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Ignite Your Coding, Episode 2: Glenn Block

Joey deVilla, Ward Bell dressed up as Elvis, Glenn Block

A couple of weeks ago, my coworker and Ignite Your Coding co-host John Bristowe and I did a live webcast interviewing Glenn Block, a Program Manager for .NET FX at Microsoft. Glenn’s one of the go-to guys on Prism, Unity, MEF and ways of building maintainable and reconfigurable applications out of pieces that you can assemble and rearrange in general. We’ll talked about building composite applications, design patterns, dependency injection and why it’s good for you, and other aspects of good object-oriented design as we understand it these days.

imageIgnite Your Coding is a series of webcasts in which John and I talk to some of the bright lights of the software industry about how they got started, what they’re doing, how they cope with the change that affects our industry constantly and whatever else they want to talk about, all with the goal of informing and inspiring you.

The recording of our webcast with Glenn (which took place on March 10th, 2010) is linked below, and we’ll set up RSS, Zune and iTunes feeds shortly.

Direct Download:

MP3 - click here to download

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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David Laribee on Thursday’s “Ignite Your Coding”

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David Laribee on Technical Debt

“Debt” is a term so unpleasant that we don’t even pronounce one of its letters. Technical debt is equally unpleasant in its own way; like the financial kind of debt, it holds you back and haunts you. It’s the hard-to-change, error-prone parts of your code that bog down your project and its maintenance. Ward Cunningham – the guy behind the wiki and contributor to the concept of Extreme Programming – coined this clever metaphor, and it’s the topic of Thursday’s Ignite Your Coding.

David LaribeeWalking us through the topic of technical debt is our guest David Laribee, who’s going to be our technical debt counselor, providing advice on how to pay back technical debt. He coaches the product development team at VersionOne, has over a dozen years’ experience building enterprise software and coaching lean/agile teams in many industries. He’s also a co-organizer of the ALT.NET movement, and was a Microsoft Architecture MVP for 2007 and 2008.

If you’d like to know more about David’s thoughts on technical debt, check out this article of his from the December 2009 issue of MSDN Magazine: Using Agile Techniques to Pay Back Technical Debt.

What’s Ignite Your Coding All About?

In case you were wondering what Ignite Your Coding is all about: It’s all about helping you, the software developer, find ways to stay on top of the technological, economic and social changes that affect you and your work every day. We got our hands on some of the biggest thinkers and doers in our field and asked them if they’d like to chat about the industry, how they got started, where they see the opportunities are, how they deal with change and how to be generally awesome. We got some big names from the Microsoft/.NET world, but we also went farther afield and got some people from beyond that world as well, because a different perspective is often helpful.

If You Want to Catch the Live Webcast on Thursday and/or Ask David Questions…

You’ll need:

If You Want to Listen to a Recording of the Webcast Later…

We’ll make it available in MP3 format soon. Watch this site for details!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Ignite Your Coding, Episode 1: Andy Hunt

Andy Hunt

Ignite Your Coding

Andy Hunt has been behind some of the biggest ideas in everyday software development in the past decade. From co-authoring the Agile Manifesto and The Pragmatic Programmer to starting The Pragmatic Bookshelf, one of the most influential developer book publishers, to helping bring about the rise of MVC web frameworks, chances are that he’s had some influence on your day-to-day work. In this one-hour webcast, we’ll talk with Andy about the ideas in his latest book, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning. We’ll discuss why your brain is where software development really happens, how you can refactor your thinking and as he puts it, “just the plain old weirdness that is people”.

You can listen to the recording of the webcast (recorded on March 4, 2010) in a couple of ways:

 Direct Download:

MP3 - click here to download

Subscribe to the podcast: (so you don’t miss an episode)

RSS Feed   Subscribe with Zune   Subscribe with iTunes

As always, if you have questions, comments or suggestions on how to make Ignite Your Coding better, we want to hear from you! Feel free to email either of us – John Bristowe and Joey deVilla.

About Ignite Your Coding

Ignite Your Coding is a series of interviews where Microsoft Canada Developer Evangelists John Bristowe and Joey deVilla talk with some of the brightest lights in the professional programming world about their areas of interest, dealing with the constant change in the industry and their suggestions on how to be a better software developer.

Podcast Participants: Andy Hunt, John Bristowe and Joey deVilla.

