The Full Stack–a videocast series with Jesse Liberty and Jon Galloway
I just posted the second in an ongoing videocast (screencast) series that I’m working on with Jesse Liberty called The Full Stack.
A full, working application
We’re building out a full, working application – not just demo or tutorial scale – which spans from the server to Windows Phone, Silverlight, web, and wherever else we (or the viewers) decide we should go. To that extent, we’ll be using those best practices Jesse and I’d use in a shipping, production application.
Pair-programing in public
We’re pair-programming in public so we can take turns making mistakes and asking questions. There’s definitely a place for polished, scripted tutorials and demos, and Jesse and I are both working hard on those, too. But sometimes when I’m watching a screencast or reading a walkthrough, I have questions that the instructor wouldn’t think to answer because – well, it’s all obvious, isn’t it? That’s one advantage of “live” training – you’ve got other learners in the class who will ask the questions you need answered. Jesse’s an expert on Silverlight and Windows Phone, and I’ve been focused on ASP.NET MVC and server-side technologies for a while, so we can take turns asking the questions about the areas where we’re not experts.
A work in progress
We’re building this out on the fly. We’ve got a general plan, but it’s flexible, and it changes as we go. We’re starting out by covering our basic technology stack, then moving between the server and clients as we (or our viewers) see fit.
Note: We’ll definitely be unit testing, and not as an afterthought. The first two episodes are overviewing the technology and the UI, but they’ll show up very soon. I wrote some example code in Part 1 to demonstrate NuGet and the mechanics of CRUD in MVC, but it’ll be replaced in the next episode or two.
Watch the first two episodes and let me know what you think.