Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman

Damian Edwards and David Fowler have created a jQuery client-side library and an ASP.NET back end that promises to make real-time persistent connections available to .NET programmers. Long-polling, Server-sent events and WebSockets. What does it all mean? Damian sets us straight.

Scott talks to Microsoft UX expert Sara Summers at the Heartland Developer's Conference. Sara has coauthored the recently published book for experienced designers, entitled Dynamic Prototyping. Sara loves to talk about big ideas, changing everything, breaking your toys, throwing away your designs and capturing new ideas.

Scott goes directly to the source and talks to Phil Price from the Visual Studio team. Why is VS sometimes slow? When it is slow, what's really happening? What is PerfWatson and how will it help them make VS faster? All this and some hints in interesting improvements in the next version of Visual Studio!

Steve works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives. His book, Even Faster Web Sites, explains his best practices for performance. Steve is the creator of YSlow, one of the top 25 Firefox add-ons.

Not every startup starts up smoothly. Alex Papadimoulis shares his stories of near-failure moving from a consultancy to a software company while working on a wildly popular blog at night. What mistakes did his company make in sales and marketing, and how long did it take them to change course?

Gael Fraiteur had a full time job while working on the side on his open source Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) project "PostSharp." He's since turned his project into a successful commercial entity called SharpCrafters. What did he learn along the way and what can we learn from his successes and troubles? We also learn about Aspect Oriented Programming and how AOP tools like PostSharp can help your projects today.

Kendall Miller is a founder at .NET development tools vendor Gibraltar Software. They are two years into their their startup experiment and are becoming a small, mature company with some great products. How much did they need to fund their startup? How do they market and spread the word? What if there are free or open source versions of their software out there?

Scott chats with Nick Ganju CTO of ZocDoc on how he's building his business with BizSpark and ASP.NET. Does he use Open Source? When do they write their own libraries and when do they buy? What kinds of issues does a .NET startup run into when hiring?

This week Scott skypes with Paul in London. He's recently moved from Australia and has simultaneously launched his own micro-ISV focused on convention-based deployments made easy. What's involved? How did it get started and what does this Octopus Deploy do?

In this first Startup Series episode, Scott talks to Gabriel Weinberg about DuckDuckGo, his new search engine. How dare he go up against Google? He dare with better, more relevant search results. Learn how to be an overnight success in just 15 short years.

Scott talks to designer Jeremy Kratz about the design process from yellow legal pad to complete design. What kinds of things should a designer take into consideration? Where does design stop and CSS begin, or is there a distinction? Should YOU hire a designer?

Scott talks via Skype to Haixun Wang at Microsoft Research Asia about Trinity: a distributed graph database and computing platform. What is a GraphDB? How is it different from a traditional Relational DB, a Document DB or even just a naive in-memory distributed data structure? Will your next database be a graph database?

Scott sits down with Rafael Rivera to talk about the black box that is Windows. Or is it? Rafael doesn't take no for an answer and shares stories of breaking apps to fix them. No more secrets, this week on Hanselminutes.

Scott Hanselman and Scott Hunter (also known as Scotts the Lesser) talk about recently Azure/Web reorg, the direction that ASP.NET and Azure are talking, and how they see open source fitting into the future at Microsoft.

Scott sits down with Ivan Towlson from Mindscape. They recently released Web Workbench to the community for free with support for LESS, SASS, and CoffeeScript. Interestingly, they used C#, F#, JavaScript and Ruby to create this app. Why was polyglot programming right for what them? Is it right for you?

Scott talks to Matt Clay and Matt Davis at Earth Class Mail about how they used Nikhil Kothari's Script# compiler to write JavaScript from C# source. Why did they do it? What were the benefits? The problems? Would they do it again?

Scott gets schooled on the Microsoft Research Kinect SDK by Dan Fernandez. What happens when I plug a Kinect into my PC? What's included with the SDK and what's not? What work happens in the hardware and what happens in software...and more importantly, what can I build?

Scott talks to Erik Meijer about the idea that JavaScript is an assembly language. What assumptions can we make and how could this idea fundamentally change how we develop software on the web?

Scott talks with open source developers Anthony van der Hoorn and Nik Molnar from the Glimpse Project. Their very innovative (and all JavaScript and HTML!) debugger tool for ASP.NET has taken the community by storm. How did they do it and how can Glimpse make your live better?

Scott sits down with Microsoft Security Engineer Barry Dorrans to get a general sense of the basics of Web Security in 2011. Who are the groups in the news most often? What threats are nailing websites most often today, and are they different from classic threats? Where do we start to protect our sites?

Scott talks to open source developer Fredrik Holmström about IronJS. It's a very complete implementation of JavaScript written in F# on top of the DLR. It's even faster than IE8 now and getting faster every day. How does something like this get built? What can you use it for? What are the Iron* languages used for and how can you get involved?

Scott chats with open source developer Andreas Håkansson about his .NET micro web framework called Nancy which is inspired by a Ruby framework called Sinatra. Why do we need frameworks like this? What kinds of sites and services can they support and how do they relate to ASP.NET?

Scott sits down with Brandon Watson, a Director on Windows Phone. He works with the Developer Community, but what does that really mean? Scott pushes on this point to better understand his own job at Microsoft.

Tables turned this week and Rey Bango interviews Scott on his personal systems of organization. How has Scott synthesized the systems of Stephen Covey, David Allen, J.D. Meier and the Pomodoro Technique into a living system that works for him.

Sometimes the most interesting conversations happen before or after the show. Often they happen with Jeff Atwood. I (Scott) called Jeff to get some audio for our other show http://thisdeveloperslife.com and was recording as soon as Jeff and I started chatting. Here's our unedited random personal phone call that I thought might be fun.

