Coding 101 34 (Transcript)

Shannon Morse: Today on Coding 101 we are getting classy with practical classes. Are you ready? I know I am.

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Father Robert Ballecer: Welcome to Coding 101, it’s the place where we let you in on the secrets of the coding masters. I’m Father Robert Ballecer.

Shannon: And I’m Shannon Morse. And for the next 30 minutes we’re going to get you all learn-ded up on everything you need to know to be a code warrior.

Fr. Robert: Absolutely. Now Shannon, we’ve been kind of stalled on classes because it’s actually-

Shannon: Because they’re weird.

Fr. Robert: Because they’re weird. We’ve had a lot of people who have said- rightfully so- I still don’t get how this is useful. They understand how classes work, they understand how abstract classes work. They understand how interfaces work, but it’s kind of tricky to write something where you’re thinking, this is just extra work

Shannon: Yes, you know, my biggest problem with classes so far- I understand how to make them, I understand how to build them and how to make it implemented, but my problem is when am I going to use a class as opposed to just putting it all on one program style sheet.

Fr. Robert: Right. Which is today what we’re going to do is we’re going to give you some practical examples, and all of these examples we give you today will be available on the show notes page. Now we haven’t been putting it into the GitHub because we’re actually building packages. It’s not just one file anymore. And what we found was, if we made multiple files, people were complaining that it’s too difficult for them to put it in the proper place. So I’m actually zipping up all the program examples, there’s a link in the show notes page that you can download them from, and then when you open up the project file, it will open up exactly as it is on our computers.

Shannon: Oh that’s awesome. I didn’t know you could do that with GitHub. Yay. Well, I’m ready, are you ready to do a little bit of Snub’s compiling.

Fr. Robert: You know, I’d like some compiling please.

Shannon: Alright, I’ll make it short today. I’ll make it very, very short so let’s go ahead and jump over to my computer where I have visual studio express 2013 opened. Now my example is not super, super practical, but hey, it works for me. And that’s what matters. So first off I have just program.cs which is what you normally open up with. I’ve named it episode 34 snubs example, and the class is just called program. So I left that as the default. The first line is a default. And then down here you see a whole bunch of different commands. So what are all of these? Well, I have a whole bunch of new names for my class, my class called anime. So you’ll see the same thing over and over and I’ve done it a couple of different times. First off, I made this first amine class and I named it anime 1. And then it’s going to write anime 1, which is name of anime. Now down here, I have anime 1 and I set anime as sailor moon. So when it types out, it should type out as sailor moon. Same thing as this one, it should type out as dbz, but what do these do? Weird huh? And down here we just have press enter to exit. Now if you go up to my class, and I named this one class1.cs, this one is called public class anime. So that’s where we see that name again. Down here, I’m going to have- let me erase that because that’s not correct anymore, because I messed with it a little bit. So down here I have the name of anime, which is where you’re going to put in whatever the name of the anime is that you decided to call it. If you do not have a name, it just comes up as nane, which means what, in Japanese. And then here I have a conjugation, I think it’s called. And under that I have set anime where you can actually add a name of the anime. So this is where this comes into play. Now if I go ahead and build this file, so ill build a solution and hit start. You’ll see that it says nane for the first one, sailor moon, dbz, and nane, nane, nane, press enter to exit. So press enter to exit. Interesting isn’t it? Hmm.

Fr. Robert: Nice, I like that. Okay.

Shannon. Yeah. So it’s not very practical, but you could use this to- say you work at funimation or something. You could end up listing out all the different animes for your website into this c sharp code to put on your site or something like that.

Fr. Robert: Yeah, one of the ways I see you using this, and we’ve been trying to stress this- in fact, we’ve been hitting you over the head with this, I know this. Is to enforce a hierarchy. Once you have a set number of methods and variables and procedures that you want to attach to any anime series, you would build that anime class.

Shannon: Yeah, exactly. So that’s what I was doing in this one. Of course if I wanted to take the time to do it, I could also add new classes to this, such as an episode listing for a specific anime. And then if I wanted it to not coincide with all animes for all classes, I could always over ride that so it just coincides with a certain anime that I’ve figured out. Same with like a list of characters or a list of the voice actors or something like that. So many ways that you can use it and you can also use it with- after users have put information in themselves.

