Hanselminutes - Fresh Talk And Tech For Developers

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.