rob-Reynolds-on-Nu.mp3]
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Herding Code 91: Listener-Powered Lightning Round

This week on Herding Code, K Scott, Jon, Kevin, and Scott K field your questions. That’s right – it’s a Listener-Powered Lightning Round! Whether you were interested in their opinions on Microsoft LightSwitch, energy drinks or how the current economic downturn affects quality and craftsmanship, this week’s conversation is being directed by you!

Thanks, listeners, for all of the great questions:

  • @mattcasto – What does the herding code crew think of LightSwitch
  • @detroitpro – What do you know of orchard? w/ @loudej on board it could be something. #HerdingCode
  • @detroitpro – Thoughts on Nu (gems in .NET) #HerdingCode
  • @MachaHack – If you were going to learn to program all over again, what would you do differently?
  • @mattcasto – What’s your favorite energy drink? #herdingCode #lightninground
  • @JimHolmes – Cake or Pie? (In honor of @stevehorn )
  • Ross Jempson – Why all the fuss about Microsoft.Data? 
  • Ross Jempson – How did you get banned from chat.meta.stackoverflow? 
  • Ross Jempson – I have a friend, here in Australia that queued up from 11:30pm one night for 11 hours to get an iphone4.  Is an intervention required?
  • @JimHolmes – Failing cake or pie, do y’all think this downturn gives companies pause to rethink approaches to quality and craftsmanship?

And the show wraps with the prospect of turning urine to gold…

Show Links: 

Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 91: Listener-Powered Lightning Round

[audio://herdingcode.com/wp-content/uploads/HerdingCode-0091-Listener-powered-Lightning-Round.mp3]
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Herding Code 90: Sara Chipps on Girl Develop IT and Girls Developing Software

This week on Herding Code, the boys talk with Sara Chipps about Girl Develop IT, a comfortable place where women can learn at their own pace and not be afraid to ask "stupid questions." Listen in as Sara talks about repairing the wide gender gap in development through her series of classes which help women gain knowledge and get involved in software development.

Note: Since we recorded this, Sara was named one of the Top 15 Developer/Hacker Women to Follow on Twitter by Mashable. Congrats!

  • Sara kicks off the show by introducing us to Girl Develop IT and its target audience – female entrepreneurs who needs to higher and work with developers and professional women who wish to switch careers and become coders.
  • Kevin asks the focus on building projects/products.  Chipps speaks to the series’ curriculum – HTML/CSS, JavaScript, design patterns, data structures and Ruby on Rails.
  • Jon asks why Ruby and Rails over ASP.NET MVC and C#?  Good question since Sara is an ASP.NET and C# developer after all.
  • The guys and gal talk about the early success of the program.
  • Kevin shares that most of the Herding Code hosts are fathers of daughters and asks a twitter question about providing classes and turning girls to coding. Sara expresses the overarching strategy of Girl Develop IT which is to develop rock star programmers which girls can look up to.
  • This sparks a conversation about media not telling the real story about developers. Are they any sexy cool female (or male) coders on TV? Is there any way to be a normal girl and a coder?
  • Jon asks about dereferencing a pointer in high school.
  • Scott K asks about the differences in teaching women compared to men?  Do the gender have different learning styles?  Sara talks about getting the women in the group feeling comfortable to answer questions. 
  • The group talks about conferences and open source projects and the percentages of women there within. 
  • Sara talks about extending the Girl Develop IT course materials to other chapters.
  • Jon asks why this sort of thing (teaching focused on women) isn’t already being done. Sara speaks to what’s happening in the community and the typical women’s group.
  • The guys ask “if you can’t get to Girl Develop IT, how can women get involved and learn?” How about online learning?
  • The cast considers pretending to be women on Stackoverflow?
  • Scott K asks what’s next for the Girl Develop IT? Will the course begin to venture outside of the web space? Lisp development for women perhaps?
  • Chipps offers the bundl.it elevator pitch, answers a Twitter question about Mono and the conversation quickly digresses to challenges in international domain registration.
  • Sara shares her excitement about last year’s Concept Camp and announces this year’s return.  Be on the lookout for CONCEPT CAMP 2010: A DEV ODYSSEY, puns and steak sponsorship!
  • Sara talks about the success of the Devs for Wendy fundraiser held of software developer and loving mom, Wendy Friedlander.
  • The show wraps with the boys asking Sara for advice on raising daughters around computers and software and code.  And then Chipps pimps the October release of Computer Engineer Barbie.

Show Links: 

            Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

            Download / Listen:

            Herding Code 90: Sara Chipps on GirlDevelopIT and Girls Developing Software

            [audio://herdingcode.com/wp-content/uploads/HerdingCode-0090-Sara-Chipps-on-GirlDevelopIt-and-Girls-Developing-Software.mp3]
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            Herding Code 89: Vaidy Gopalakrishnan on IIS Developer Express

            This week on Herding Code, the guys talk with Vaidy Gopalakrishnan about IIS Developer Express.

