Scott Hanselman's ComputerZen.com

All of the talks at this year's Norwegian Developer's Conference were recorded, which is always a treat.

I did four talks as well as a live .NET Rocks show. It was a crazy week. I also recorded a half-dozen great podcasts. Three are already live on Hanselminutes and I've got more in the hopper coming soon.

The HaaHa Show - Hacking with Phil and Scott

In this one, Phil is a hacker and he keeps breaking my websites. I fix them, and he breaks them again. Watch movie.

.NET Rocks - Live! With Carl, Richard, Scott and Phil.

This is a really silly show and was entirely content-free. ;) Watch movie.

The Magic of Astoria - ADO.NET Data Services

Me talking about REST and SOAP and ADO.NET Data Services. Watch movie.

Making Your Blog Suck Less

Warning: I do swear in this one. Dunno what got into me. Watch movie.

Tour of .NET 4.0

This one's not working right now. Not sure why. I'll update with a screenshot when it works again. Watch movie.

There's a LOT of greats content over there, and I encourage you to check them out. There's DOZENS of awesome talks, but here's just a few.

• Jeremy D. Miller - Convention over Configuration applied to .NET
• Ayende - Building Scalable Systems
• Udi Dahan - Asynchronous Systems Architecture for the Web
• Ted Neward - Rethinking "Enterprise"
• Jonas Follesø - Building Business Applications in Silverlight 3
• Michael Feathers - Seven Blind Alleys in Software Design
• Peter Provost - The Butterfly Effect
• Robert C. Martin - Clean Practice: Agility and Craftsmanship

All in all, if you're in or around Europe, do stop by NDC next year. I've done it two years in a row and it's been a blast each time. It's a very smart, agile conference.

NOTE: Their website is borked right now and has an "off by 1" error for the Day 1 Talks. The "watch movie" links are all shifted. Pick the talk you want, but CLICK the talk above it, wrapping to the left. I'm sure they'll fix it in a few hours.

Second Note: I am just reporting the news here, so don't get mad at me. I haven't been able to get the videos to work on any browser EXCEPT Internet Explorer. They don't seem to work on either Firefox or Chrome. Again, not my thing, and yes, it sucks. It's probably a result of whatever company they selected to do their video, not due to some global Microsoft evil plot to be mean to you personally. Smooches. YES, we will ask them to make downloadable versions.

Enjoy!

I'm up in Seattle at the ALT.NET Open Space (group DL) and the MVPSummit. "Open Space" is a technique to hold self-organizing conferences. ALT.NET conferences have always been Open Spaces, and if you haven't gone an Open Space conf (of any kind) I recommend you check it out. This is my third (?) ALT.NET conference, and sixth Open Space conference and I always enjoy it more than larger shows.

 Martin Fowler says this about Open Space:

The unusual (and powerful) thing about Open Space is that you don't pre-plan a list of activities and speakers. Instead you provide a basic skeleton of time and space, and the attendees figure out what actually happens. The result is a more participative and energetic event.

What is ALT.NET?

In April of 2007, David Laribee coined the phrase ALT.NET after reading a post by Scott Bellware about the NHibernate Mafia. The core message David was keying off of was the maintainability of a software solution and not the tools involved in creating it.
ALT.NET means many things to many people and the debate will continue about what it means to you.
David proposed ALT.NET signifies:

1. You’re the type of developer who uses what works while keeping an eye out for a better way.
2. You reach outside the mainstream to adopt the best of any community: Open Source, Agile, Java, Ruby, etc.
3. You’re not content with the status quo. Things can always be better expressed, more elegant and simple, more mutable, higher quality, etc.
4. You know tools are great, but they only take you so far. It’s the principles and knowledge that really matter. The best tools are those that embed the knowledge and encourage the principles (e.g. Resharper.)

Robert Scoble introduced me to Kyte.TV last week after he moved a Twitter conversation we were having out of the constrained space of Twitter and into a live video stream with a chat window. As an experiment I recorded a "Hanselminutes Live" using Kyte and it was pretty fun. Fast forward to ALT.NET a week later and I'd forgotten about this. Then I noticed a number of folks on Twitter saying "wish we were there!" I had my webcam with me so I started streaming the sessions I was attending live using Kyte.

Nate Kohari and Ben Scheirman also started recording. Here's the extremely raw video we ended up with. We're still learning, so there's audio and video problems, so set your expectations LOW.

Scott - ALT.NET Recorded .NET Sessions

• Mono on iPhone
• ALT.NET - Why So Mean?
• TDD and Microsoft - Part 1
• TDD and Microsoft - Part 2
• LINQ is Friggin' Awesome
• Offline Web Apps
• How to Present
• Abstracted Fluent Testing

Ben - Recorded ALT.NET Sessions

• Spark View Engine
• Is Persistence Ignorance Necessary?
• Iron Ruby
• Ayende and NHibernate Prof

Nate - Recorded ALT.NET Sessions

• Death of the Relational DB

You can also click the "Shows tab in the embedded interface below:

  Blog posts about ALT.NET Seattle 2009:

• Phil Haack:
  • ALT.NET Seattle Day One
  • ALT.NET Seattle Day Two
  • ALT.NET Seattle Day Three
• Glenn Block
• Steve Bohlen - The Next Best Thing to Being There
• Simone Chiaretta
• Tweets on Twitter about the Kyte.TV ALT.NET conf live streaming

Enjoy!

I'm a huge fan of screencasts for learning. There are an increasing number of increasingly sophisticated tools and libraries that we as developers have available and I'm leaning on screencasts to learn them. I really like the screencasts that Rob Conery is doing and I've got really positive response from the ASP.NET MVC Screencasts.