Fr. Robert: This is something that we’re going to make available for all of our listeners, all of our viewers, you’ll be able to download this code so you can play with it, and yes, I know, I know that on the surface it looks like this is a waste of time, you should just all include in one big program. And I know that I’ve told you this-

Shannon: It’s not, it’s so much more work.

Fr. Robert: It really is so much more work. And you’re going to- this is the way that you should program. This is the way that you should organize your code. And that’s what we’re trying to really push on you. And I’m sorry if it feels as if we’re covering the same thing over and over again, but this is really important.

Shannon: I’m going to engrain it into your head. I also have a viewer example. Well, not really a normal viewer example that we share where I show you the example code and everything. But you might remember that Nathan Flummer over in our Google+ community had recently asked us hey, I want you to mess with this Fibonacci sequence and answer this question that I ask of you. I don’t think anybody actually did it in the Google+ community. I tried it myself and I kept on getting errors. But he did put the answer in here. So if you want to try his code, and see if you can get it yourself, go over to our Google+ community, which is bit.ly/twitcoding101 and you can check out his answer. So try out that code and see if you can figure out his problem solving.

Fr. Robert: Right. And remember we’re just trying to give you ways to get into it. And one of the best ways to get into it is to try to solve a problem. Because if you’re solving a problem rather than coming up with code, it’s a much better way to think about programming. We stress this again, since the first module, which is, the code is inconsequential. The thought processes that go into breaking down a problem into solvable chunks is really what we’re after.

Shannon: Alright, I’m ready.

Fr. Robert: I think this is a good time for us to take a pause. And maybe fill the knowledge hole. I talk about the knowledge hole in my other program- are you okay?

Shannon: Nom, nom, nom, nom, knowledge hole?

Fr. Robert: It’s this part of our minds that once we start into a topic we want more. You’ve done this right?

Shannon: Oh yeah, all the time.

Fr. Robert: Those late nights where you just start click, click, click, click. And that’s because we’re naturally curious. So a program like this, like coding 101, even though we’ll give you the basics, even though we’ll give you the introduction, sometimes you need to go someplace else to get something more in depth. Which is why I’m happy that Lynda.com is a supporter of coding 101. Now what is Lynda.com? Lynda.com is the true source of knowledge online. If you want to learn about business, you want to learn about programming, if you want to learn about video editing, you can find it on Lynda.com. Lynda.com is an easy and affordable way to help you learn the way that you want to learn. You can stream thousands of courses created by experts on software, web development, graphic design, and more. In other words, it’s your life. Taught to you the way you want it to be taught to you, online. How can it get better than that. Lynda.com works directly with industry experts and software companies to provide timely training, often the same day that new versions are released. So you’re always up to date. Your skills will always be ready to go. All courses are produced at the highest quality which means that they’re not going to be like those low quality YouTube videos. I’m not saying all YouTube videos are low quality, I came from YouTube. You came from YouTube Snubs. But sometimes you want to concentrate on the material than on the fact that so and so is using a bad mic. Or so and so has really bad lighting. That’s what Lynda does. They give you the way to learn that has the fewest distractions. Lynda also includes tools like searchable transcripts or playlists and certificates of course completion so you can look for and find exactly what you need at that time. And so that you can tell the world by publishing your certificates on LinkedIn, what you’ve drained in. it’s a great way to show potential employers what you’re ready to tackle. Now whether you’re a beginner or advanced, Lynda has courses for your experience level. You can learn while you’re on the go with Lynda.com apps for the iPhone, iPad and Android. Or you can watch on your Mac, you’re PC, your desktop or your laptop. They have one low monthly price of $25 which will give you unlimited access to over 100,000 video tutorials. Just think about that. 100,000. What could you do with 100,000 instructional video tutorials? Well, you could pretty much learn anything you want to learn. Now premium members with an annual plan can download courses to their iPhone, iPad, Androids, and watch them offline. Which is great if you want a repository that goes with you. Anytime you need reference, Lynda.com will be there for you. Now I have been using Lynda.com for programming in aid of course with Coding 101. It’s always good to get a refresher on things that we’re going to be talking about. So for example, if I want to start developing for Android and I could jump into this, ask DK tutorial that will show  me step by step what I need to do in order to create an Android app. it’s that simple folks. You want to learn, Lynda wants to help you learn. Now for any software you rely on, Lynda.com can help you stay current with all software updates and learn the ins and outs of being more efficient and productive. I love Lynda and I know you will too. And we’ve got a special offer for you to access all of their courses free for 7 days. Visit Lynda.com/c101 to try Lynda.com free for 7 days. That’s Lynda.com/c101 and we thank Lynda for their support of coding 101. How about a little bit of Ivory Tower?

