Mark Nichols

Last week I had the privilege to visit Adler Planetarium and talk to the brains behind the interfacing of Adler Planetarium, the Worldwide Telescope (WWT) and Kinect.  When it’s complete it will be showcased in the Grainger Sky Theater which was just renovated and upgraded.  Adler, once the first planetarium in the western hemisphere, is now the most technologically advanced in the world.  Kinect will be used to control the WWT in the new theater and, hopefully over time, many exhibits that visitors will be able to use and learn from.  Brilliant!

Michelle Yehling, Dr. Mark SubbaRao and Jonathan Fay talked to me for over an hour and shared plans and insight about how they are using technology to demonstrate, teach and research the cosmos.  I can’t thank them enough!

Jonathan Fay of Microsoft Research, Dr. Mark SubbaRao, me (not a Dr. Mark) and my sister Michelle (Nichols) Yehling right after the recording of the podcast.

That’s me in the background talking to Mark and Jonathan – unfortunately, Michelle got cut out of this pic.  I am literally sitting inside of the “Mini Dome” where they test various displays of the night sky.  It’s about 15 feet across and we affectionately called it “The Cone of Silence”.  You can see Saturn being shown on the dome while we were talking.  How’s that for “atmosphere”?

• Adler Planetarium
• Worldwide Telescope

Listen to the podcast:

Developer Smackdown Episode 54 – Kinecting with the Cosmos with Jonathan Fay, Dr. Mark SubbaRao & Michelle Yehling (Part 1)

Below are a few pictures I took several weeks before the Grainger Sky Theater was finished.  It was a great opportunity to see some of the upgraded technology.

The floor contains multicolor LED’s that are controlled by playing a video.  Whatever color the corresponding video pixel is, that’s the color of the LED in the floor.  Simple to use and very effective.

The entire theater has been redone.  They say the last time the walls were that bare, it was the late 1920’s when the planetarium was built.

Also, while I was there my sister (who works there and got me in) and I experienced an audio check.  Several thousand watts pumping out Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon”.  How cool and appropriate is that?

20 super-high res/high contrast projectors around the room generate over 8000 pixels horizon to horizon.

Definitely something to see (and hear)!

In this show, Mark and Clark sit down with Matt Hidinger and talk about the building CTA Watch for Windows Phone 7. Matt discusses his experiences over this past year and shares a great deal of passion about the platform.,

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Show Notes

whois Matt Hidinger

Matt Hidinger is a .NET developer and enthusiast. He is currently doing .NET consulting at Triton-Tek focusing on ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight, and Windows Phone 7.

What is CTA Watch?

Never miss a bus or a train again. Never find yourself waiting and freezing at a stop in the harsh Chicago winters. With CTA Watch you will always know the perfect time to leave your home or office. By tapping into real-time transit information for all of the CTA’s buses or trains, CTA Watch can locate nearby stops and quickly give you the next arrivals with minimal effort. We fully embrace the glance-and-go philosophy of Window Phone, allowing you to mark your most frequently traveled routes and stops as Favorites. Now every time you launch CTA Watch it will automatically display the Next Arrivals right on your home screen, so you can get in, get out, and back to life.

View Slide Show

Install CTA Watch

Resources From the Show

• WCF WebAPI
• Chicago Transit Authority
• CTA Maps
• Bing Maps Control
• GZip Compression
• MVC Action Filters
• Bing Visual Search for WP7 Apps
• Continuum animation from Telerik
• Metro Design Guidelines
• Negative Space

Application Mentioned Show

• App Tracker
• IMDB
• Clark’s List of Apps
• Flixster
• Stocks
• Twitter
• Transit Directions

Sponsors

ThatConference is a brand new conference coming to the Kalahari Resort in the Wisconsin Dells on August 13th, 14th, 15th of 2012. This is a conference is founded by Developers who want to create the conference they’ve always want to go to and for a price that’s easy to justify to your boss. First and foremost this is a developer’s conference. 3 days of any technology and nothing but code. You can find more at ThatConference.com.

WebSite Hosting is provided by Applied Innovations.

Music

ReMix.NIN.com, and http://www.podcastthemes.com/

In this episode, we talk to Keith Burnell, a Software Engineer with Skyline Technologies in Green Bay, Wisconsin about a topic near and dear to all three of us: Test Driven Development.

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Show Notes

We discuss Inversion of Control (IOC), Dependency Injection, behavior, mocks/stubs/fakes, what unit testing really means and why we create them religiously on each project we work on.

Resources

• Rhino Mocks – Mocking framework for .NET
• MOQ – Mocking framework for .NET
• Unity – DI/IOC Tool for .NET
• StructureMap – DI/IOC Tool for .NET
• Kent Beck – Test Driven Development: By Example
• Roy Osherove – The Art of Unit Testing
• Martin Fowler – Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
• PluralSight – Training Libraries on numerous subjects including TDD

Show Sponsors

ThatConference is a brand new conference coming to the Kalahari Resort in the Wisconsin Dells on August 13th, 14th, 15th of 2012. This is a conference is founded by Developers who want to create the conference they’ve always want to go to and for a price that’s easy to justify to your boss. First and foremost this is a developer’s conference. 3 days of any technology and nothing but code. You can find more at ThatConference.com.