I'm starting to think that all technical books should come with a accompanying screencast series. You typically have to watch closely and pay attention, and it's hard to watch a screencast in double speed (unlike a podcast) but a well-done screencast is the next-best thing to letting an expert take over your computer and show you.

There are many tools that support the fundamental tenets, beliefs, and preferred processes in the ALT.NET space. Certainly ALT.NET isn't "all about the tools," but there are certainly preferred tools.

One of those is NHibernate, a sophisticated Object Relational Mapper. I used NHibernate as my Data Layer recently when I got ASP.NET MVC running under .NET 2.0 using NHibernate examples from Davy Brion (who has an NHibernate Category on his blog).

NHibernate is very flexible, but it's a little overwhelming (for me, at least) to get started. Davy has a good "code-heavy" walkthrough of the concepts. Some NHibernate write-ups assume too much, IMHO.

Perhaps to combat this, Stephen Bohlen has created the Summer of NHibernate Screencast Series as a learning tool to educate engineers at his company. Stephen says:

"Often, our strategy for bringing people up to speed on [NHibernate] has been to rely on word-of-mouth and osmosis (often via pair-programming) to get the points across, but now we have a planned staffing ramp-up of a magnitude that will likely make that approach unwieldy."

He's releasing these screencasts to the public and you can check them out at http://www.summerofnhibernate.com/ or subscribe to the feed and get them downloaded automatically like podcasts! Stephen's also including Code Downloads with each screencast.

If you like them, remember that Stephen's doing this for free, while bandwidth isn't, so you can donate via Paypal to help him out. You can visit Stephen's blog with comments and suggestions. My primary suggestions to him would be to drop his resolution to 1024x768 or even 800x600 (what I do) and raise his font size to Lucida Console 16. Right now, you'll need a high-res (1280) monitor to watch his screencasts.

These small nits aside, I think it's great that NHibernate is getting more screencasts that really help folks get started and augment NHibernate's excellent documentation.

Related Links

• Official NHibernate Home
• Online NHibernate Docs
• NHibernate Docs (PDF)
• Official NHibernate Forum
• NHUsers Google Group
• ALT.NET Yahoo Group
• NHibernate FAQ Blog

The Gu has announced another regular drop of ASP.NET MVC. This one is Preview 3 and the goodness can be found at the http://www.asp.net/mvc/ landing page.

How does this relate to Visual Studio 2008/.NET 3.5 SP1 Beta

It doesn't. For now ASP.NET MVC is an out-of-band Web downloadable thing. It's bin deployable (meaning you don't HAVE to put them in the GAC) and you don't even need to tell your hosting/ISP. They are what they are - three DLLs in a folder. Bam. Phil has more details on his blog from last week with regard to MVC Preview 2, but the idea still holds. He says:

"MVC Preview 3 will not be affected by having SP1 installed. Preview 3 will include newer privately versioned bin deployable builds of the Routing and Abstractions DLLs. That way these assemblies will not be affected by the versions in the GAC installed by SP1, because they will have different version numbers."

Cool.

ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 Beginner Videos

I did two quick updated beginner introductory videos specific to Preview 3, but the original Preview 2 videos are still up and still mostly valid. As I've said before, there will be more videos as we get closer to release. These are safe to show your CTO and they are short - on purpose - so he or she doesn't fall asleep.

Introduction to ASP.NET MVC Preview 3
Scott Hanselman walks you through an ASP.NET MVC Hello World example in this video updated for Preview 3. He also explains the lifecycle of an ASP.NET MVC application.

Basic Application Building with ASP.NET MVC Preview 3
Scott Hanselman uses a sample database to create a basic Product Catalog management application with create, read, update and delete functionality. You can download the source for this application at Phil Haack's blog.

One cool new development is that my team added Rob's Storefront Videos to the http://www.asp.net site and you can check out the first ten videos here. The benefits are several, first, Rob won't have to pay for bandwidth, but we've also transcoded his videos into a bunch of formats for those of you that are passionate about your specific format. You know who you are. Me, I use just WMV or MP4 (DivX/xVid) and think that that's one too many, but you've can you choose from WMV, Zune, iPod, PSP, MPEG-4, and 3GP if it make you happy.

Updated ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 Sample

Phil has updated the Northwind MVC Sample for ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 and you can get it at Phil's Blog.

Preview 3 is also makes it way easier to test Controllers because they return ActionResults now, which gets the Controller out of the call stack and lets the Test focus on what the controller really intends to do, rather than worrying about mocking side effects of what the Controller might have done. As usual ScottGu has left me with nothing good to write about because he's already done a fine post with lots of detail on the changes. So selfish! ;)

BTW, if you're digging the Gu's black code theme, blame me for converting him and go check out the Visual Studio Programmer Themes Gallery, I believe he's still using Rob Conery's Textmate Take 2 theme.

I posted the month before last that the Mix08 Sessions, mine included, were up and available at http://sessions.visitmix.com. I posted links to the MP4, WMVs and other downloaded versions at the time as well. The Silverlight versions were the same versions, so there wasn't really a compelling reason to use Silverlight.

What I didn't know, however, is that they (the powers that be) not only recorded the slides and demos, but also had cameras going at the same time. They did some post processing (on hundreds of sessions) and those new "dual stream" sessions are up and available online in Silverlight. One stream is a camera on me, and one is the slides and demos.

I'm fairly physical, so I really prefer my talks if you can see me. If you haven't seen the MVC talk before, you might enjoy watching this new version. You can see a screenshot below. If you click the screenshot you'll go directly to the site.

UPDATE: It looks like the servers are having trouble keeping up, but they're working on it. For now, don't select a chapter or you might be in for a wait. If the streams start, for now you'll just have to watch it straight through until they've fixed it. It's working well for me if you just let it play.