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The Stack Overflow Podcast

Podcast #6

This is the sixth episode of the StackOverflow podcast, wherein Joel and I discuss the following:

  • A mercifully brief critique of Joel's Skype avatar. Of course, he should be using this image.

  • The other programmer I'm working with, Jarrod, will be visiting me this week. It's his first visit to California! Welcome to the San Francisco Bay area -- geek mecca. We will get some pair programming time in.

  • We'll also visit the Computer History Museum, one of my favorite places in the world. I like to refer to it as computer hardware pornography.

  • An examination of the ASP.NET MVC development model as compared to the classic ASP.NET Form model.

  • We'll be using JQuery as our JavaScript and AJAX framework, and ELMAH for error handling duties.

  • A bit on the Fog Creek philosophy of error handling: crashes are automatically entered in Fogbugz.

  • About crashing in general. I enjoy talking about this because I think it's incredibly important. Crash responsibly!

  • Why you should pay people not to work at your company.

  • Why am I so evangelical about Twitter?

  • What should Joel talk about at the Rails Conference Keynote?

  • Is it unfair to dismiss Java? Is the only difference between Java and COBOL that Java doesn't require you to type keywords in all capital letters?

  • The rare topic that Joel and I agree on: presentations should be about entertainment first and information second.

  • What's the best way to deal with the larger bandwidth requirements for a podcast? We're going to use up more than 1250 GB this month. Should we be on ITConversations?

  • We would like to support OpenID for site logins.

  • About my $5,000 donation to open source on .NET -- or more specifically, to ScrewTurn Wiki.

  • A brief mention of Google DocType and the now defunct Google Answers.

  • Is Google starting to have the Microsoft "big company" problem? Why can't big companies effectively spin off smaller companies?

  • What is the Microsoft "Strategy Tax"?

  • The list of new features in Vista. How many did you know about? More importantly, how many of these features do you use and care about?

  • A mention of the [Software Engineering Radio](http://se-radio.net/ ) podcast.

  • As usual, thank you for all the questions and for the Wiki edits! We appreciate all the interest in the private beta signups, too.

We also answered the following listener questions, with a lot of peripheral discussion on related topics:

  1. Warren Henning: Why custom build stackoverflow.com when you could use something off the shelf?

  2. Andrew Hay: Why did you choose to reinvent the default ASP.NET membership provider?

  3. Martin Wallace: Have you considered open sourcing the stackoverflow.com code?

  4. Daniel Thompson: What should be in the next version of Windows, and is it worth spending hundreds of dollars to upgrade?

If you'd like to submit a question to be answered in our next episode, record an audio file (90 seconds or less) and mail it to podcast@stackoverflow.com. You can record a question using nothing but a telephone and a web browser.

The transcript wiki for this episode is available for public editing.

Episode source