Scott Hanselman

Happy Tuesday! It's indeed a happy day as I am (literally this moment) at a conference in Las Vegas and have just pressed Publish on this blog post to announce that we are open sourcing ASP.NET MVC 4, ASP.NET Web API, ASP.NET Web Pages v2 (Razor) all with contributions under the Apache 2.0 license. You can find the source on CodePlex . Be sure to read all the details on ScottGu's blog.

Ya, I bolded, underlined and italicized that last part and yes, it was gratuitous. Fight me. ;)

This is the culmination of a lot of hard work by a lot of folks in our organization. It's the very reason that I came to work at Microsoft. So, what’s happening here?

While the source for ASP.NET MVC has had source available since its inception, and converted to the MS-PL license in April of 2009, the developers didn't take contributions from the community. While we were open source we were not “open source with takebacks.”

Today we continue to push forward and now ASP.NET MVC, Web API, Web Pages will take contributions from the community. NuGet from OuterCurve also is open source, and now huge parts of ASP.NET are as well. We shipped community code in NuGet with Visual Studio 2010 and NuGet has taken community contributions. Now we will ship community code inside ASP.NET in this upcoming version of Visual Studio.

We are opening sourcing these ASP.NET components on CodePlex using Git as our repository. CodePlex now supports TFS, Subversion (via a bridge), Mercurial and now Git.

Why Open Source?

If you’ve been following our exploits, we’ve actually been shipping open source with ASP.NET and Visual Studio for quite a few years. We started shipping the jQuery open source JavaScript library back in 2008. Since then we’ve added Modernizr, Knockout, jQuery Mobile, JSON.NET, and jQuery UI. These are all shipping and available today. Betcha didn't know that.

Microsoft started using an open development style with the Windows Azure SDK last year. It’s worked and worked well, so now they’re expanding the style to include some of the popular frameworks like ASP.NET. This will let us get feedback and respond to it faster than ever.

Over the last four years at Microsoft I’ve worked closely with the community to get feedback and voices heard by the developers. However today, as we introduce more open source projects that take contributions, you can get more directly involved.

• Find a bug? Send a unit test or fix.
• Think our coverage isn’t sufficient? Submit a unit test.
• Got a feature idea? Get involved more deeply with the developers and help write it.

Like every large open source project, every check-in (open source or otherwise) will be evaluated against the existing standards used by the developers. Even better, you’ll get to see our developers' checkins to the product out in the open.

It’s really important to remember that ASP.NET MVC, Razor, and Web API are fully supported Microsoft products and will still be staffed by the same developers that are building them today. The products will be backed by the same Microsoft support policy and will continue to ship with Visual Studio.  Also, to be clear, Microsoft is maintaining the same level of development resources as we always have. There’s still a roadmap and actually, there are more Microsoft developers working on ASP.NET today than ever before.

Why are you doing this?

Why shouldn't we? We like open source and you do too. Many of us come from open source backgrounds and many of us work on open source in our spare time.  We think our products are great and by moving to an open development model we think even more people will be energized, excited, and help make the products and the community even stronger.

Are you going to open source more things in ASP.NET?

Did I mention we love open source? We are going to continue to do open source in ASP.NET as we can when it makes sense.

Why isn’t ASP.NET Web Forms open sourced?

The components that are being open sourced at this time are all components that are shipped independently of the core .NET framework, which means no OS components take dependencies on them. Web Forms is a part of System.Web.dll which parts of the Windows Server platform take a dependency on. Because of this dependency this code can’t easily be replaced with newer versions expect when updates to the .NET framework or the OS ships.

What about Mono?

The Web Team digs Mono. We love that ASP.NET MVC can run on Mono and we look forward to getting contributions from the Mono community. In fact, I called my friend Miguel last week so he could be the first one to submit a pull request.

Why not on GitHub?

The Visual Studio Team has big plans for CodePlex, including adding Git support and modernizing the experience. Right now CodePlex supports TFS, Mercurial (Hg) and just added Git! As we're a partner with the Visual Studio Team we think the right thing for us to do is to support their plans to make CodePlex a thriving place for open source software again. We push them hard and they're releasing weekly now.

Conclusion

Here's how I look at it: Open Source == Increased Investment. ASP.NET is a part of .NET, it will still ship with Visual Studio. It's the same ASP.NET, managed by the same developers with the same support. It's ASP.NET except now you can get involved. You'll be able to see our developers' check-ins in public, offer feature ideas of your own, perhaps even become a key committer.

