Hanselminutes - Fresh Talk And Tech For Developers

Charles Petzold wrote the book on Windows. Specifically, he wrote "Programming Windows, 1st edition" in 1988. This was the book I learned on and I still have it on my shelf. Charles has never stopped writing and is now working on a free book for Microsoft Press called "Programming Windows Phone 7 Series." I get the scoop from Chuck in this interview recorded in the waning hours of Mix 10 in Las Vegas.

Scott's at Mix this week in Las Vegas, and he gets a second to sit down with Charlie Kindel from the Windows Phone team. What's the real developer story? What can these phones do and how do we program them? They talk aesthetic, controls, IDEs and hardware details.

Astoria, ADO.NET Data Services and OData - what's the difference and the real story? How does OData work and when should I use it? When do I use OData and when do I use WCF? Scott gets the scoop from the architect himself, Pablo Castro.

This week Scott talks to new media consultant Liz Burr about working in Social Networking. What does a social media consultant do? Is it PR or marketing? How much is science and how much is gut? Are social media people more than just the popular kids from High School? Liz helps Scott work out his school issues. Also: People of Color and their role in Social Media.

Scott's in Egypt today and he had the opportunity to sit down with Lamees and Abeer, two successful women in IT. Lamees is a programmer transitioning to Systems Analysis, and Abeer is a veteran Senior Systems Analyst and Agile Project Manager at Dashsoft. Nearly 50% of the people at Cairo Code Camp are women. What is Egypt doing right to encourage so many women to choose technology as their career?

Scott sits down with Tatham Oddie to talk about the WebFormsMVP open source project created by he and Damian Edwards. What does it add? Can we have the best of both worlds, convenience and testability?

Two Englishmen in a row? What a sellout I am. This week I chat with Chris "ChrisNTR" Hardy, an ASP.NET programmer by day who writes C# code for the iPhone by night. He took it upon himself to answer a tweet from me and write the beginnings of a "Hanselminutes iPhone Application." How did he do it?

I tease! It's show 200, and we've got Jon Skeet. Jon writes Java at Google, but he's also got a new book out called C# in Depth, Second Edition. Jon is also well-known for his answers on StackOverflow, gaining him the title "The Chuck Norris of Programmers." Listeners can get 40% off with code "HanselC40" at http://manning.com/skeet2 until March 15th.

Scott chats with Jeremy Zawodny, a developer at Craigslist on how the system is put together. How many servers do they have? How does it all fit together and what are the major technology problems they have to solve?

Scott sits down with Erik Meijer from the Cloud Programmability Team to hear about the Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx). Rx is a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs using observable collections. Sound boring? Not even a little. Rx is a prescription for awesome.

Scott sits down with Jimmy Schementi to find out what's the scoop with the DLR. Is it baked? What do I need to do to get started? What's the status of IronRuby - is it done? Will IronPython be a first class language or is it already? All these questions and more will be answered.

Jason Olson works (or worked, as you'll hear) for Microsoft in DPE. In this episode he takes Scott a little deeper into some of the new features in .NET 4, including security, CLR changes, C# 4 and VB 10 improvements and the new Task Parallel Library.

The WiX Project was the first big Open Source project out of Microsoft over 10 years ago! Scott talks to project lead Rob Mensching about how the WiX Installer project got started. How much trouble did he have with Microsoft bosses and Legal? What's next for WiX?

Scott chats with Warren Sande and his 10 year old son, Carter, about their new book "Hello World: Computer Programming for Kids and Other Beginners." Listeners can get 40% off Hello World! from Manning.com with the code "hanselm40". The offer is valid until Jan 31, 2010.

Scott talks to Niklas Gustafsson about Axum (formerly Maestro), an incubation project at MSDN DevLabs. Axum is a new language based on the Actor model that targets the CLR. It focuses on making concurrency fundamental with principles of isolation, agents, and message-passing.

Scott chats with new Microsoft employee and ASP.NET team member about his open source ASP.NET MVC ViewEngine called "Spark." It's a totally new DSL (Domain Specific Language) that might make your MVC Views more fun to write!

Scott's on campus and talks to Nathan Brixius, a Senior Developer working on the Microsoft Solver Foundation library. Solver Foundation helps break down complex multi-variable problems in a clean, declarative way.

Scott's in Redmond this week and he sits down with Lee Holmes and Jason Shirk from the Powershell team. What's the state of Powershell now that it's built into Windows. What does 2.0 buy me and what features could I exploit more effectively?

It's the day after Thanksgiving (in the US) and we're making our way deep into the holiday season. Scott chats with Richard Campbell and they each share their best gadget gifts for the geek in your life.

This week Scott's at PDC but just before he left he chatted with Phil Haack about his exciting release of ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta. They chat about the changes, and Scott gets a surprise phone call from The Gu.