Scott's areas of interest

Scott Hanselman: TypeScript is demonstrably important and it happens to be from Microsoft. It was a risk to talk about TypeScript before it was deemed important, but, clearly, it is. The trick is to use your gut.

Another example is WebAssembly. We have a thing called Blazor that lets you compile ASP.NET pages to WebAssembly. Part of it is from Microsoft. I think it's cool and it will change things. Blazor might not become the next Ruby on Rails, but it is important.

WebAssembly is the foundation. Saying, "Here's a library and it's built on JavaScript," is different from saying, "Here's an entirely new language you've never heard of." JavaScript gets you the interview; it's your way in. Another example is getting C# to run on the Java virtual machine (JVM). You can use one thing like a bridge to the other thing.

Remember all that time that we spent trying to get virtual machines running in browsers? Little squares, Java applets, Flash, and Silverlight were all different ways that people were working around the internet itself. HTML didn't do what we needed and JavaScript was immature. We needed real tools. Java made Java applets, C# went with Silverlight, and Flash was for animations and then YouTube. Flash pushed us forward in the context of video codecs, Silverlight gave us really great graphics, and Java gave us Java applets in the browser.

We all did physics demos, but then everyone was asking, "Why did Microsoft kill Silverlight?" No one killed any of those plugins. The Internet itself killed those plugins and now we have a virtual machine in the browser: JavaScript. Rather than remoting user interfaces, we're now remoting code, which is not VT100 terminals or HTML terminals: it's now bytecode terminals and JavaScript is the bytecode. WebAssembly or binary WebAssembly is going to be the bytecode.

If someone has spent 15 or 20 years in the business writing C#, they will say, "I don't want to learn JavaScript. I've got all this C# code."

If we came out and said, "Here's some secret sauce that runs inside of WebAssembly," or, "Here's a plugin," which is what we did with Silverlight, "and it's all secret and closed source," that would be one thing, but there's not a non-open-source thing in the entire stack. Having an entirely open-source stack becomes compelling.

Blazor lets you go and manipulate the Document Object Model (DOM) and write full-on single-page applications (SPAs) in C#, and take existing 15-year-old dynamic link libraries (DLLs) and repurpose them, and run them in the browser. That's got to be important.

Tiny devices also interest me. The device that I held up earlier is not a Raspberry Pi, which is a microcomputer; this is actually a microcontroller. It has 5 or 6 MB of RAM and can run .NET. Imagine running a .NET application on a microcontroller and talking to sensors and the Internet of Things (IoT), and having the battery last for weeks instead of hours.

Microcontrollers aren't microcomputers; that's significant. If I can have something this big run .NET, then I can run it in 64K on a tiny device or in 64 GB, and I can run it on Apache Spark or something like that. This proves that .NET scales.

Geertjan Wielenga: Do you talk about these topics when you go to conferences?

Scott Hanselman: Yes, absolutely.

Geertjan Wielenga: What other talks have you given recently?

Scott Hanselman: I was in the Netherlands a couple of weeks ago. I went to Breda and then 's-Hertogenbosch. I called a couple of buddies of mine and said that I was in town. They rented a cinema in 's-Hertogenbosch and they put the word out. We combined three user groups and about 750 people turned up.

I believe that the talk was called ".NET Everywhere: Is It Possible and Is It Cool?" That was just me on stage for two and a half hours straight talking about Raspberry Pis. I showed Docker in the web on Windows and Linux on Mac; it was a tour of the .NET ecosystem, and it was designed to challenge assumptions.

I provide edutainment, which is education and entertainment. Putting on a show is easy, but I like to edutain. The fact that I could make that many people happy and sell out a movie theater is pretty cool. That's the culmination of my job, but it's not about me. People think it's about me. They say, "Hanselman is in town. Let's go and see him at the movie theater," but when you go to church, you don't go to see the preacher: you go for the community. My goal is to bring people together.

When you go to the circus, you don't go to see the ringleader: you go to see the elephants. I'm a ringleader of the .NET community. I'm maybe the people's programmer, but we're all members of the same community. If the audience leaves saying, "Man, there's such great stuff happening in .NET right now," then I've been successful. Do you see the difference? That's the ideal advocate in my opinion.