Shannon: I’m ready.

Fr. Robert: Alright, now I wanted to start this off a little bit different because we’re going to be doing a classic classes smack down. With something that really is very Ivory Tower. This is sort of pie in the sky, something that’s not all that practical at the moment but is very cool and is something that maybe a prospective programmer might be wanting to get into. And that is bit coin might save the world.

Shannon: What?

Fr. Robert: Okay, not save the world, but it could change the face of programming. What we have is we have a young man, a college dropout. How many stories start with that, right? The college dropout who made good. In fact, if you go to my computer, Josh, what you see is you see that this young man, Vitalik Buterin, he started up a new project that he’s calling project Ethereum. And what it is, it’s an effort to use the technology behind bitcoin to change the way that we program and publish programs on the internet. Now you may be asking, but bitcoin is – how do I use bitcoin to change the world? Quite simply, it’s based on the block chain. You understand how crypto currencies work right?

Shannon: Yes. Kind of.

Fr. Robert: So the block chain was absolutely essential to any crypto currency. So bitcoin, licoin, dogecoin, any of the other coins. The idea is you decentralize the control of the currency. And the way that you decentralize it is you put it into a block chain. Which means that the control over the tracking the finances and the ledgers and who has done what and who has transferred money to whom, is controlled by all computers rather than a central computer. Which makes it impossible to shut down. Or at least very, very difficult.  It also makes it very difficult to cheat. And how do you mess with the ledger when the ledger is stored over thousands or millions of computers. Right. It helps to think of it as a massively parallel, massively redundant, ridiculously backed up cloud server. Except that there’s not one single entity that’s controlling it. So what he wants to do with project Ethereum is, they want to be able to take that power, and apply it not just to a ledger, but any program that you might write for use on the internet. Imagine this, so if there’s not central authority for bitcoin, licoin or dogecoin, and if you take that same block chain and you use it for, say hosting the next email service, or whatever that you want to do, it means that you don’t have to worry about someone taking down your email server, you don’t have to worry about it not being available as long as there are participating nodes that are working on that block chain. Your service will always remain up.

Shannon: Oh wow, that’s actually kind of cool.

Fr. Robert: Yeah. Now here’s the cool part. So Vatalik had a campaign, a crowdfunding campaign, and he raised about 30,000 bitcoins, which in today’s market, I think that’s about 15 million dollars USD. But he’s using that to seed what is a crypto currency that he’s calling ethers. He’s calling them ethers. And the idea is that it’s like a bitcoin and it’s like a licoin or a dogecoin, but here’s the main difference, and this is something that we’ve lamented. When you talk about a bitcoin, you’re talking about mining. Usually mining, unless you’re buying it. Going through an algorithmic cache until you find a proof and then you present that proof to the block chain and the block chain will reward you with a certain number of bitcoins right. But all of those calculations are wasted. You’ve got computers priming all the time making these calculations and then if you get or if you don’t get rewarded, that’s worthless calculations. You just wasted all that processing power. He wants to create a block chain where all the participating nodes are helping to host the software that’s in the block chain. Now, you get money, as long as you’re hosting. Participating in that block chain. And the people who host their software in the block chain pay ethers in order to host their software. So it’s like mining but now there’s actually some sort of service being provided. You’re not wasting the processing power. We’ve talked about this a bit in the past on Know How, my other show here on Thursdays and I think we’ve come to a time where we don’t like the idea of just wasting electricity and processing power for nothing. And if I could get rewarded by donating some of my computing time to, say, someone who wants to host some supercomputing math blah blah blah, then I’m willing to do that. If I get a little bit of something, something. So it’s not mining, it’s hosting. You’re now hosting. But it still uses a block chain.

Shannon: That’s very interesting. It’s very intriguing.

Fr. Robert: It’s intriguing and I honestly think this is where we’re heading.

Shannon: This is the time. yeah. Its 2014.

Fr. Robert: Its 2014 and the idea of having monolific servers in a back room somewhere that control everything, that could be hacked, it’s kind of old school.

