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Questions

  1. Rob tell us a little bit about who you are? What you are doing? What has been going on in your life for the last couple of years?
  2. Yeah, and where are you at now?
  3. Telligent Systems does what?
  4. You know you mentioned you really liked being a part of the ASP.NET 1.0 team, what were some of the goals you guys had, the initial 15 guys, what were things you were trying to build with ASP.NET and did no you get there do you think?
  5. What were the initial goals, what did you guys see that that was wrong with ASP that you wanted to fix?
  6. I have to ask the question as you mentioned it earlier. During that time frame Microsoft was in this really really competitive mode because J2EE was growing and you certainly look at a lot of ASP.NET compared against its technological cousin JSP, Servlets and JSP, how much were you guys looking over the fence at what the Java guys were doing and saying that is a good idea or we can improve on that idea, were you guys sort of operating in isolation because Microsoft wanted to do avoid lawsuits or were you really free to look around and see not just Java and Servlets JSP but other technologies, how much awareness did you have of the industry around you when you were doing this?
  7. Well one of the guys in the Java space Bruce Tate who worked for IBM for a while during that time frame said a Sun guy and a IBM guy basically went home the same weekend and said hey this ASP thing is just a compiler problem. They wrote a compiler to compile the servlets, but they deliberately mimicked the ASP syntax, leveraging the technology is not a bad thing, he was just curious to see how much of the two were actually borrowing from each other?
  8. One of the things that people have basically lined up as criticism of ASP.NET compared against the JSP world is this whole separation of model view controller that is so prevalent in the JSP space, it does not really seem to be something that ASP.NET's design philosophy whatever espouses. A JSP guy walks up to you and says you don't do MVC and because of that you suck. What do you say back to him?
  9. When you went out doing your evangelism and so forth, did you get a lot of people, finding that the same philosophy or did you run into a lot of folks who were like well because this book said we must do MVC, we must do MVC or just kind of curious to know, because obviously you talked to a lot of people, I would imagine both pro and con of Microsoft, is that par, evangelist does not really need to evangelize the people who already love you. Did you feel good?
  10. One of things, in many respects listening to you, it's almost like coming home because we got a lot of the same stuff in the J2EE community, Martin Fowler is talking about differentiate layers from tiers, they are a logical partition from your physical partitions and so forth. This is very much, what you're your saying is very much the patterns community methodology and so forth and yet this is the ironic part, Microsoft has traditionally been lambasted for not having a patterns community surrounding it for people not coming out and saying much the same thing. Do you think this is just a matter of time that the .NET community needs to grow older, or is this something that is endemic to the technology endemic to the company, where are these discussions coming from because they don't seem to be coming right now, they don't seem to be happening?
  11. I am playing devil's advocate here for a second, but doesn't that also open you up to the idea of as Don refers to them the ex jounalism major, right the guy who couldn't find a job working as a news reporter and so decided instead that well I've got to find a job somewhere, so I'll take up programming and do that for a living until something else rears its ugly head at me and I go off and do that for a while and then you get these stereotypical bad VB programs. Is that necessarily a good thing, do we want that?
  12. Where do we as consultants, as developers, where do we draw the line though. This gets into some of the whole Agile space now, but where do we draw a line between knowing what they want today and being able to look at that and say, you know what I've been through this three times before, they know that A leads to B, B leads to C and C leads to D, so therefore I better do something that will allow me to do D three years from now, of course the Agile guys call YAGNI, "You Ain't Gonna Need It" syndrome, where do you I mean now that you are in this space again, now your back into that consulting space, where do you draw that line, how do you make that determination?
  13. Switching back for a second, your time at Microsoft, what was if there is one thing you look back, how many years three, four or five years at Microsoft, what was like the one technical feature in ASP. NET that you are most proud of?
  14. Now both of those are ASP.NET 2.0 features. Just making sure ...
  15. Gotta ask this question? Obviously you are fairly biased in terms of your involvement with ASP.NET and so forth, but I did the same thing to Chris Anderson and I'll do it to you, what do you think about the smart client?
  16. But its one of those question that everybody, is kind of, they are recognizing, there is this tension here now, right. Where before it was kind of like, before we had just the rich client, the thick client, and then it was the browser, and the browser, the browser and oh the deployment model is so much simpler not that anybody thought about it in those terms, but it was uber browser everywhere and now that we have deployment options people are coming back and saying which one do I use. Help me Rob, help me, which one do I want to use when?
  17. Do you find sometimes that we are just going around in hamster wheel? Because it seems like ages ago, we went to the browser model because we were centralizing and then before that we went to the PC because we wanted to take advantage of processing power at the client's side and before that we were doing mainframes that makes twice around the hamster wheel already. Do you think we are making any progress?
  18. A part of that concern of the smart client is the overhead for example of the .NET framework and if I have to pull down the .NET framework to get an update and particularly with all of these older machines still out there, my grandmother runs Windows 95, .NET framework is not going to run on Windows 95, do we have to wait ten years before .NET becomes ubiquitous or anything becomes ubiquitous. .NET, JVM whatever enough to really enable this smart client stuff to really work?
  19. If there were one change you could make on the .NET framework as it stands today, we will count 2.0 as part of this, doesn't have to be ASP.NET it could be any part of .NET framework 2.0 what would it be?
  20. What do you think that would have done for us? As a developer that sounds kind of cool but in general beyond the developing community who cares?