Scott Hanselman

All too often I see programmers trying to solve their problems on the internet by blindly "flipping switches."

Change something, hit refresh in the browser. "Why is that cached? What's going on?" Change something else, hit refresh in the browser. "What's the deal?"

You may have heard the term "cargo cult programming" where islanders after World War II would wave sticks hoping that planes full of supplies would fly over. They drew a conclusion that the sticks waving caused the planes to come.

Think about abstractions. This is a good reminder for the beginner and the long-time expert. This applies not just to computers but to cars, light bulbs, refrigerators and more.

What are you not seeing? Look underneath.

When coding on the web, remember that effectively NOTHING is hidden from you.

A friend emailed with a question about some CSS files not caching. This is a smart guy with a long question about a confusing behavior in the browser. I asked - as I often ask - what's happening underneath? Did you look inside?

Are you using Fiddler? Did you press F12 in your browser of choice and explore their network tools? Are you using WireShark?

Literally this moment, as I am writing this post, I just noticed that the Twitter box on my blog here doesn't have my latest tweet embedded.

I could hit refresh a bunch of times, google around for vague terms, email a friend, or I could look inside.

I hit F12 in my browser. I look at the Network tab, and sort by Status.

Hey, suddenly my Twitter API call is a 404. First, that's lame of them. They should have redirected me, but alas, no one respects the permalink anymore. #getoffmylawn

With this single  insight I am now armed with googleable terms. I do a single search for "twitter user timeline json api" and see at the Twitter Developer Center that they've changed the format to included "api." and a version number.

I change my template to call this changed URL https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline/shanselman.json?callback=twitterCallback2&count=10 instead, and hit Refresh in my browser, once.

There's my tweet. No joke, this just happened. Good timing, I think.

You decide how deep you want to go down the rabbit hole. I am not expecting everyone to be a neurosurgeon or a professional network engineer but I firmly believe that digging just one layer deeper in all things will enhance your life and your work.

Learn basic HTTP debugging and ALWAYS check your result codes. Even if you are a non-technical blogger, learn how to check for 404s and 301s and 500s and assert your assumptions.

The world - and the internet - is not a black box. Look inside.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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So you've installed Windows 8. I'm going to do a small series of posts called "Windows 8, Step 0" with tips on what to be sure to do after you've installed Windows.

Here's an important TODO for you. Do it NOW. Do it all your machines, especially Non Technical Family Member's machine. Take that giant external USB drive you've got lying around and plug it in.

From within the Windows 8 Start Screen, type "File History" then click "Settings"

Click it. Turn on File History and point it to your giant external drive, or some large network share that you have available.

This is kind of like Time Machine on a Mac. It will keep a constant shadow of your files backed up to this other drive. It runs automatically and you don't think about it until you lose something. It will automatically backup anything and everything in your Libraries (including Documents, Photos, Videos, Music) and everything on your Desktop.

If you want to backup more specific stuff, add whatever files you want to your Windows Libraries. I've added photos from another drive, for example as well as Documents from my DropBox folder.

You can click Advanced Settings there on the left to control how long the files are kept, how much disk space is used and how often it happens.

I've also checked the box under HomeGroup to automatically recommend this large drive to the rest of the house! This is awesome for a few reasons. Other machines in the HomeGroup will automatically see this drive and can use it just by clicking "Turn on."

In the screenshot below you can see the File History dialog from my laptop with the 3TB drive from my other machine called HEXPOWER7 being recommended as a good drive for File History. One click, now my files are backed up on this machine.

HomeGroups are groups of computers at home that you trust and want to share files and devices with. You can make a HomeGroup in less than a minute. From the Start Screen, type "HomeGroup" then Click "Settings." Follow the instructions.

If you want, you can click Select Drive and pick any drive on your machine or add a network location. I have a 5TB Synology NAS so I could use that also. Any Windows-compatible SMB/Samba NAS will do.

Now I'm backing up to the Network Attached Storage (NAS).

Restoring from File History

Once you've been running File History for a while, you can go back to the Start Screen and type "Restore Your Files" and click "Settings" to get this dialog:

There's folder I want from my Desktop but it's not there as I've deleted it before. I will click the back button (you can hold it down to go back in time fast) until I get to a day when that file existed. I can also search my entire File History for previous versions of files.

I've backed up to November 6th and there's the file on my Desktop.

