Twisten - A new way to experience Twitter. By listening to it! We talk about the WPF desktop app that Nathan wrote to listen to Twitter while doing other things and staying productive.
ASP.NET MVC3 Tools Update - Richard digs in to what's new with the ever popular ASP.NET MVC framework. This most recent update is not to the MVC libraries, but more to the surrounding toolset. It's also another example of Microsoft's increased pace of shipping software. Faster! Faster!
We are honored to have Mel Leeb join us for a discussion about SketchFlow. Mel has some great experiences to share about how he used Sketchflow in the real world, including thoughts on what it does well, how to use it most effectively, and what challenges he faced. Overall, we found SketchFlow to be a tool that is well worth your consideration.
A variety of topics. We start with some fun that Nathan had fighting a stack overflow exception in DataContractSerializer. Then we chat about a gem of a post from Expensify who announced that "they don't hire .NET developers". We talk about the renaissance that C++ is experiencing, including the near finalization of the C++ 0x standard. And we wrap up the show admiring M.C. Escher's work, which is currently on display in Akron OH. Oh, and I recorded from my car. Find out why...
In this episode, Richard and Nathan discuss Windows Server AppFabric. What is it, what does it do, and how do I get started? But first, we cover a couple news items. (59 minutes)
Richard and Nathan review a new book "Applied Architecture Patterns on the Microsoft Platform" by a 5 talented authors. This new book is unique in it's approach... it aims to help the reader understand how to decide which of 6 different technologies are appropriate for various architectural patterns. Technologies include WCF+WF, Azure, SQL Server, Stream Insight, BizTalk, and Windows Server AppFabric.
We discuss the book and then dive into Windows Server AppFabric a bit. (71 minutes)
We review Microsoft's recent announcements from their Silverlight Firestarter event. They announced the future of Silverlight (Silverlight 5) and provided a good jumpstart to get people up to speed on the current versions of the product. There are some great features coming, as well as some that raised some eyebrows.
Well, my fellow podcasters couldn't make it this week, so I forged ahead anyway and recorded solo. I had a backlog of things I've wanted to share, and this seemed like a good opportunity. Topics covered include an initial review of NDepend, WPF memory usage, Blend's integration with TFS, async programming with the Task Parallel Library (TPL) and Reactive Extensions (RX), plus a feature request for NuGet.
This week, Richard and Nathan contemplate PDC 2010... The good, the bad, and the ugly. And, yes, there was some ugly. Microsoft execs made some remarks that left the Silverlight community in a tizzy. What does this all mean? We chat about it for a bit and then move on to some of the cool stuff that we're used to seeing at the PDC. And Microsoft did have some significant announcements spanning C# 5's async/await keywords, azure enhancements, IE9, etc.
This week, Nathan shares Tips and Tricks for Entity Framework based on info from his recent presentation to the Cleveland .NET SIG. We look at using the Self Tracking Entities, tips for loading/saving/deleting records, and some very helpful partial method tweaks to the T4 template.
But first, we cover a number of news stories, including a movie review and the new package management framework named NuPack.
Markis presents HTML5 to the group. We discuss the road to HTML 5 (HTML 4.01 and XHTML), the canvas tag vs SVG, audio and video tags and how we should handle them going forward, codecs and encodings and firefox's decision not to support mp3 and are we ready for HTML 5 today?