Podcast #71

A collection of clips recorded at the San Francisco DevDays conference, including Joel Spolsky, Mark Harrison, Jeff Atwood, Scott Hanselman and Rory Blyth. This episode runs a bit longer than usual.

• Joel Spolsky on web usability

• Mark Harrison on Python and the Norvig spell checker

• Rory Blyth on iPhone development

• Scott Hanselman on ASP.NET MVC 2.0

• Jeff Atwood on Stack Overflow

• Ad-hoc roundtable podcast with Scott, Rory, Joel, and Jeff backstage at DevDays. Warning: extreme ramblosity ahead!

• Joel explains his Duct Tape Programmer post. Apparently DevDays is a duct tape conference, and this section of the recording is a duct tape podcast.

• Some discussion of the ubiquity of mobile code. Also, if you are nostalgic for the era "when development was hard", the consensus is that you should be doing mobile development today on iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, or Symbian.

• Rory elaborates on his experience with (and effusive opinions on) iPhone development to date. Is coding in Objective-C best accompanied by a flux capacitor, New Coke, and Max Headroom? Also, his excitement for MonoTouch.

• Joel and Scott put on their amateur language designer hats and have a spirited discussion of type inference and Fog Creek's in-house DSL, Wasabi.

• Scott covers some of the highlights of new and shiny features coming in the Visual Studio 2010 IDE, the C# 4.0 language, and the ASP.NET MVC 2.0 web framework.

Our favorite questions this week:

• How do I create unicode smileys? So far beyond :) it isn't even funny. Who knows, you might even learn some typography along the way!

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. We also have a dedicated phone number you can call to leave audio questions at 646-826-3879.

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

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