Just click the green back-in-time Restore button and it's put back where it was. I can also restore it to a specific new place if I want to.

I hope this helps you. It's helped me!

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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How can you not love a tiny computer? I posted about Top 10 Raspberry Pi Myths and Truths and since then I'm up to four Raspberry Pi devices. The most recent is the new Raspberry Pi "Model B" that includes 512 megs of RAM.

Sure, Raspberry Pis aren't fast, but what they lack in performance they make up for with chutzpah. They have a nice GPU as well which will decode 1080p MP4 video in hardware and play it just fine. Even better, for about $4 you can get a license to unlock MPEG-2 or VC-1 decoding in hardware.

I also have a Netduino and Netduino Plus as well as an Arduino that I use with the greatest FPS Controller in history, the SpaceTec SpaceOrb along with a custom OrbShield that provides a bridge between the RS-232 Serial Port and the Arduino.

All these devices are very reasonably priced and a great fun for kids or adults.  Next I'm looking at the PIX-6T4 "game console" that lets you write tiny games in C# on a Netduino Mini or perhaps a Netduino Go.

Don't listen to the folks who write negative headlines about the Raspberry Pi. Sure, it's the wild west but with a little patience you'll do fine. There's an amazing community around the Raspberry Pi.

The amount of excitement around these tiny machines is amazing. There's even a Kickstarter for a "Picade" tiny arcade cabinet.

To make things easier once you get your Pi, I do recommend the Adafruit Raspberry Pi Budget Pack if you don't want to go hunting for parts. This kit includes a great little clear case, a 4 gig SD Card (actually a mini with an adapter, which is great since the Netduino Plus has a mini SD slot), cables and power, but best of all, a breadboard, wires and a lovely little ribbon cable and "cobbler" that makes it super easy to keep things tidy while still messing with the Raspberry Pi's GPIO (General Purpose Input Output) connections.

Related posts you might like

• Top 10 Raspberry Pi Myths and Truths
• Adding AirPlay to a Receiver without an Apple TV - Raspbmc and the Raspberry Pi

What's great about the Raspberry Pi and small devices like it isn't the price -although that's great - it's that the Raspberry Pi has a GPIO and HDMI. This means it's the easiest and cheapest little PC that can talk to the outside world's many hardware devices. Having the combination of  HDMI out (for your TV) and GPIO (for everything else) means it's extremely accessible to the beginner.

That GPIO port along with its ease of programming gives rise to such fun as as the RetroPie GPIO Adapter that let you hook up your old Super Nintendo (SNES) controllers to a Pi! You can order a RetroPie GPIO Adapter here. Here is Video of the RetroPie in action. I am not affiliated with this creative person at all, I just dig the idea.

So I've got four now. Some friends have tweeted me saying that they bought one Raspberry Pi and haven't gotten around to doing antyhing with it, usually because they aren't sure WHAT to use it for.

Here's what my Pi's are currently doing:

• My first Pi is running as an XBMC machine in my living room. I put Raspbmc on it and while I've got my Synology NAS hooked up and serving media to it, I ended up using this Raspberry Pi mostly as an Airplay "catcher" that I throw video at from my iPad.
• My second Pi was for the kids. They built a LEGO Raspberry Pi Case and it's their primary PC. They think they are playing SCUMMVM games but they are actually learning how to read. ;)
• I gave my third Pi to my 13 year old nephew. He is loading games on it as fast as he can, checking out SNES Emulators while I try to convince him to write his own game.
• My new fourth Pi is going to be my GPIO playground. I want to learn more about hardware and now that folks are actively hacking things like Monogame onto it, it's becoming even more attractive to me. I like learning Python but Mono on a Raspberry Pi seems like great fun.

I'm sure there are more reasons to buy more Raspberry Pis. Here's a few.

Seventeen Awesome Raspberry Pi Projects

These are some exciting and fun projects for you to explore with Raspberry Pi that might make your Pi feel more useful and get you playing today!

