Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman

Not every startup starts up smoothly. Alex Papadimoulis shares his stories of near-failure moving from a consultancy to a software company while working on a wildly popular blog at night. What mistakes did his company make in sales and marketing, and how long did it take them to change course?

Gael Fraiteur had a full time job while working on the side on his open source Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) project "PostSharp." He's since turned his project into a successful commercial entity called SharpCrafters. What did he learn along the way and what can we learn from his successes and troubles? We also learn about Aspect Oriented Programming and how AOP tools like PostSharp can help your projects today.

Kendall Miller is a founder at .NET development tools vendor Gibraltar Software. They are two years into their their startup experiment and are becoming a small, mature company with some great products. How much did they need to fund their startup? How do they market and spread the word? What if there are free or open source versions of their software out there?

Scott chats with Nick Ganju CTO of ZocDoc on how he's building his business with BizSpark and ASP.NET. Does he use Open Source? When do they write their own libraries and when do they buy? What kinds of issues does a .NET startup run into when hiring?

This week Scott skypes with Paul in London. He's recently moved from Australia and has simultaneously launched his own micro-ISV focused on convention-based deployments made easy. What's involved? How did it get started and what does this Octopus Deploy do?

In this first Startup Series episode, Scott talks to Gabriel Weinberg about DuckDuckGo, his new search engine. How dare he go up against Google? He dare with better, more relevant search results. Learn how to be an overnight success in just 15 short years.

Scott talks to designer Jeremy Kratz about the design process from yellow legal pad to complete design. What kinds of things should a designer take into consideration? Where does design stop and CSS begin, or is there a distinction? Should YOU hire a designer?

Scott talks via Skype to Haixun Wang at Microsoft Research Asia about Trinity: a distributed graph database and computing platform. What is a GraphDB? How is it different from a traditional Relational DB, a Document DB or even just a naive in-memory distributed data structure? Will your next database be a graph database?

Scott sits down with Rafael Rivera to talk about the black box that is Windows. Or is it? Rafael doesn't take no for an answer and shares stories of breaking apps to fix them. No more secrets, this week on Hanselminutes.

Scott Hanselman and Scott Hunter (also known as Scotts the Lesser) talk about recently Azure/Web reorg, the direction that ASP.NET and Azure are talking, and how they see open source fitting into the future at Microsoft.