In case everybody wasn't aware, and to be honest it is really my fault for not announcing this, but I started a podcast with Lee Dumond, Dustin Davis, and Keyvan Nayyeri called the Mash This Podcast which can be found here and on iTunes.
We just released our 5th episode in which we talked with Brad Wilson of Microsoft about his work on the ASP.NET MVC and Web API team now commonly referred to as the ASP.NET Web Stack team. Our conversation started with us focusing on Microsoft's major announcement that happened last week regarding the open sourcing and accepting public contributions to the ASP.NET Web Stack. The announcement surrounded the fact that were going to make the process of developing the web stack open source, under the Apache open source license, instead of just releasing the source at major release points like they have done in the past. The difference may be lost on some people, but this means the direction of the framework is now influenced by the community instead of just a select few Microsoft employees and ASPInsiders.
Brad talked to us about what drove this decision with in Microsoft and some of the hurdles they had to over come legally and technically in order to allow people to contribute this source code. I think we are the first podcast to actually talk with a team member on the Web Stack team after the announcement was made, so that was pretty exciting for us. Even I got in on the action and contributed a small patch to ASP.NET MVC that has bugged me since ASP.NET MVC 2.
The patch can be seen here:
And the announcement of the accept request can be seen here by Marcin Dobosz:
After talking about the open sourcing of the Web Stack we dove in to the new ASP.NET Web API, which is a "newish" technology. The Web API was previously known as WCF, but it has been refactored and modernized into what is now called ASP.NET Web API. The Web API has been designed to be first stop and best framework for creating web based API's using a RESTful style. We had many questions relating to this new framework and Brad was able to answer them all and gave us many technical details about the design and process that the new Web API adheres to. Listening to Brad talk about the technology behind Web API is going to be very helpful for any .NET RESTful developers out there that will be starting new project soon, so if you have the time I highly recommend this podcast.
This podcast can be downloaded from our episode 5 page. If you’re interested to follow the Mash This Podcast, you can subscribe to our RSS feed or Apple iTunes.