Thank you for the support, Developer Smackdown is 2!?!? Yes you heard it right. 50 shows in 2 years. Clark and Mark start the show musing a bit and then dive into how might you learn using NuGet as an example.

Play Episode 50 Now

Go to the show

Show Notes

Thank you for all the support over the past 2 years. For our 2 year anniversary and show #50 we went to our old watering hole, Hooters in Schaumburg. Sorry for the background noise, I guess it’s part of the experience.

Clark has been asking a lot of questions these days and the current one is “how do you learn”? Using NuGet as an example Clark and Mark explore how people might in fact learn of NuGet’s existence and why that might be the case. You can find more about NuGet at NuGet.org.

Travis and Ian, we love you guys! Keep up all the awesome you do.

Sponsors

ThatConference is a brand new conference coming to the Kalahari Resort in the Wisconsin Dells on August 13th, 14th, 15th of 2012. This is a conference is founded by Developers who want to create the conference they’ve always want to go to and for a price that’s easy to justify to your boss. First and foremost this is a developer’s conference. 3 days of any technology and nothing but code. You can find more at ThatConference.com.

WebSite Hosting is provided by Applied Innovations.

Music

ReMix.NIN.com, and http://www.podcastthemes.com/

In this episode we got a little serious and talk to Nick Pearson, Mike Price and Nishanth Samala about an application they are working on to help friends and loved ones use targeted communications when a medical “situation” make things exceedingly difficult.

Not only did we get serious but we also got very personal as we shared some real experiences of the Smackdown hosts to drive home some of the real benefits of this type of technology.

• ASP.NET MVC
• MVC Scaffolding
• WCF Web Services
• Azure
• SQL Azure
• Windows Phone
• Silverlight and MVVM
• NuGet
• Code-First Entity Framework

Play Episode 49

Personal request: Check out the links below. Get in shape and make a difference. Thanks.

Find this episode here: http://developersmackdown.com/Archives/Show/49

Find The Smackdown on your phone:

Clark and Mark sit down with Microsoft’s Brandon Satrom to talk through three very different implementations of an ASP.NET Helper. We dive into the dirty details of each and how come each implementation is just so different.

Listen Now: Play Here

Go to the Show Notes on DeveloperSmackdown.com

Find The Smackdown on your phone:

What’s the first rule of bit.ly?…You can’t bit.ly a bit.ly!  In this episode we talk to Matt LaMay of Bit.ly about API’s, the analytics that they provide, how they are used, how they fit in to the internet ecosystem and where they are hoping to go in the future.

Listen Now: Play Here

Show Notes

Matt LaMay:

In this show we talk to Matt who is the platform manager at bit.ly, where he works with developers to integrate the bit.ly API and hosts a monthly "hackabit" hackathon. In his spare time, Matt is a music and audio geek.

Resources:

• Bit.ly API Documentation: This is where you can find out how to integrate bit.ly services into your application.
• Domainr: Find out what top-level domains are available for your brand.  Go here and test out your ideas and get suggestions.
• OAuth Community Site:  An open protocol to allow secure API authorization in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications.
• Bitly.tv:  What people are watching.
• Sidebar Bookmarklet: The Sidebar Bookmarklet slides out to shorten your long link, then shows Traffic, Conversations, and History.
• Chrome Extension: Shorten from within the Chrome browser

Find the Smackdown on your phone (thanks to Bit.ly):

In this version, Clark and I muse about ASP.NET Helpers and NuGet. What are they, getting started and of course deploying.

Listen Now: Play Here

Show Notes

The number of helpers is slowing growing.  Not only are there some good ones included with the framework but the community has started to embrace things as well.  After the show, we decided to just create the IE9 Helper we talked about.  It has since been published and you can check it out at: http://csell.net/2011/01/29/IntroducingTheIE9HelperV1.aspx. During the show we mentioned we were not aware of the actions required to have your helper listed in the WebMatrix NuGet feed. As it turns out, you just have to include the tag ‘ASPNETWEBPAGES’.  See the complete NuGet list here: http://nuget.org/Tags/ASPNETWEBPAGES

Show Links:

• NuGet Project: http://NuGet.CodePlex.Com
• NuGet Gallery: http://NuGet.org
• IE9 Helper: http://IE9Helper.CodePlex.com
• UrlShortenerHelper: http://UrlShortenerHelper.CodePlex.com
• Facebook Helper: http://FaceBookHelper.CodePlex.com
• UserVoiceHelper: http://UserVoiceHelper.CodePlex.com
• List of Helpers at V1 Launch: http://www.microsoft.com/web/webmatrix/partners.aspx
• WebMatrix Download: http://web.ms/webmatrix
• WebMatrix Documentation: http://asp.net/webmatrix
• ASP.NET Web Pages Helper Documentation: http://www.asp.net/webmatrix/tutorials/asp-net-web-pages-api-reference#Helpers

Make sure you hit your local grocer and pick up a 6′er of the newly released Obama beer.