Talk with Justin Kohnen

As the last host of my first tour, Justin Kohnen deserves a special place. He spent the entire tour as the anchor for the end of the tour. When I left for Chicago initially, I basically only had the first week planned definitively, plus Justin at the very end, 3 weeks away. Over the first week, the middle of the tour filled in with some amazing experiences, but, through it all, there was Justin. :) Add the fact that he was the only non-Ruby guy, and it was a recipe for a fun and interesting weekend.

I spent Saturday and Sunday programming with him, and we did some great stuff, had some great conversations and just generally coded the weekend away!

Both of us were new to Silverlight (SL) and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), but, after a marathon push on Saturday, we figured it all out in time to build a reasonable architecture on Sunday. While the application we worked was secret, Justin said it would be okay to talk about it like a chat server. So, let's just say that we were building a chat server: SL on the front; WCF in the middle; and, SQL Server on the back.

Special thanks to Keith Elder for taking some time on Saturday night and walking us through the initial setup of the WCF services.

Enjoy!


Interview with Justin Kohnen from Corey Haines on Vimeo.