Music: Win This Race by picadillyCircus Sound Design, courtesy of iStockphoto.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Jeremy Miller on Thursday’s “Ignite Your Coding”

Jeremy Miller

This week’s Ignite Your Coding podcast features Jeremy Miller, Chief Software Architect at Dovetail Software, the coolest ISV in Austin. In our one-hour webcast, my co-host John Bristowe and I will discuss a wide range of topics, from newer OSS efforts in the .NET developer community and how they’re trying to reduce friction, AAA-style mocking instead of record/replay mocking, the effective use extension methods for cleaner/readable/easier unit testing, jQuery magic, and many other topics.

imageIn case you were wondering what Ignite Your Coding is all about: It’s all about helping you, the software developer, find ways to stay on top of the technological, economic and social changes that affect you and your work every day. We got our hands on some of the biggest thinkers and doers in our field and asked them if they’d like to chat about the industry, how they got started, where they see the opportunities are, how they deal with change and how to be generally awesome. We got some big names from the Microsoft/.NET world, but we also went farther afield and got some people from beyond that world as well, because a different perspective is often helpful.

If You Want to Catch the Live Webcast on Thursday and/or Ask Jeremy Questions…

You’ll need:

If You Want to Listen to a Recording of the Webcast Later…

We’ll make it available in MP3 format soon. Watch this site for details!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Ignite Your Coding: This Afternoon with Glenn Block!

Ignite Your CodingIf it’s Thursday, it must be time for me and my fellow Developer Evangelist John Bristowe to host another live Ignite Your Coding webcast!

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This week’s guest is Glenn Block, a Program Manager for .NET FX at Microsoft. Glenn’s one of the go-to guys on Prism, Unity, MEF and ways of building maintainable and reconfigurable applications out of pieces that you can assemble and rearrange in general. We’ll talk with him about building composite applications, design patterns, the “alphabet soup” of SOLID, DI and IoC and whatever questions you ask him.

If You Want to Catch the Live Webcast on Thursday and/or Ask Glenn Questions…

You’ll need:

If You Want to Listen to a Recording of the Webcast Later…

We’ll make it available in MP3 format soon. Watch this site for details!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Thursday’s “Ignite Your Coding” Webcast: “Composable Applications FTW” with Glenn Block

Ignite Your CodingThis Thursday, my fellow Developer Evangelist John Bristowe and I will host another live Ignite Your Coding webcast, where we’ll interview another high-profile software developer and pass along some of your questions.

This week’s guest is Glenn Block, a Program Manager for .NET FX at Microsoft. Glenn’s one of the go-to guys on Prism, Unity, MEF and ways of building maintainable and reconfigurable applications out of pieces that you can assemble and rearrange in general. We’ll talk with him about building composite applications, design patterns, the “alphabet soup” of SOLID, DI and IoC and whatever questions you ask him.

blocks.png(We don’t have a photo of Glenn Block, but we do have the image to the right, which is the symbol for MEF – that’s Managed Extensibility Framework – which is one of Glenn’s projects. It’s a lucky coincidence that Glenn’s last name is also featured prominently in the image.)

If You Want to Catch the Live Webcast on Thursday and/or Ask Glenn Questions…

You’ll need:

If You Want to Listen to a Recording of the Webcast Later…

We’ll make it available in MP3 format soon. Watch this site for details!

What’s Ignite Your Coding All About, Anyway?

It’s all about helping you, the software developer, find ways to stay on top of the technological, economic and social changes that affect you and your work every day. We got our hands on some of the biggest thinkers and doers in our field and asked them if they’d like to chat about the industry, how they got started, where they see the opportunities are, how they deal with change and how to be generally awesome. We got some big names from the Microsoft/.NET world, but we also went farther afield and got some people from beyond that world as well, because a different perspective is often helpful.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Yes, There WILL be an “Ignite Your Coding” RSS Feed

ignite your coding rss

For those of you who’ve been wondering if we’ll be setting up an RSS feed for recordings of Ignite Your Coding, the answer is “yes”.

Here’s how Ignite Your Coding works:

  • On the actual day of the Ignite Your Coding live event, we do the interview live, as implied by the phrase “live event”. From 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. (Eastern) on that day, we chat with our guest and you can listen to it as it happens if you’ve got a Windows machine running the Live Meeting client (available for free from the Live Meeting download page). The Live Meeting client also lets you see what visuals we’re putting up – mostly just information about our guest – and you can also use it to type in questions for us to ask our guest.
  • After the live Ignite Your Coding event, we take the recording of the event, do a tiny bit of post-production (adding an intro and outro, checking sound levels and so on) and post the interview in MP3 form, with a link to the recording in an RSS feed so that your favourite podcatching application or system can grab them.

I’ve got my plate full with more than the usual amount of tech evangelism activities, so there’s a team doing all this stuff. Once they tell me where they’re putting the recording and RSS feed, I’ll tell you. I’m told it’ll be soon.

Want to know about the upcoming guests on Ignite Your Coding? Check out the Ignite Your Coding site!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.