• NFC (Near Field Communications) for Raspberry Pi
• BerryTerminal - Your Pi as a thin client
• RaspBMC - An amazing auto-updating Media Center front end
• Screenly - Digital Signage for your Pi!
• Super Nintendo and RaspberryPI with RetroPie - Pull out those old SNES controllers and hook them up to an emulator!
• PiCade:  Mame + Tiny Arcade = Crazy Delicious. How tiny an arcade could you have? Or perhaps a Coffee Table Pi? Folks have NeoGeo working too!
• C64 Emulator - Because it has to be done.
• Even better, put a Raspberry Pi INSIDE a C64
• Automate your Home - Hookup a Pi to a ZigBee
• Internet Radio - Create a tiny internet radio
• Robots! - A device this small is great for driving a robot
• Run Quake. In 3D. - Because that's insane.
• Security Penetration Testing - Raspberry Pwn. Yes, that's Pwn.
• Speech Recognition - I think you're getting the idea.
• Give it a Camera - Any external thing can be made to work. Here's a Camera module.
• One Button Audiobook Player - For Grandma.
• Arduino Adapter for Raspberry Pi - Reuse is cool

Be sure to check out the Element 14 Community Site for Raspberry Pi. I also love AdaFruit and their Pi-related products like the Adafruit Pi Box (I have 2) or the Budget Pack (I have 1).

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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A few years back I did a podcast with Erik Meijer about Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx). Since then thousands of people have enjoyed using Rx in the projects and a number of open source projects like ReactiveUI (also on the podcast) have popped up around it. Even GitHub for Windows uses Reactive Extensions. In fact, GitHub uses Rx a LOT in their Windows product. My friend Paul at GitHub says they liked the model so much they made a Mac version!

“GitHub for Windows uses the Reactive Extensions for almost everything it does, including network requests, UI events, managing child processes (git.exe). Using Rx and ReactiveUI, we've written a fast, nearly 100% asynchronous, responsive application, while still having 100% deterministic, reliable unit tests. The desktop developers at GitHub loved Rx so much, that the Mac team created their own version of Rx and ReactiveUI, called ReactiveCocoa, and are now using it on the Mac to obtain similar benefits.” – Paul Betts, GitHub

Today, Microsoft Open Technologies announced the open sourcing of Reactive Extensions! You can get the code with git up on Codeplex at https://rx.codeplex.com. You can’t stop the open source train! Congrats to the team!

There’s a LOT included, so be stoked. It’s not just Rx.NET, but also the C++ library as well as RxJS for JavaScript! Now everyone gets to play with IObservable<T> and IObserver<T>.

• Reactive Extensions:
  • Rx.NET: The Reactive Extensions (Rx) is a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs using observable sequences and LINQ-style query operators.
  • RxJS: The Reactive Extensions for JavaScript (RxJS) is a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs using observable sequences and LINQ-style query operators in JavaScript which can target both the browser and Node.js.
  • Rx++: The Reactive Extensions for Native (RxC) is a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs using observable sequences and LINQ-style query operators in both C and C++.

• Interactive Extensions
  • Ix: The Interactive Extensions (Ix) is a .NET library which extends LINQ to Objects to provide many of the operators available in Rx but targeted for IEnumerable<T>.
  • IxJS: An implementation of LINQ to Objects and the Interactive Extensions (Ix) in JavaScript.
  • Ix++: An implantation of LINQ for Native Developers in C++

A great way to learn about why Rx is useful is to check out the Rx Koan’s project or to read the IntroToRx online e-book.

Why do I think Rx matters? It’s a way to do asynchronous operations on event streams. Rather than hooking up click events and managing state with event handlers all over, you effectively “query” an infinite stream of events with LINQ. You can declaratively sequence events…no flags, no state machine.

For example, here’s a dragging event created (composed) via Mouse button and Mouse move events:

IObservable<Event<MouseEventArgs>> draggingEvent =
     from mouseLeftDownEvent in control.GetMouseLeftDown()
     from mouseMoveEvent in control.GetMouseMove().Until(control.GetMouseLeftUp())
     select mouseMoveEvent;

Even better, Rx makes it easier (or possible!) to create event-based tests that are asynchronous, like this example from Jafar Husain:

Rating rating = new Rating();
IObservable<Unit> test =                             // Unit is an object that represents null.
    ObservableExtensions
        .DoAsync(() => TestPanel.Children.Add(rating))
        .WaitFor(TestPanel.GetLayoutUpdated())     // Extension method GetLayoutUpdated converts the event to observable
        .DoAsync(() => rating.Value = 1.0)        // Calls the Ignite EnqueueCallback method
        .WaitFor(                                 // waits for an observable to raise before going on
            // listen to all the actual value change events and filters them until ActualValue reaches Value
            rating                          
            .GetActualValueChanged()        // extension method that converts ActualValueChanged event to IObservable
            .SkipWhile(actualValueChangedEvent => actualValueChangedEvent.EventArgs.NewValue != rating.Value))
        // check to make sure the actual value of the rating item is set appropriately now that the animation has completed
        .Assert(() => rating.GetRatingItems().Last().ActualValue == 1.0) // crawls the expression tree and makes a call to the appropriate Assert method

Test.Subscribe(() => TestPanel.Children.Remove(rating));    //run the test and clean up at the end.