I'm pretty jazzed that we pulled this off at Microsoft. Still, it's just the beginning. I’m looking forward to working with you! ;)

Yay!

Related Links

• http://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com
• http://asp.net/open-source

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.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By

Here's the tale of how I took 7 hours of PAL DV tape and digital video, two CD's worth of music, 322 photos that totaled 105 gigs of digital assets and turned it into a DVD of my brother in law's wedding. The result was 66 min, 364 cuts and included music, overlays (who's that cousin?) and some nice transitions, as well as a DVD menu.

I know next to nothing about digital video and I'm sure all of you who will comment on this will say stuff like "Dude, why didn't you use Adobe Premiere/Avid/iMovie/an IPad" or whatever. You'll also say that you have created much more interesting/complex/impressive projects. Poop on you, I say. I'm feeling pretty darned proud of myself here because I just made a DVD that my family will love. ;)

OK, here's what my amateur self did.

My wife went to South Africa for a month last year to her brother's wedding. I stayed home with the kids. She returned with five hours of digital video on a bunch of PAL Digital Video Cassettes. PAL is essentially the non-US format. We use NTSC here.  PAL is 576 lines interlaced. She also brought over 300 photos across a half dozen digital cameras as well as an other two hours of 720p video shot with our little Canon S95.

Importing/Ripping Video from Tapes

First, I needed to get the PAL video off the mini-DV tapes. If you want to rip PAL DV tapes you really need a PAL DV player, then you can just hook up a Firewire (IEEE 1394) cable and import the video directly.

I decide to use Windows Movie Maker because it was free. I have a Mac around here somewhere but it's a few years old and I really wanted to edit this as fast as possible so I used my more powerful machine which is my Windows Desktop.

Back in the Windows XP days I remember this experience sucking badly. There were Firewire drivers to find, and most machines were too slow and too small to import video without dropping frames. In this case I just plugged in the cable to the camera, then to the PC and got a dialog.

I selected import and it even chopped up the scenes into separate files. About 60 gigs and 5 hours later I had all my PAL mini DVD tapes in an uncompressed AVI format.

Getting Assets Organized

Cool. I also had some CDs and music we bought I knew I wanted to use, as well as all the other AVIs from digital cameras, some DVDs of other video and all those photos. I put them each into folders like this:

This is as far as I went for "asset management," although we did go through the video and give them descriptive filenames like this (yes, that's an actual filename):

"17A - Ceremony Begins; MC, Pastor Arthur prayer & welcome; Choir sings; Mbusi, Fatty & other girl arrive; Mbux & Groomsmen Bridesmaids Phili waiting in car Vusi4 2011-09-27 08.23.20.avi"

That file name might seem silly, but the  gamble paid off later. It's totally unambiguous. At this point we're organized and have 105 gigs of files on an external drive.

Editing in Windows Live Movie Maker

As I recall around the Windows XP times Windows Movie Maker wasn't very good, but I thought I'd give it a try, because it's free, sure, but also because I didn't want to do lot of multi-layered super complex editing, I just wanted to make a wedding DVD. I did want to do some reasonable interesting editing though because I had multiple camera angles on the same event. I also had the source music that was playing the background.

This meant I would/should be able to, for example, take three angles on the ring along with the music in the background and assemble a series of quick cuts in order on the same event while cleaning up the music using the original source. That was about the trickiest thing I'd want to do.

Here's an example sequence. The bride is coming in, I've got cross fades between some (indicated by the white triangle in the corner of each segment) and tight cuts between others. There's music coming in as she walks up, that fades out, the ring, then another song starts up and some photos come in.

You can mix photos and videos and get a "Ken Burns effect" automatically with pans and zooms around the stills. I mixed and matched video and photos along with audio and didn't have any trouble. I ended up with 364 scenes/cuts in the end, about 80% video and 20% photos.

Each box there is a segment of video. You can split, trim, set starts and ends and move them around. The green lines are audio files that I brought in of the music that was playing at the time. That made the audio a lot nicer when it was just music playing and allowed for fun dance sequences like this excerpt video below. I really like the crazy color effect starting at 10 seconds in. It really works with the bridesmaids dresses.

I even published that segment above directly from within Windows Live Movie Maker with the built-in YouTube Plugin.

