Scott Hanselman

Today is a pretty cool day. It's the culmination of a bunch of little stuff and a lot of hard work by some really nice dudes. Here's a few surprises.

Rob, Phil, and I have been working on the ASP.NET MVC book for a while. One (poorly kept) surprise is the inclusion of ScottGu as an author on the book. Between the four of us, we got enough forehead space for like six guys.

Here's where it gets cool.

Free ASP.NET MVC eBook

Today we're releasing the first 185 pages of the book as a FREE PDF download.

Not only that, it's licensed as Creative Commons Attribution No Derivatives. You can share, distribute, hand out, transmit it all you like. You can even include it in your own book if you'd like. ;)

We worked really hard on this chapter, but the real applause goes to ScottGu who closed down Starbucks a number of times, working late into the night. If you enjoy ScottGu's Epic Blog Posts, here's 185 pages of Epic. This chapter will be Chapter 1 in the book; kind of a book within a book.

The book itself is deep in production but this should hold you off for a while, I hope. ;)

Free ASP.NET MVC Sample Application - NerdDinner

Next, we're releasing the NerdDinner sample application at http://nerddinner.codeplex.com as MS-Pl. It's not nearly as sophisticated as the MVC Storefront, but it's pretty cool and does some nice stuff in a very clean way, in our opinion.

There's also more Full Application Samples to be had at http://www.asp.net/mvc with more to come soon!

Big thanks also to the NerdDinner style designer Michael Dorian Bach and to Dave Ward for his jQuery ninja skills. Thanks also to Steve Harman for his peer review. (I'm getting there! Soon...)

I'll be maintaining the application with all these folks, and you're welcome to join in! I'm hoping to add features like RSS, iCal, Blog Badges, jQuery UI controls, OpenID and more in the coming weeks. Wanna help?

Mix 09

I'll be presenting NerdDinner and the code at Mix 09 next week on Thursday at 2:30pm in session "T49F" called

"File|New -> Company: Creating NerdDinner.com with Microsoft ASP.NET MVC "

You can sign up for my talk by going to the Mix Session Builder, entering "T49F" and clicking on the "Green Plus Sign" next to the title.

Enjoy!

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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My one-hundred-and-fifty-second podcast is up. Scott chats with Kathleen Dollard about the past and the future of Code Generation. Scott's infatuated with T4, but does it have a future?

Subscribe:

• Download: MP3 Full Show #152
• Play in your browser.

Do also remember the complete archives are always up and they have PDF Transcripts, a little known feature that show up a few weeks after each show.

Genome is a sponsor for this show!

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Telerik is a sponsor for this show!

Building quality software is never easy. It requires skills and imagination. We cannot promise to improve your skills, but when it comes to User Interface, we can provide the building blocks to take your application a step closer to your imagination. Explore the leading UI suites for ASP.NET and Windows Forms. Enjoy the versatility of our new-generation Reporting Tool. Dive into our online community. Visit www.telerik.com.

As I've said before this show comes to you with the audio expertise and stewardship of Carl Franklin. The name comes from Travis Illig, but the goal of the show is simple. Avoid wasting the listener's time. (and make the commute less boring)

Enjoy. Who knows what'll happen in the next show?

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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Great fun on Twitter today as I asked when folks went online for the first time in their lives. The answers were marked with the #goonline hashtag. Mostly just random reminiscing but it got me remembering the fun we had "suffering" in the olden days.

The best part, of course, is that my "olden days" aren't yours. Maybe you learned with punch cards or maybe your first machine was a *gulp* Pentium. Either way, it was different and now it's a part of you.

Here's a totally random, completely useless collection of things I remember doing/accomplishing/working on while I was "coming up" in computers.

What's your list? Is it a list of suffering? Of joy? Of great fun? Of accomplishment?

What's 10 Awesome Things You Remember About Computers?

Using QEMM to rearrange all the TSRs in upper and extended memory. Then getting better than QEMM and using intuition to get better results.

Stacker'ing a 40 meg MFM hard drive. Upgrading to DR-DOS and getting compression for free.

Running a multi-node WildCAT! BBS under DesqView. Later running it under OS/2, then OS/2 Warp.

Upgrading my PC/XT by meticulously adding dozens of DIPs to an QUADBOARD expansion.

Using a standard paper hole punch to punch another write-protect notch in a 5 1/4" floppy to make it double-sided.

Telling everyone to be quiet so the acoustic coupler on a 300 baud modem could do its thing.

Using a regular cassette tape to play games on a Commodore Vic 20. LOAD "*", 1, 1

Printing out 40+ page or more giant-posters of Mr. Spock created entirely in ASCII on a TSR-80 and a 9-pin dot matrix printer. It took hours.

Typing in games from the back of COMPUTE! magazine. I ended up hiring kids from down street to read the long list of HEX values and CRC codes to me.

Buying a printer to work with PaperClip and having to type the printer's control codes directly into the application.

What's yours, Dear Reader?

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 I installed and have been playing QuakeLive. Here's the Review part. It's fun. It's Quake. Fast, pretty, twitchy, fun. Quake. Good fun.

Here's the Rant part. I'm having trouble understanding is why this is interesting in any way?

Folks on the 'tubes are saying, "OMG, this is a Browser-based game?"

To say, browser-based game, to me, implies effortless installation. More importantly, it also implies a reason to be in the browser. See the screenshot below? That's the MSI installer I ran as Admin.

See this screenshot? That's IE requesting permission to run this plugin. There's a separate MSI if you want to run it in Firefox. I download and installed both installers separately.

Here's a sample error message:

** GLW_CreateWindow: could not register window class
Please report the the problem you encountered on the Quake Live forums.
You must reload the web page to make this display go away.

A web (or web-enabled) app that doesn't phone home with errors? Hm. Doesn't seem like a web app to me.

See this screenshot? That's my %appdata% folder with 266 MEGS downloaded. It gets downloaded in the background while you "train." Why do you think they train you for 10 minutes in a single level? It's because they are downloading the other 1/4 gig of content.

I'm sorry, but this is a re-imagining of Quake III Arena, compiled as a DLL and running inside my browser. It's the same PAK file concept and format that you (possibly) remember from ten years ago. Yes, 1999.

Yes, there's social aspects, background content delivery, easy multi-player matching, but why is this a DLL living inside the browser's memory space and not an EXE that jumps out of the browser? Do I want something that I think of as a browser plugin downloading 256megs+ of content for me? Why is no one pointing out that the emperor frag-fest has no clothes?

Apparently this is interesting to the young people today because the ones playing Quake Live because they weren't alive when Quake was released originally.

I would rather that a game company like ID spend more time really innovating in the gaming engine space (and I know they are), rather than repackaging the same game in different ways for a decade.*

Quake Live is NOT an interesting game. There are more interesting ways to distribute games that have been working nicely for me since 2003. GuildWars is another GREAT example. It was a <1meg EXE to bootstrap and streamed the levels you needed. There's no reason for QuakeLive to be shoe-horned into a browser plugin.

Now I'm off to delete 256 megs of Quake III from %AppData%\LocalLow\id Software\quakelive\home\baseq3.

End of rant. Move along.

*Quake and its four sequels, Quake II, Quake III Arena, Quake 4, and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

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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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!

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

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