Sunday 2 February 2014

Wahlin's "Web Weekly" at ng-conf

Dan Wahlin has published the four 'Wahlin's Web Weekly at ng-conf' video interviews I recorded a few weeks ago for him at ng-conf, the world's first conference dedicated to the AngularJS framework.

The ".NET Community Leaders" panel discussion with Jeremy Likness, John Papa and Ward Bell (as well as Dan himself) is the one I was most excited to record, and it exceeded my expectations. I really think it should be mandatory viewing for any Silverlight or ASP.NET MVC developer! My only regret is that we ran out of time and so didn't get around to discussing security. But there's lots of interesting stuff in this panel, and different takes on the best way forward with Angular and other helper libraries.

Below I've embedded the original YouTube videos that Dan has published.

If the arguments about Angular's advantages, especially for the Silverlight developer, made in the panel video don't convince you, I strongly recommend listening to this podcast (Jesse Liberty's 'Yet Another Podcast' series from earlier this week. This episode on Angular and Breeze is where Microsoft's Scott Hunter and John Galloway talk about future tooling for AngularJS.

At one point Scott Hunter, a team lead for Visual Studio, says that customers kept asking which SPA framework they should use with a Microsoft back end and that Microsoft avoided an answer - until now, when they're recommending AngularJS! He also talks about the tooling that's being added to Visual Studio to make Angular 'a first class citizen'.

Watch the panel discussion and give the podcast a listen. You might be surprised by what you learn!

If you're wondering why there's a couple of jump-cuts in the panel discussion, the first one is because the DSLR I used to record the discussion automatically shuts down after 30 minutes and stops recording (it's to avoid paying higher taxes on camera equipment that can record video - with an arbitrary limit set for Europe) so I had to go back and ask Jeremy to re-start his comments. The second jump-cut towards the end one is because Brad Green, interviewed in a separate video, knocked on the door while we were recording, so we had to stop recording to let him in.

And if you're wondering why there's a bit of corpsing from Dan and Ari going on halfway through Ari Lerner's interview, it's because John Lindquist arrived for his interview and knocked on the door mid-interview and I crept out from behind the camera on all fours to go and answer the door without appearing on camera. I don't know how Dan and Ari managed to keep mostly straight faces as I suddenly started crawling around on the floor in front of them!

Most of the interviews have an 'out-take' after the end titles sequence ;-) and if you're wondering why the zoom bits are so jerky and messy it's because the videos were filmed with a DSLR which lacks auto-focus and motorized zoom. Hopefully it doesn't spoil things too much.