I can zoom in to make the segments lengths expand which makes their size more representative of their length in seconds I can also hover over a segment and see how long it is, the filename it came from (see now why I used big filenames?) as well as it's speed, effects, etc all in a tooltip. This segment is about 8 seconds long.

The whole video ended up being 66 minutes and 35 seconds long. It rendered into a 10Mb/s5 gig HD WMV file and fit nicely on a 480p DVD.  I may do a 25Mb/s or 50Mb/s Blu-Ray also. Remember that the PAL tapes were 576i and the HD video from the digital cameras were 720p so there isn't really a reason to do a Blu-Ray, but the still photos are all >5 Megabits so they'd be improved by a 1080p treatment. I was pleasantly surprised to see 1080p as an option in Windows Live Movie Maker:

Size of Videos

I was a little concerned that maybe Windows Live Movie Maker (WLM) couldn't do large videos or long videos or complex videos. With 105 gigs over 5 hours turning into an hour of video I figured I'd be taking a chance. Turned out it worked fine. I kept all the videos in their folders and the WLM file is just pointers to all the things I wanted done. The final video editing file from WLM was about 500k. It looks like an XML file with a bunch of time codes.

NOTE: I did have one technical issue where I was getting all black video previews in Windows Live Movie Maker. It turned out to be an NVidia Display Driver issue. Mine was old, and when I upgraded to the latest drivers I was all set.

It took two sessions of four hours each to edit the video and about an hour to render. I rendered into a large WMV file that was about 5 gigs. I did have three 'hang' crashes in Windows Live Movie Maker over the 8 hours, although I'd been saving every few minutes the whole time. The hangs seemed to be related to me moving audio around too fast then right clicking immediately, but I need to check on that.

Then I ran Windows DVD Maker and dragged the final file in. It automatically created scenes and a DVD menu. The opening title also includes a music background and the menu moves (it's not static) which is nice.

One of my other obscure requirements was that I needed to be able to make both NTSC and PAL versions of the DVD. I didn't see any options for this in Windows Live Movie Maker, but there are options in Windows DVD Maker. I was able to burn two master DVDs, one PAL and one NTSC. I'll then make copies and send 20 of these home to South Africa knowing they will play in their DVD player.

Conclusion

The couple of crashes were irritating but I crash Adobe Premiere a lot too. Overall, I was impressed. Windows Live Movie Maker was easy to use, had hot-keys for things like Split that sped me up once I got a rhythm going and handled a VERY large amount of high quality video without any issues. I'll use it again for family stuff, weddings and the like.

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.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By

There are so many really innovative products online right now. A good friend was showing me amazing product called Intercom that lets you see who of your users are online, their social profiles, even direct message/chat them live on your site.

You just add this JavaScript to your site. Here's the snippet from their home page:

<script id="IntercomSettingsScriptTag">
  var intercomSettings = {
    app_id: 'tx2p1ufd7g30c',
    email: 'john@example.com',
    created_at: 1234567890
  };
</script>
<script>
  (function() {
    function async_load() { var s = document.createElement('script'); s.type = 'text/javascript'; s.async = true; s.src = 'https://api.intercom.io/api/js/library.js'; var x = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; x.parentNode.insertBefore(s, x); }
    if (window.attachEvent) {
      window.attachEvent('onload', async_load);
    } else {
      window.addEventListener('load', async_load, false);
    }
  })();
</script>

My buddy was thrilled and thought this was an amazing product. It totally is. With modern browsers and modern JavaScript we can more quickly integrate applications like Intercom, Google Analytics, UserVoice, JanRain and a thousand others into our websites. It's a LEGO web, indeed. Just add some JavaScript like above and you're off.

However, after looking at this for about 5 minutes, I rained on my friends parade.

"Hey, is that the user's email address there?

"Yes! The 3rd party needs that so they can populate their dashboard and keep track of who's who."

"Ah, OK, but you're sending that email to them, right?"

"Yep."

"And they're storing that, right?"

"Yep."

"So, what's their privacy policy and how will it be added into yours? There's a chain of privacy policies that needs to happen here. What 3rd parties does this company use? And theirs?"

"You're totally raining on my parade. But you're right."

We emailed the folks at Intercom and they knew immediately what we were talking about and answered exactly as they should. Here's their email:

Sure thing, firstly our official terms & privacy policy are here:

http://docs.intercom.io/#PrivacyAndTerms

The short summary is...

1. You own your data, when you kill your account we don't keep it. We never sell it. We never contact your users. We will never do anything with your data that we wouldn't be proud to tell the world about.