Shannon: It’s kind of old school, yeah. That’s like 1990’s now.

Fr. Robert: We like to distribute it. Out into the cloud. Alright, let’s get away from that and let’s talk a little something, something about classes. Now we promised you some solid practical examples of how we use classes and we’re going to deliver. Josh, if you could go ahead and go back over to my computer, this right here is an example of a piece of code that Lou Well put together over the weekend. I was playing with the ability of C Sharp to download things off the internet using get, so you basically it’s a web call right. So there’s a file on the internet that I want to get, which you’re going to want. This is how you do. And how do I use C Sharp to get it, to bring it in? Now, check this out. If you take away the comments, this is what my program actually looks like. That thing. That entire thing is my program.

Shannon: Wow, it’s not that long at all.

Fr. Robert: And half of it are comments. Which is what we want right, because we want people to comment the code so we can understand what its doing. All this is doing, if you look at this, in the use statements, it has something that we haven’t seen before. Using twit.tvcoding101.data.asynchronisdownloads.

Shannon: What?

Fr. Robert: This was a set of classes that Lou created for me that allows me- see if you go over here Josh, if you could zoom in on this- these are the individual classes that he has created. When I put that in my using statement section, it means okay, make these available for the program. Now, go ahead and back back out, I want to show what one of these looks like. So let me go to the resumeable downloads. This is a class. This defines a public class. Called resumeable downloads. And then these are all the methods that go into that class. And essentially this is the back end code that allows the program to access the network part of the computer.

Shannon: And I’m noticing this is not abstract so you have to have all the complete code in there.

Fr. Robert: Right, so all the complete code, this is a complete code. Right. But unlike say, putting this into my main program, there’s a lot of members in here that I’m probably not going to use. If I’m only using the download method, then I don’t have to use the upload method. Or maybe it means I don’t have to use the check some method. But that could all be in the class, I just pick and choose what I’m going to use.

Shannon: You don’t have to use every single one.

Fr. Robert: I don’t have to use every single one. But it’s nice to know that it’s there. It means that in future programs, if I use this class, I can. Right. And then I’m also including something here like the download state. So this is another public class called download state, and as you can see there are no abstracts in here. So this is a real class, this is ready to be instantiated. And this allows me to check what the download state is so that I can be ready to download. Now let’s go back to my program and Josh, I’m going to zoom in really quickly here. As you can see, the first thing that this is going to do, and we’ve seen this before, it’s going to instantiate a new object. And this object is going to be based off of resume downloads which we took a look at over here. So this is a class that was included with my using statements. It’s not in this program. I have it nowhere in this program, but this allows me to make a new object based on the class called resumeable downloads which I included in this synchronous downloads package. Look how neat this becomes. Now it becomes, I create the object, I create this string, which allows me to input okay, where’s the file located and what is it called, and then I also tell it where’s it going to go. I want it to go to my computer and I want it to go to a specific directory. And then the rest of this is just using the download state class to download the file according to the variables that I’ve set. Now when I run this, what it will do is it will automatically go to podtrac.com which is one of our content distributers, and it will start a console that will start downloading the files to my computer. Now I can specify as many files here as I want, so this, folks, this is the start of creating your own podcast catcher. So if you’re tired of really bad RSS feeds, or really bad podcast catchers, what Lu has just done for you, is he’s given you the basis, the class that you need to create your own. You don’t have to code it. All you have to do is look at the comments in this class to figure out what does what and then you’re good to go.

Shannon: That’s brilliant. I love it.

Fr. Robert: So we’re going to make this available, this will be as is file, all in one. So if you download this project and you run it, it will automatically start downloading one of our episodes, and then you can go through there and say, you know what, I want to download something from Hack 5. I want to download something from Revision 3.

Shannon: You just change the link.

Fr. Robert: You can change the link, you can create a menu system, because we already know how to do that, and you can play with the other methods that are included in the class that we didn’t use in this particular program.

Shannon: That’s amazing. I love it.

Fr. Robert: I think when you start seeing stuff like this, this is when classes begin- oh, that’s why you do that.

Shannon: It makes sense. That’s why you would plug it in.

Fr. Robert: So what we’d like you to do is go ahead and download this, try it. Makes sure it works. Because it will work the very first time. And then play around. And I promise you, once you realize how easy it is to use classes like this to interface with the interwebs, you’ll be hooked.

