Summary: 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 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: Warren Henning: Why custom build stackoverflow.com when you could use something off the shelf? Andrew Hay: Why did you choose to reinvent the default ASP.NET membership provider? Martin Wallace: Have you considered open sourcing the stackoverflow.com code? 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.