2. We have a feature where we use a 3rd party service called FullContact, to augment your data, for example find an twitter/linkedin/facebook/github account that matches an email address. This can give you extra insight into the types of users  you have. You can easily disable this in your app settings.

Regarding updating your privacy policy, you obviously should note that you send data to Intercom for the purposes of providing support and extended communication with your customers. You might already have this covered under other areas (for example if you use helpdesk software, certain analytics packages, etc then you're already doing precisely this)

Ultimately you should check with your lawyer who created your privacy policy to ensure that using Intercom doesn't violate your existing privacy and find out precisely what changes are necessary.

Exactly. Knowing is half the battle. Are you using a number of 3rd party services? Are you integrating "on the glass" with JavaScript? Step 0 is making sure your Privacy Policy reflects the chain of Privacy Policies for all the products you use.

Sponsor: Again, I want to thank my friends DevExpress for sponsoring this week's feed. There is no better time to discover DevExpress. Visual Studio 11 beta is here and DevExpress tools are ready! Experience next generation tools, today.

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.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By

WARNING - This post will ultimately lead you to sites using offensive racial terms.

My Twitter friend Wesley pointed me this apparent Abercrombie and Fitch website advertising a pair of N***** Brown Pants. Here's a screenshot if that link dies. After the shock and frustration wears off, you ask yourself "How could this happen?" This link is spreading all over Twitter and the social web right now, and I'm sure that the Abercrombie PR machine will jump on it when their Twitter person wakes up.

Let me walk you through a few things.

• First, what a technical-type person does (or should do) in this situation.
• Second, why the internet is WAY WAY more screwed up than you ever thought
• Third, why no one should really be buying anything on the web.

The Technical Details

While it's possible that an idiot at Abercombie entered the N-word text, my eye immediately went to the domain:

Note the dashes and the "and?" No internationally-known and copyrighted brand would have such a lousy domain. I'd expect Abercrombie.com, full stop. In fact, it is.

I loaded up Domain Tools to see who owns this obvious knockoff. Like actual physical knockoffs of pants, there's no good way to tell what's real and what's not. I hit: http://whois.domaintools.com/abercrombie-and-fitchoutlet.com

Registrant Contact:
   su ye
   ye su 
   +86.095156230147 fax: +86.095156230147
   NO.217 North Street, Yinchuan Qinghe
   yinchuanshi ningxia 750000
   CN

The domain is registered in China. OK, this is NOT Abercrombie's site. It can also be confirmed by the poor English on the site's about page as well as the throwaway reference to Chinese piracy:

A&F is the favorite brand of American college students, a lovely deer printed on the front of the youth fashion. Its fashion and personalized style always the certain reason some youngsters follow. Nowadays, Abercrombie and Fitch piracy in China has spread to unimaginable proportions. Soft cotton is comfortable in the apparel.

OK, so how much of a problem is this and these pants? The combination of the N-word along with a unique brand-name like Abercrombie makes for a good hash. That means these words together, especially if you add "pants," makes for a search term that is unlikely to happen in the wild.

It's worse than you think

If we then Google for the four words together (forgive me) you can see hundreds if not thousands of fake domains. For Example:

• newabercrombies.com
• abercrombieandfitchoutletsale.com
• abercromibesaleonlione.com
• marvelousabercombie.com
• afsonlinesale.com
• cheapabercrombiestore.com

You get the idea. There are at least hundreds. All with the same pants, all registered in China. I can't imagine, sadly, that there's ANYTHING that Abercrombie could do about this except try to get the domains shut down - one by one.

How could your Mom possibly know this?

These are automatically generated sites, like "splogs." Splogs are spam blogs. They aren't real stores, there aren't real people behind them. They are almost like computer viruses, except they make stores. In this case, it appears that someone in China at some point designed a system that could churn out fake stores from a single database. That's why these pants keep appearing on hundreds of other sites.

Imagine if you just wanted a regular pair of pants and didn't see this pair? How could you possibly tell if this the site you want? There's no good way. Here's what you CAN do.

1. Make sure the URL starts with https:// when you are checking out.
2. Click the lock in your URL and see if the company name looks legit. Sadly, these can be faked also, but it's a start. HTTPS (SSL) doesn't mean "I can trust this site," it means "this conversation is private." You still might be having a private conversation with Satan.
   