Scott chats with Chris Sells about the pressure to release software as Open Source versus pressure to make money as a business. How are Google, Microsoft and Apple evolving over the years and what should we as developers do about it?

Scott chats with fellow home storage enthusiast Travis Illig about NAS options (Network Attached Storage) available today. Both Scott and Travis purchased (and told their friends about) Windows Home Servers. Where are their Home Servers now, and what are they using going forward?

Glenn Block is with Scott in The Netherlands and tries to get Scott up to speed on what's new in WCF. Scott thinks WCF is scary and heavyweight. How does WCF fit into a world of Web 2.0 lightweight APIs? What's the WCF WebAPI and how does compare to services in ASP.NET MVC?

Scott talks to Chris Sells after Chris has been up since 7am writing JavaScript and HTML. What's the world coming to when one of the world's foremost managed code experts starts writing Web Code? How is he finding JavaScript and what should you do about it?

Scott's at Mix this week and he sits down with Sam Saffron and Rob Conery to talk about their Micro-ORMs. What have they done in less than 400 lines of code, that the rest of the planet needs a dozen assemblies for? Should you abandon your ORM and start writing inline SQL? All this and more.

Mix 11 is today so Scott got the scoop from Phil on the new tools being released.

Scott sits down with Jonathan Carter to brainstorm about optimizing APIs for programmer happiness, rather than programmer productivity.

Scott talks to Martin Woodward, a Microsoft Program Manager who lives and works in Northern Ireland on the Java-based Eclipse plugin for Team Foundation Server. Martin Woodward is the Program Manager for Visual Studio Team Explorer Everywhere and part of the Team Foundation Server group at Microsoft. He helps to ensure that Eclipse and cross-platform developers are an active part of the TFS eco-system.

This week Scott sits down with the lead dev and lead PM for Entity Framework to talk about the improvements from the first version. What's improved and changed? What do they think about NHiberate or just doing SQL on your own?

Scott chats with Jim Evans from the Selenium team about how to get into Web Automation Testing. What's new in Selenium v2? Can you use Selenium with any browser? How does .NET fit into the process? All this and more in this Web Testing Episode.

Scott talks to Elijah Manor and Dave Ward about how one can take their JavaScript knowledge to the next level. What are the major concepts I should study? Which plugins are the must-haves? What's "Modernizr" and how does it, along with the concept of feature detection make my life easier?

Scott sits down with Rune from AppHarbor. AppHarbor has some strong opinions about how the cloud should work and how applications should be deployed. Is there room for another cloud offering? Is the cloud about elasticity or something else? What's a Cloud and what's Platform as a Service. All this and more as Scott gets educated.

Scott chats with Damian Edwards about new features coming in ASP.NET WebForms, new techniques, controls, model binding, HTML 5 and more.

Scott talks to Javier Lozano and Jon Galloway (and Eric Hexter in spirit) about MVCConf. Thousands of viewers logged in and watched hours of top technical content on ASP.NET MVC this last week. How was it organized? How was it paid for? Can you put together your own free conference?

Scott sits down with Paul Betts and talks about extensing the Reactive Framework. We currently manage our UI events as they are pushed to us. How does programming - and asynchronous programming - change if we change the way UI events are consumed? The ReactiveFramework extends .NET, and Paul's extended that with his Open Source Reactive UI framework. Let's see if Paul can teach Scott a new trick.

Scott chats with Mads Kristensen about HTML5? What exactly is this thing? Is it evolutionary or revolutionary? Should you start working with HTML5 now, or should you wait for some unknown future?

Scott and Drew are shattered, having just finished presenting 8 solid hours of technical but upbeat content in The Netherlands. They're doing WebCamps and take a moment to talk about presenting. How do you start? How do you stay focused and recover from errors? How can you move up from smaller venues to the big rooms? All this, plus Scott's lost his voice.

WebMatrix was relesed on the 13th of January. Some folks have said its very existance is confusing. Do we need another IDE? What's Microsoft trying to pull here? Scott talks to ex-Microsoftie Rob Conery on his unfiltered take.

This week Scott learns about Executable Specifications with Gojko Adzic, Jonas Bandi and Aslak Hellesoy. What's all this talk about BDD, Cucumber, Gerkin and SpecFlow? Where's the best place to start and how to Acceptance Tests fit into my existing projects?

Scott sits down with former agile coach John Wilger to talk about his experience going to work for the company he originally consulted with. What kinds of issues do small teams deal with when moving from traditional software develoment processes?

Happy holidays! It's a totally random chat show with Richard Campbell. What's next for Windows Phone 7? Will Scott give up his iPhone? How many Kindles can one man own? Is Kinect the future of computing? All this and less on this episode.

Scott talks to his friend John Batdorf about their move from small consultancies to large corporations. What kinds of issues do we deal with as employees and what kinds of issues do IT departments come upon as companies grow?

Scott sits down with open source developers Benjamin van der Veen to talk about his C# Web Server, Kayak, as well as OWIN, Open Source Web Servers and his thoughts on where server-side web development is going.

Steve Sanderson has created an interesting MVVM Javascript library for ASP.NET MVC. Yes, you read that right! MVVM on the client, MVC on the server, living together happily may make a more enjoyable development experience. All this plus HTML, data binding, jQuery, text boxes over data, ASP.NET and more.

Scott and Pete have both worked for Microsoft for a while now as remote workers. What works, what doesn't? Why is Scott obsessed with video portals and cameras and does it help? Pete shares his thoughts and tips on the remote life.