Shannon: Ooh, so fun.

Fr. Robert: We’re going to be getting over to our code warrior Lou, who did assemble this for me, but I was messing around with it for the longest time and I just couldn’t make the asynchronous downloads work. And Lou is like “oh, yeah, I have a class here for you” boom.

Shannon: Oh, let me just fix that for you.

Fr. Robert: Let me, oh yeah, let me just take care of that.

Shannon: Just give me like two minutes, I got this.

Fr. Robert: That’s why he’s the code warrior. But before we get there, you know what I’d like? I’d like a place where if I have projects like this, I could make them available for people. I’m tired of dealing with domains, I’m tired of registering blah, blah, blah.

Shannon: I want my own .com, I want to be able to upload as many photos as I want, I want to be able to embed a map, I want it to look clean and crisp and very easy to understand and Squarespace did that for me. And it was so easy and it was inexpensive too. So Squarespace.com, they’re the all in one platform that makes it super, super easy to create your own professional website or your online portfolio or your wedding website. They are so great. Some of the reasons why of course you’re going to love Squarespace just as much as I do, they’re constantly improving their platform with new features, they have new designs that you can just use for your own. And they have even better support. For example, you can get support from them 24/7, every single week, even on holidays. If you want help they have a live chat. They have email support plus they have a completely redesigned customer help site as well. And they have beautiful designs. There are plenty to choose from on there. They have over 25 beautiful templates for you to quickly build your own personal or business site. And they have a great mobile experience. Squarespace has developed templates with responsive designs which means that your site is automatically restructured to look great on any device, no matter whether you’re using a smartphone, the new iPhone, what is it, the 6+? Or just your computer, you’re desktop at home. It’s going to look great on any of those and hosting is included. You don’t have to go anywhere else to get hosting. They have it. They take care of the hosting with a distributed network that does not go down. Even if their server room is flooding. Seriously, it did happen, and my website stayed up. Its inexpensive, it starts with $8 a month, and they include a free domain name if you sign up for a year. So it’s perfect for my wedding website. I had my own .com, I had my own domain name. It was only$8 a month. And their code is gorgeous. Squarespace takes just as much pride in their back end as they do with their front end design. So not only do you have these gorgeous designs, but you also have really, really easy to code. Squarespace even has a developer platform. So if you’re a coder for example, you can get all up under there and be able to fix anything that you want. Just to your liking. So if you really want to dig into site customization and developer accounts, they never expire while in development. So you can take as much time as you need before launching your site, and you don’t pay anything until you actually go live on your site. On the internets. You have complete control on their developer platform, so you can edit all of the code that affects the display of your website. Every little line of HTML, every little bit of CSS and the JavaScript all under your control. And they have git NSFTP support. There’s a git repository. They have version control that comes standard. And you can connect to template files via git or SFTP as well. And a little bit more in developer tools, there’s less preprocessing, jasontemplating, script comboing, retina ready responsive image handling, ha ha. And even more. So start a free 2 week trial with no credit card required. And start building a website. See if you guys like it because it’s gorgeous. When you actually decide to sign up for Squarespace, make sure to use the offer code CODING. And get 10% off and show your support of coding 101. And of course we thank Squarespace for their support of coding 101. Because a better web awaits and it starts with your new Squarespace website. It’s gorgeous.

Fr. Robert: Yes, absolutely gorgeous. And speaking of gorgeous, I think that definitely qualifies for the coding warrior who we’re bringing in now. Are you ready? Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Lou Maresca from Microsoft. He’s our code warrior. He’s the man of the hour. He’s the man who gave me this awesome, awesome software that I can now customize ….

Shannon: I’m pretty excited about that.

Lou Maresca: Yeah, hopefully people can get use out of it.

Fr. Robert: You know, it’s this sort of stuff, this sort of program that we’re going to be giving to the audience, that really gets them to finally, I think, make that transition to this is a better way to program. I understand what they’ve been doing, we’ve had a lot of mail INS and a lot of comments from people, saying I don’t understand why we’re learning this. This doesn’t make any sense. When they see this, and when they see, oh, you mean I can use code that someone else wrote and I don’t have to figure out how it works and I – I think then yeah, it’ll work. So thank you, thank you very much.

Lou: Yeah, no problem at all.