3. Even better, if your Address Bar is green, click on it! This is a special "high trust" certificate that says you are really talking to who you think you are. This screenshot means "I am having a private conversation with a company that is KNOWN to be Twitter." Banks and big companies often use these special certs.
   

Ultimately, you, me, Mom and the Web need to develop a better "Internet Sense of Smell." The bad guys want our credit card numbers and will do everything they can to get them, even make ten-thousand fake Abercrombie and Fitch sites.

UPDATE: Thanks for the comments! If you (or Mom) had the Web of Trust installed, this is what you would have seen when visiting an evil site like this. I'm installing this free tool on Mom's machine today.

Good luck out there. It's a messed up web.

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.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By

There is a fascinating "storify" (a list of tweets with commentary that make up a story of what happened on Twitter) by Charles Arthur about an uncomfortable back and forth on Twitter between Shanley Kane, an engineer at Basho, and Christian Sanz and Reuben Katz, the founders of Geekli.st.

UPDATE: Here is a link to Geekli.st's apology.

The nutshell is that Shanley came upon this ridiculous video (photos here) of a girl in her underwear dancing around with a Geeklist T-Shirt. According to the Geeklist site, it is an "achievement-based social portfolio builder" for developers. Programming is an intellectual pursuit and any kind of "-ism" is totally inappropriate. In this case, immature sexism is a huge turn off. It's been a week of sexism in technology on the Internets.

But this post is less about that, as we can all agree that girls dancing in their underwear is a poor way to promote programming. I want to talk about Twitter, your Customers, your Brand, and Bile.

Shanley tweeted to the founders of Geeklist a totally reasonable question.

@csanz @rekatz why the ads with a woman in her underwear dancing around to dupstep?

— Shanley Kane (@shanley) March 22, 2012

At this point, Geeklist should have recognized what Shanley was really saying. This was a chance for them to re-notice the video in context and be reminded it should probably not exist. Instead, they replied with a non-answer answer with no recognition of the underlying question.

@shanley @rekatz oh that was super old ad created by a friend,we need an updated version that shows less skin! :)

— Christian Sanz (@csanz) March 22, 2012

@shanley @rekatz ? why the agressive tone

— Christian Sanz (@csanz) March 22, 2012

Boom. Stop there. You've got a customer who is upset, rightfully so, about an -ism, also a hot button. She's reaching out to you to validate her frustration AND most importantly handle your business. Every time a person reaches out to you on Twitter, it's a chance for you to put your best foot forward. This is the first impression. Get it right. You have only 140 characters.

At this point there's no turning back. It doesn't matter at this point that the video in question was made by a friend of Geeklist. It doesn't matter that Geeklist is/was a good product. What matters is that the founders were thoughtless in their response on Twitter.

Twitter is not chat, it's not IRC. And even it it was, the thing that I see companies forget over and over and over again is this. Companies need to know: You're on the Internet. Things that you say here matter and will be archived forever and repeated.

Shanley then nails it with this tweet:

@csanz @rekatz sorry my "tone" is offensive but a video that objectifies and sexualizes women in the context of "geek culture" merits anger

— Shanley Kane (@shanley) March 22, 2012

This is Geeklist's last opportunity to fix this. They should watch their tone, fall on their swords and handle their business. Surprisingly (or not) they go on for two dozen more tweets. It's really hard to read. Good on Shanley for not backing down. Note Charles Arthur's commentary:

[Shanley] Kane complained about a video. [Geeklist's Christian] Sanz took offence because of how he was addressed, rather than treating it as a legitimate complaint about content. Now both he and his co-founder are subtly signaling that they will make life difficult for her and her company

Stop here. Note. You will never win an argument on Twitter. You think arguments on the Internet are hard? Counting the characters until someone invokes Hitler? Pardon me while I quote myself, via Twitter.

Why argue on Twitter? Try speaking to someone in person in monotone short sentences while blindfolded without context.

— Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) May 20, 2011

Acknowledge your mistakes, be kind, stay positive, respond with respect and thoughtfulness. You are in public  and you are teaching people how to treat you. You likely cannot win an argument on online, and you can never win one on Twitter.

This story is a great example about how not to manage your brand on Twitter. Of course, in this case they were also totally wrong, but trying to argue their point in 140 characters just dug the hole deeper.

Related Links

• Don't Give Bile a Permalink - Finding Balance within The No Asshole Rule
• Profanity doesn't work
• On Pie Chart Diversity at Technical Conferences

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.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By