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Herding Code 193: Mark Rendle on Zudio, developing with Angular and Typescript, The History of Programming, and Simple.Data

At Techorama 2014 (Belgium), Jon corners Mark Rendle for a few minutes to talk about his new startup, Zudio, "the Azure Cloud storage toolkit," his keynote on the History of Programming, and other minutia.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 193: Mark Rendle on Zudio, developing with Angular and Typescript, The History of Programming, and Simple.Data

Show Notes:

  • History of Programming
    • (00:54) Jon asks Mark what the talk was about, and some of his personal favorite periods.
    • (01:53) Jon remarks that some of the joke terrible languages weren’t much worse than the unintentionally terrible languages. Mark mentions Intercal, brainf*** and Malbolge as joke programming languages and IBM Cobol as the most unintentionally hilarious programming language.
  • Zudio: The Azure Cloud Storage Toolkit
    • (02:55) Mark talks about how Zudio got started and where it’s at. Zudio is a web based tool for managing Azure storage. It’s great for a lot of users, especially PHP / Node / Java developers and in the enterprise. It’s built with AngularJS and Typescript.
    • (04:37) Jon said he assumed it was just a simple table grid, but there are seem to be a lot more advanced features. Mark talks about the new enterprise model, which lets you control your user list through Azure Active Directory (which can be synchronized to on premises Active Directory), and you can assign different access rights to users and groups. There’s also auditing and logging to track usage.
    • (05:29) Jon asks if he’s specifically focused on storage. Mark talks about upcoming support for SQL databases, including Azure SQL, SQL VM’s, ClearDB running MySQL, Oracle VM’s, Postgres via VM, etc. that will show run queries and show results in a grid, list tables and views, etc. Jon compares it to phpMyAdmin, but Mark says it’s for any database and deployed in the same datacenters, without you needing to spin up a web server. His stretch goal is to handle data migrations between different database systems.
  • Angular and Typescript
    • (07:19) Jon says that Mark’s been a fan of Angular and Typescript for a while and asks why he likes the combination so much. Mark says it feels like the data binding framework Microsoft’s been trying to build since VB3.
    • (08:30) Jon asks why Typescript instead of just writing in JavaScript. Mark talks about the benefits of compile-time checking. Jon asks for some specific answers and Mark gives an example with services passed as parameters. Oh, and IntelliSense is handy, too. Mark uses DefinitelyTyped and some Bower packages that he maintains.
    • (10:24) Mark says that unlike most frameworks he’s worked with, he’s gotten to the end of a project using Angular and doesn’t want to throw it out, so that’s saying something.
  • Simple.Web and Simple.Data
    • (11:33) Jon asks Mark what’s going on with Simple.Web (a simple .NET web framework with attribute routing and dependency injection). Mark says that everything that had driven him to create Simple.Web has been added into ASP.NET vNext, so Simple.Web is pretty much done.
    • (14:50) Simple.Data is Mark’s simple data access layer that leverages dynamic types and can work without any code changes against a lot of different databases.
    • (15:52) Jon asks why someone would use Simple.Data instead of Entity Framework. Mark explains how Simple.Data works really well in lightweight web frameworks; it’s so simple you can code to it without IntelliSense.
    • (16:47) Mark is focused on updates to Simple.Data for use in Zudio, and will we working on more metadata, performance, and async support. He’s looking at moving to async only and is interested in listener input on that.
  • Wrap up
    • (18:13) Mark likes all the new stuff and thinks it’s a good time to be a programmer.

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