Fr. Robert: Now this was how we access the get features on your computer. Which is how we pull stuff off of the internet. Which is very useful, crazy useful. In fact, as I mentioned, this could be the start of your own podcast catcher, but you’ve decided you want to give us a little something, something else…. So what are we doing today?

Lou: What I decided to do is to make something more useful for people who like to use social network, I built a twitter app. and it’s probably one of the simplest apps. You’ll be surprised at how easy it is to use. And I’m going to actually show you a library that I’m using to kind of get it to work but it’s so simple and hopefully everybody will be able to play with it and try it out for themselves. So the app itself, you do have to go register an app, so you would go like to dav.twitter.com and then sign in and create an app for yourself. But we can put instructions on how to do that in the notes and then they can basically go and do that themselves. Because they have to have some secret codes in their app for it to work.

Shannon: Yeah, you have to have a key, correct?

Lou: Yeah, that’s right. But other than that, the code itself is really simple.

Fr. Robert: Right. But now let’s be clear here. You didn’t have to write this from scratch. You needed to apply for a DAV account, you needed to get your super-secret number so that your program knew how to access the twitter API, but the bulk of the programming was just a class available on line that you were able to use in your code.

Lou: That’s right. And so I think that a couple episodes ago we did a social networks abstract class. And so I just basically used that so I could show okay, well, we already did that code so I’m going to use that against this other library that I found online. A really cool library called link to twitter. And you can go to its GitHub or to its codeplex online and find it and I can actually show where that’s at in the show notes too. Yeah, I just basically just used that and then I used the class that I already wrote to kind of interact with it and it makes it really easy.

Fr. Robert: Nice, okay show us. Bring us in there and show us how this works.

Lou: Yeah, sure. So if you show my screen real quick, this is the social network class that we wrote a while ago. And you remember it was just an abstract class. Sometimes it has properties in here which is things that describe the class. But sometimes it had methods that don’t really do anything. It doesn’t really have any code in here at all. And then I built a twitter version of that where I basically inherited it and now I actually had to create a function for it. And you’ll notice in here, this is the code that actually works with this library that’s linked to twitter library that I found. And again, its only 3 lines, it allows me to tweet a message. Very, very simple. And then this is inside my social network class. So anytime I want to call post a message, the message is a string and I just go ahead and send it off there after I’ve already authenticated myself. Very simple. And then if I show the actual window here, this is a very simple window. All I did was go to the tool box, general tools here, and I drag and dropped a couple controls, a button and a text box on here. And then I double clicked on the button and it took me in here to the code and said okay, when you click the button what do you do? I want to create a twitter object, and I want to log in and then I want to post a tweet. And really, really simple code, yeah.

Shannon: That’s awesome.

Fr. Robert: Wait, that’s the program?

Lou: That’s the program. That’s it.

Fr. Robert: How does that work Lou, I don’t understand, that doesn’t have any code in it.

Lou: So honestly, it’s real simple. So if we actually run this real quick, it’s going to first ask me log in, because you have to log into twitter. And then this is the simplest way that you can- it’s called PIN authentication on twitter, it’s just a way to authenticate the user. And then you just click on authorize PIN. And again that all comes for free. And then this simple app is this little text box, and I can say on coding 101. And hit tweet. And that’s it. It’s already out there. And if I pop out here to my twitter feed, and… yeah. There it is.

Fr. Robert: Wow, that’s crazy easy.

Lou: Yeah. So if we go real quickly back through the code, I want to show you what we did here. So I basically just created a really simple PBF app. once I created that…

Fr. Robert: By the way, if you don’t understand what we’re doing with the WPF app, look at episode 7 and 8 from the first module from C Sharp. You’ll see the step by steps.

Lou: Yep. And really all it does is add a bunch of forms in here and it’s giving me a form designer. And like I said, all I did was drag and drop a text box and a button on there. And that’s really what the bulk of this code is, is those two things. And then again, I used a social network class that we already used before, and again, it doesn’t really have any code in it, it’s just a framework. It’s basically just the plans for what I want to do right. The blueprints for what I want to do. I want to post, I want to post with a photo, that kind of thing. And so if I actually wanted to write code to post with a photo, again, it’s really easy for me to do that. I basically could just copy this code and I could just use tweet- again there’s a method called tweet with photo. I think its called tweet with media. Yeah. So it’s real simple super. And I can put my message in here. So I can do say hey, put the message that I passed in, and then is this possibly sensitive? Nah, it’s not sensitive. And then what the image is. So I can just put the photo that I send in here. And then that’s it. There you go. Now I can actually post a photo to twitter. Real simple stuff. Again, that’s what classes allows you to do. is it allows you to abstract the complexity, take away the complexity from what’s underneath the covers to do all of this, and make it really easy for you to build the app without you having to do any craziness in your app to kind of complicate things in your head and on the screen.

