Scott Hanselman's ComputerZen.com

I'm in Sweden this week at Øredev and I got a chance to talk to legendary ASP.NET Debugger and Escalation Engineer Tess Ferrandez.

In this video Tess shows me how to debug a dump of an ASP.NET Web Site with a pile of awesome and totally new features in Visual Studio 2010. You can open up dump files in Visual Studio directly and see visual representations of parallel call stacks. If you spend any time in WinDBG you're going to be excited by these new improvements in the debugging experience.

I also talked to Tess for an extended Debugging 101 session on the full 30 minute audio edition of my Hanselminutes Podcast out later this week.

Enjoy!

What do you get when you put Spolsky, Atwood, Blyth, and Hanselman in the same room? A crazy Content-Free podcast recorded backstage at the San Francisco DevDays conference.

The video is up at Channel 9, and the audio will be up on Hanselminutes and in the RSS Podcast Feed in the morning. The audio for the actual podcast will include tracks from three locations and will likely be a LOT better, however, be warned, this episode runs a bit longer than usual and the sound quality isn't up to our usual standards.

Warning: extreme ramblosity ahead!

• Joel explains his Duct Tape Programmer post. Apparently DevDays is a duct tape conference, and this section of the recording is a duct tape podcast.
• Some discussion of the ubiquity of mobile code. Also, if you are nostalgic for the era “when development was hard”, the consensus is that you should be doing mobile development today on iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, or Symbian.
• Rory elaborates on his experience with (and effusive opinions on) iPhone development to date. Is coding in Objective-C best accompanied by a flux capacitor, New Coke, and Max Headroom? Also, his excitement for MonoTouch.
• Joel and Scott put on their amateur language designer hats and have a spirited discussion of type inference and Fog Creek’s in-house DSL, Wasabi.
• Scott covers some of the highlights of new and shiny features coming in the Visual Studio 2010 IDE, the C# 4.0 language, and the ASP.NET MVC 2.0 web framework.

Enjoy! You've been warned.

Who loves you? Not only is Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 now available for everyone to download (not just subscribers) but I've got 11 short video interviews with the ASP.NET 4 team up on Channel 9.

I was up in Redmond just last week and made sure to stop by the offices of as many ASP.NET developers and program managers as I could. I chatted with a few faces you may recognize and a few you may not. All of them are working hard to make ASP.NET 4 cool.

I'm still working on my video techniques, and I used two different HD cameras to film these videos. Your feedback (negative AND positive) is always appreciated.

This series of videos is called Hanselminutes on 9 and you can get to all of these (and many more) using the Channel 9 Tag "hanselminuteson9." You can also subscribe via RSS to just those videos. There are also iPod, Zune, PSP and large WMV versions of every video to download as well as basic MP3's if you just want audio.

Enjoy!

I'm up in Redmond this week and I stopped by to abuse the folks at CodePlex.com. I got to see their hardware, build servers, server room and more. You can even see how they abuse the test team. Lots of fun with Sara, Jonathan and the Whole Codeplex.com Team.

Also, while you're watching, I'd encourage you to check out my other Channel 9 video interviews, including:

• Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood preparing for StackOverflow Keynote
• ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 1 with Phil Haack and Virtual Scott
• Phil Haack on the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Release
• Brad Wilson has Lunch
• Rob Conery and the MVC Storefront
• Johnny Lee on Computer Vision (Project Natal prescience)
• Eilon Lipton and the ASP.NET MVC Rumors
• Chris Sells on Managing People and Your Time
• The Death of the Professional Conference Speaker
• The Nerds of Tomorrow
• Inside Secret Microsoft Meeting Rooms - What Laptop do Alpha Geeks Use?
• The .NET Micro Framework with Colin Miller
• Storyteller with Jeremy Miller
• Why Aren't There More WinForms Talks with Rocky Lhotka
• What is Productivity?
• Tour of Fog Creek Software with Joel Spolsky

Enjoy!

I was up in Redmond this week and stopped by to visit my Video Portal in Phil's Office. I wanted to see where I virtually sit.

While I was there, Phil gave me/us/you a tour of ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 1.

Be sure to read ScottGu's post on ASP.NET MVC 2. The best point:

• Today’s preview works with .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008, and can be installed side-by-side on the same machine as ASP.NET MVC 1.0 (meaning they don’t conflict and your existing ASP.NET MVC 1.0 projects will not be impacted if you install it).

Quoting from the ASP.NET MVC Roadmap, the theme for ASP.NET MVC 2 is "Improved Productivity and Enterprise Ready."

ASP.NET MVC 2 Features

Preview 1 - Early August

• Templated Helpers - allow you to automatically associate edit and display elements with data types. For example, a date picker UI element can be automatically rendered every time data of type System.DateTime is used. This is similar to Field Templates in ASP.NET Dynamic Data.
• Areas - provide a means of dividing a large web application into multiple projects, each of which can be developed in relative isolation. This helps developers manage the complexity of building a large application by providing a way to group related controllers and views.
• Support for Data Annotations - Data Annotations enable attaching validation logic in a central location via metadata attributes applied directly to a model class. First introduced in ASP.NET Dynamic Data, these attributes are now integrated into the default model binder and provide a metadata driven means to validating user input.

Preview 2 and beyond

• Client Validation - builds on top of the Templated Helpers and Data Annotations work done in Preview 1 to provide client-side validation based on the model's validation attributes. This provides for a more responsive experience for users filling out a form with validation.
• Strongly-typed input helpers – allow generating form input fields using code expressions against the model. This allows the helpers to take advantage of Data Annotations attributes applied to the model and reduces errors caused by lack of strong typing such as typos.
• Strongly-typed link helpers – allow developers to take advantage of Intellisense support (due to the strong typing) to discover which controllers and actions are available for linking.
• Asynchronous Controller Actions - provides a programming model for writing actions that can call external resources without blocking a thread. This can increase the scalability of a site that needs to interact with web services and other external services.
• Areas - continued refining of the Areas feature, enabling a single project approach for developers who wish to organize their application without requiring multiple projects.
• Other Improvements - continue to fix known issues carried over from ASP.NET MVC 1.0 as well as ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 1. Also including API improvements based on user feedback along with minor new features.

There's lots of cool stuff (release notes are here) and in this video Phil shows off Templated Helpers. There's a walkthrough of Templated Helpers in the Pre-Release Documentation as well.

Remember, it's a preview, so there's still time to give feedback. Blog about it, complain in the forums, or bug us on Twitter.

I hope you enjoy the video!

Related Links

• Download Page for ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 1
• ASP.NET MVC Overview on MSDN
• ASP.NET MVC Reference Documentation on MSDN
• ASP.NET MVC website
• ASP.NET CodePlex site
• ASP.NET MVC Forums
• CodingQA Podcast with the ASP.NET QA Team