There’s amazing Time-related operators that let you simulate events over time. Note the Buffer and Subscribe calls.

var myInbox = EndlessBarrageOfEmail().ToObservable();

// Instead of making you wait 5 minutes, we will just check every three seconds instead. :)
var getMailEveryThreeSeconds = myInbox.Buffer(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(3)); //  Was .BufferWithTime(...

getMailEveryThreeSeconds.Subscribe(emails =>
{
    Console.WriteLine("You've got {0} new messages!  Here they are!", emails.Count());
    foreach (var email in emails)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("> {0}", email);
    }
    Console.WriteLine();
});

You can use await and async, like in this example returning the number 42 after 5 seconds:

static async void button_Click()
{
    int x =  await Observable.Return(42).Delay(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5));
    // x with value 42 is returned after 5 seconds
    label.Text = x.ToString();
}

Here’s some more resources to check out about Rx. Congrats to the team for their contribution to Open Source!

• MSDN on Rx
  • Rx Beginners guide with Videos
• DevCamp 2010 Keynote - Rx: Curing your asynchronous programming blues
• Kim Hamilton and Wes Dyer: Inside .NET Rx and IObservable/IObserver in the BCL (VS 2010)
• Going Deep: Rx on .NET 4.5 and WinRT
• E2E: Brian Beckman and Erik Meijer - Inside the .NET Reactive Framework (Rx)
• E2E: Erik Meijer and Wes Dyer - Reactive Framework (Rx) Under the Hood 1 of 2
• E2E: Erik Meijer and Wes Dyer - Reactive Framework (Rx) Under the Hood 2 of 2

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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It was an insane week at BUILD. Much of my schedule was my own fault as I continue to treat Microsoft Outlook as if it were a game of Tetris, franticly packing appointments ten-deep.

The "Angle Brackets" team (ASP.NET, Azure, and Web Tools) had a good showing and lots of fun. We chose to create a little two day mini-conf by scheduling our talks on Thursday and Friday and I think it worked great. There was a Day 1 and Day 2 Keynote. I had a small 10 minute coding segment before ScottGu in the Day 2 Keynote. I kicked if off on Day 3 (Thursday) with an un-keynote at 8:30am called Angle Brackets, Curly Braces, One ASP.NET and the Cloud. Then the team had their talks on Thursday and Friday and finally Jon Galloway and I ended the show with the very LAST talk  on Friday afternoon called "Bleeding edge ASP.NET."

Here's video of my talks, as well as links to all the talks our team did! Remember that you can download these talks in various formats and watch them at your leisure!

Angle Brackets, Curly Braces, One ASP.NET and the Cloud

I'm very happy with how this talk turned out and I hope you enjoy it. If you do, let me know and share it with your friends.

Downloads:

• MP3 (Audio only) 53MB
• Mid Quality WMV 141MB
• High Quality MP4 706MB
• High Quality WMV 400MB

Bleeding edge ASP.NET: See what is next for MVC, Web API, SignalR and more…

I played code monkey in this talk with Jon Galloway. We had great fun, showed lots of demos and generally picked on each other throughout.

Downloads

• MP3 (Audio only) 56MB
• Mid Quality WMV 148MB
• High Quality MP4 700MB
• High Quality WMV 500MB

Talks from the Web Team

There were some amazing talks this year.

• Building Real-time Web Apps with ASP.NET SignalR - Damian Edwards and David Fowler
• Building Services for Any Client with ASP.NET Web API - Daniel Roth
• Building HTML 5 Web Apps with Visual Studio & ASP.NET- Mads Kristensen
• Building data centric applications for web, desktop and mobile with Entity Framework 5 - Rowan Miller

See how we're BUILDing stuff? Each of these talks is code-heavy and focused on getting you working and building great stuff and hopefully having fun while you do it.

Be sure to check out all the BUILD talks. They are up on http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2012 in their entirety, with both speaker cameras via Picture-in-Picture and high-def video. Hope you enjoy them!

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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