Shannon: I feel like any time you do this, it’s a lot easier to share it with a team. Like, classes are perfect for teams.

Lou: Yep. And if you write the class well enough, it will be completely broken apart and you can just package it up and send it to somebody and say they just use this.

Fr. Robert: When you’re beginning, classes are going to mainly be for you to take someone else’s code, as Lou was doing here with the twitter API and the twitter class. And be able to use the methods that they created to do the things that you want to do. as you get more advanced, you’re going to find that your code, especially if you do it right, and as Lou says, if you can decouple your class, from the program that’s using it, then people will start using your classes. This is how the world of open source works. People writing good code that other people want to use, getting hooks into it. And I can’t stress enough that this is ultimately where you want to end up. There’s no greater compliment in the world of programming than someone else saying “I really like that class, can I get a copy”. Yes. No there, is. There is one better compliment, which is we love your programming, we’d like to buy it for a billion dollars.

Lou: Hey, maybe a twitter app. maybe twitter.

Fr. Robert: Now Lou, can you actually show us the class that you’re turning into an object here? It’s in your workspace right?

Lou: Yep. So the twitter guy, this is the twitter class right here. It’s again, very simple, its only 3 lines. Because it gets to inherit from its parent here. But again, it has a post method. Post for an image and then a log in image. Again, very simple code in here to say hey, go use this link to twitter library to go and authorize me and then show the log in box. And that’s what you saw, that little ebox that says authorize or whatever.

Fr. Robert: People in the chat room are asking about that, they’re asking “so where did that box come from?” well, its right here. Lou just showed you the method that’s creating that.

Lou: That’s right. And it’s just another window, but in the window itself, it actually spins up this PIN authorizer, which is part of the link to twitter library. But it’s another class that’s supported in there.

Fr. Robert: Now you could hard code all of that in there. And that would be a horrible, horrible app. don’t ever do that.

Lou: You notice here I take my secret code and my secret key that I get from my- so If I were to go over to my twitter apps, if I were to sign in here and then create, its apps.twitter.com, if I were to sign in and create an app, they would give me a secret code and a secret key. And then I put it in a config file. So that’s why it’s kind of hidden behind the scenes. And then you guys can put whatever code you want in there. But again, don’t put it in your code.

Fr. Robert: You could. It would work. It actually will work. The problem is anyone who gets ahold of your code now has you. You are owned. Yeah so don’t do that. That’s bad. Lou, again, I’m hoping that this time, people will see these examples, they’ll download this program, your program, snub’s program and they’ll say “okay, this is worth it” and they’ll start exploring. Especially with the twitter class, especially with this download class. They’ll be able to fool around and put enough together that they’ll finally decide that okay, this is how I will write my programs. Do you have any advice that you want to give to them as they head on their classy way?

Lou: Yeah definitely. I saw a lot of posts on google+ and on twitter, and it is kind of confusing because a lot of other languages are like, oh we don’t support object orientation, when creating objects in classes. And some of those languages are really easy. They’re what you call interpreted languages. Or very easy to compile at one time, or do the code at one time. But again, classes make it really easy for you- for me it’s kind of like organization in my head too. So if I say oh I’ll give you something that does that for you, it’s like, Padre, I’ll give you a resumeable download- I’ll give you some class that will download stuff and use every processor on your machine to do it. Like that sounds super complex and so I’m going to give you classes that are really easy. You call downloads, you pass the file name and then it’s going to be done. And to me that really makes it easy for everybody to understand that classes allow you to kind of package up a complexity and give it to other people.

Fr. Robert: Right. And there’s nothing like being able to do that. To say, oh this is a super huge class, but you can create an object and these are the two methods that you want to use and this is how you use them. And that’s what we’re talking about. That’s really how simple you can make it. Lou Maresca from Microsoft, we want to thank you again for being our code warrior. It is always a pleasure to talk to you. It is always a pleasure to see your code. And again, thank you for this, because I was struggling with the whole down- I don’t know what I was doing. I think the problem was I was trying to make it more complicated than it actually had to be.