            • The show kicks off by explaining the IIS Developer Express name.  Why not just IIS Express?
            • Vaidy provides an overview of IIS Developer Express and explains it is a lightweight, self-contained version of IIS for web developers.  
            • Vaidy speaks about the WebMatrix which includes IIS Developer Express along with the Razor ViewEngine and SQL 4 Compact Edition.
            • K Scott asks about IIS Developer Express and its relationship to ASP.NET Development Server (which you may still be calling Cassini).  Vaidy notes that Express will likely integrate with Visual Studio in the future and responds to a Twitter question asking why wasn’t Cassini further developed rather than building out the new product.
            • Vaidy notes that IIS Developer Express is based off of IIS 7 which triggers a conversation about Hostable Web Core.
            • K Scott and Jon pepper Vaidy which a number of questions including whether or not MSDeploy will work with IIS Developer Express.
            • The guys review the environments for which IIS Developer Express and WebMetrix are supported.
            • Vaidy talks about IIS.Net.
            • Vaidy walks Jon and K Scott through debugging your .NET web applications with IIS Express.
            • Jon asks about running IIS Express from the command line. Vaidy talks about the configuration mode vs the application mode.
            • Vaidy talks about SSL support, self-signed certificates and custom certificates.
            • Jon asks about IIS Express user interface and how it’s implemented.  Guess what. It’s WPF.
            • Vaidy speaks to IIS Developer Express logging and how it differs from the full version of IIS.
            • K Scott asks if there are IIS Express extensions like FastCGI or UrlRewriting. Vaidy explains that all IIS7 extensions should be compatible except when the extensions were not designed to run on XP.
            • Jon wants more. What’s next for Vaidy and IIS Developer Express? 
            • The show wraps with talk about distribution and redistribution of WebMatrix and IIS Developer Express.

            Show Links: 

                      Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

                      Download / Listen:

                      Herding Code 89: Vaidy Gopalakrishnan on IIS Developer Express

                      [audio://herdingcode.com/wp-content/uploads/HerdingCode-0089-Vaidy%20Gopalakrishnan-on-IIS-Developer-Express.mp3]
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                      Herding Code 88: Julie Lerman on Entity Framework 4

                      This week on Herding Code, the guys talk with Microsoft MVP, MSDN Magazine columnist and Programming Entity Framework author Julie Lerman about what’s new in Entity Framework 4. 

                      • The show begins with Julie providing a broad look at the new features and improvements around the EF designer, the run-time, POCO support and disconnected entities.
                      • Julie talks about her world of database-first development and learning about persistence ignorance, repositories and domain driven development.
                      • The group talks about the history of Entity Framework and how it is more than a typical ORM.
                      • K Scott and Julie dive into the designer support for database-generated entities and starting with a blank slate for POCOs.  Julie notes that one can create the DDL in the Visual Studio designer and then generate the database from what is modeled.
                      • The group talks about green field vs legacy database development and Jon comments on migrations and updating models.
                      • Scott K asks about hurdles such as generated code being overwritten when using the designer. Julie speaks to updating the model from the database and using views rather than tables to generate the model.  Julie shares complications around foreign keys and RIA services and managing large models in the designer.
                      • K Scott brings the talk back to POCOs and Julie discusses code generation templates customization with T4 templates. 
                      • Jon mentions the Visual Studio Extension Manager and how adding template items from the online gallery is just so easy.
                      • K Scott asks Julie about Code First development with EF 4 CTP4 and compares Code First to  Fluent NHibernate.
                      • The conversation jumps between versioning, plain old PHP objects, ALT.NET kerfuffle and the Vote of No Confidence.
                      • Julie and K Scott speak to the two types of POCO support, virtual properties, dynamic proxies, lazy loading and select n + 1.
                      • Jon asks about EF’s context lifecycle management for ASP.NET and the complexity around disconnected entities.  Julie shares her recommendations on change tracking, entity state properties, self-tracking entities and persisting to the database.
                      • Julie talks about her book, Programming Entity Framework, the rewrite for EF 4, her Data Points column in MSDN Magazine and the MSDN Development videos.
                      • The show wraps with comments about Domain-Driven Design and the Norwegian Developers Conference talks.
                      • Postscript – Jon calls Julie back to talk about the new CTP 4 release.
                      • Julie talks about how some of the changes are specific to code-first, and others enhance to the core API in CTP 4 to facilitate use of code-first.
                      • Julie describes the DbContext and DbSet, how they relate to ObjectContext and ObjectSet, and how they’re so much simpler to work with.
                      • Julie then talks about how the code-first changes make it possible to remove a lot of code because the model is inferred, but you can override things using model builder code or attributes.
                      • Jon and Julie talk about the Ugly Buddy class, which allow adding attributes to an EF model.
                      • Julie talks about how the conventions have gotten a lot smarter.
                      • We talk about Scott Guthrie’s post, and how he’s demonstrating how to take maximum use of the EF / Code First approach.
                      • We wrap up by talking about improvements in how updates are handled. There’s support for a few workflows – manually keeping them in sync, having EF drop and create, and have EF drop / create / populate. However, as far as we can tell, this drop doesn’t include a migration system.

                      Show Links:

                      Show notes compiled by Ben Griswold. Thanks!

                      Download / Listen:

                      Herding Code 88: Julie Lerman on Entity Framework 4

                      [audio://herdingcode.com/wp-content/uploads/HerdingCode-0088-Julie-Lerman-on-Entity-Framework-4.mp3]