Shannon: It’s usually what happens.

Lou: You can get way out of hand with code. I’ve done that before. You get way out of hand sometimes.

Fr. Robert: Oh, by the way, I should mention, if you’re going to use the download code, there’s an extra special bonus for the advanced programmers. There is no exception handling and we haven’t made it customizable, everything’s kind of hard coded in there. so if you’re feeling frisky, why not drop it into a WFM, why not give it error checking, make sure that you’re not going to run into any exceptions, and why not make it completely configurable with some dialog boxes. That’s your challenge.

Lou: You kind of tricked me a little bit because you said hey I need a class that does downloads. Asynchrosies. Okay. So I just did it really quick, I didn’t think you were going to use that.

Fr. Robert: It was a lot of fun. We want to go bare bones, we don’t want to get too complicated. Lou Maresca, if you could tell the folks where they can find you, where they can find your work.

Lou: Definitely. @LouMM on twitter and about me Lou MM. and of course all my works on sierram.dynamics.com.

Fr. Robert: Fantastic. And we will see you next week. What do you think we should venture into next Lou?

Lou: I don’t know. I think we’re getting pretty close to maybe doing some more fancy stuff. Maybe moving into mobile or tablet platforms. I don’t know. As long as people are okay with the class thing by now.

Fr. Robert: Yeah. How about this. We’ll keep our ears out, make sure you go to the Google+ group and tell us, I’ve got classes, or give me one more. We could give you one more, I’d like to move on to something else, but I don’t want to do it until people have classes down pat. Unless people are dedicated to writing their code in the right hierarchy. Because honestly, if that’s all we get out of the second module, I will be very, very happy. How about that Lou, does that sound good?

Lou: Sounds great. Yeah let’s do it.

Fr. Robert: Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Lou Maresca, sr. software developer over at Microsoft, good friend of the TWiT TV network, sir we salute you.

Lou: Yeah. Thank you, guys.

Fr. Robert: And folks, we salute you too. That’s right, the geek, the gal, the man, the woman who watches our show every single week, we wouldn’t have a show without them right?

Shannon: That’s so, so right. Thank you so much for watching the show. And of course if you want to find all of our show notes and all of the information available about coding 101, or you just want to subscribe because you found us randomly on YouTube or something, go over to Twit.tv/code or twit.tv/c101, both of those links work. And you can find everything, including the links to our GitHub as well.

Fr. Robert: Yeah. And our GitHub and also the links to the individual software packages. We want to make it easy. Because we’re listening to you. And people were saying I don’t want to have to go to 12 different GitHubs to get all the different codes for the different classes that will run this program. So we’re going to package everything up. There’s going to be a nice easy zip for you to download and get the projects that we worked on today. And don’t forget you can also find us on iTunes. Download coding 101 on iTunes if you are an iPerson. Especially if you’re getting a new iPhone 6 because I’ve heard that we look damn good in 5.5 in.

Shannon: We’re also on YouTube, we’re on the Googles, all over the Googles. We’re on the YouTubes, youtube.com/twitcoding101, and you can also find us on the Google+ community. And I made a little bitly link for that. Its bit.ly/twitcoding101. That’s where we have most of our community. That’s where you can find all sorts of information and lots of really, really helpful answers to any of your questions. People are very, very open to answering pretty much anything over there.

Fr. Robert: It’s not a board it’s a community. Also if you don’t like G+, we’re doing the twitter groove. And we’re probably going to write our own custom apps, I want mine to tweet every time Jeff stands up. I’m going to write something for that. You can also find us doing the twitter thing, I’m at twitter.com/padresj.

Shannon: And I am @snubs.

Fr. Robert: Yeah. Don’t forget we do this show live every Thursday. 1:30pm pacific time, you’re going to find us at live.twit.tv and as long as you’re watching us live, which is great by the way, because you get to see pre show and post show and the bloopers that get- you get to watch it live. You’re going to be able to do that. And you can drop in at irc.twit.tv and be part of our chat room. You see us every once in a while looking down here. That’s where the chat room lives. They get to talk to us during the show. Sometimes we answer their questions, and we always pay attention. So irc.twit.tv. Until next time. I’m Father Robert Ballecer.

Shannon: I’m Shannon Morse. End of line!