AltNetConf

For the last half a year a group of us (Bil, James, Dave, Terry, Justice, Greg and Kyle) have been organizing the first ALT.NET conference in Canada and today, on Canada Day no less, we are announcing the opening of registration to it.  The event will happen on August 15-17 in Calgary.  If you've not been to, or heard about, the ALT.NET conferences in Austin and Seattle, they have drawn many software development luminaries and created great conversations.  There are no predefined sessions like you would normally find at a conference.  The format follows the Open...

The completion of the Alt.NET conference in Austin has created a plethora of conversation on blogs and in the altnetconf Yahoo Group.  Some have been critical of the purpose and intent going into, during and following the weekend.  Others have begged for further discussion on logos, mantras, mission statements, and governence in general.  In some form all have a valid point (with the exception of one, but I'm not going to comment on that one). I went to the conference fearing some of the worst was going to happen.  I thought, with absolute certainty, that there would be at least one,...

Thanks to the folks that setup the Alt.NET Conference.  This is the start of something good.  Like many said, it will be hard to proceed for a while, but we will influence change for the better both during that time and after.  I leave you with one picture of the guy who really sparked the whole thing.

This was a primer for thoughts on DSLs, fluent interfaces, discoverability and where we're at with the concepts.  Have we taken these things to far?  Interesting thoughts in my head, but I don't know how to write them right now.  Hopefully I will in the next couple of days.

This was a brilliant discussion about what we in the Alt.NET community need to do to propogate our message.  The great part was that we had people from the Patterns & Practices group, MSDN Magazine and MSDN Architecture and they were the ones driving the group to be more visible. The thing that was discussed for more than a minute was that we need to tell the world the things that we learned two, three and four years ago.  When we were learning them we weren't good and speaking about what we were learning.  We knew what we had learned, but...

Interesting conversation on the optimal location for behaviour related to the domain.  The discussion was around whether a Transfer of Funds from one Account to another Account should exist in a Domain Service (i.e. AccountTransferService) or right in the Domain entity (i.e. Account.TransferTo(account, amount)). The real question is where does the ubiquitous language belong?  How do we make the code more soluable?  Where is readability at it's optimal state? I think that they pointed out the names for some things that I saw in the last code base that I worked on.  Anemic Domain is when you have a thin Domain model...

Scott Guthrie is showing the yet to be released MVC implementation that will be coming out of Microsoft for preview in the next few weeks, and RTM sometime in Spring 2008.  It's pretty exciting to see Microsoft taking this project on.  Right now it's looking alot like a MonoRail implementation, but it's using some more of the new language features. MS has implemented a tonne of hook , integration and extensibility points in the system.  Although it comes with defaults (i.e. aspx as the default view engine) you can override them with whatever you need.  If you want Brail, you implement with...

The BDD discussion was fantastic.  It was primarily driven by a need for people to understand where it fits into the development process.  One of the primary questions was where does it fall in the lifecycle of the development process and where do you go once you have worked with it?  I don't know that this was answered. We've moved onto how this relates to working with the client.  Should we be working in code to document the converation when the client is in the room?  Should we be exposing them to our side of the world at this point in...

The morning came far to early today, but once I hit the first session I started to get pretty stoked and energized.  We had a very passionate and, at times, heated debate about how to get more passion into the community about the principles that are Alt.NET. So how do we get the developer community at large to be more pragmatic?  That is what Alt.NET really is...a pragmatic approach to software development.  Maybe you choose .NET drag-and-drop in one situation, and another time you may choose Ruby or PHP.  The key with Alt .NET is that there is no one "right" answer.  Each answer is...

Unlike most people I showed up fashionably late to the show.  I managed to squeek in 2 double Jose Cuervos with the nerd herd before retiring to the front lobby to discuss geeky topics.  We indulged ourselves on the possibility of mbUnit becoming the one framework to provide to them all (unit, integration, system and other types of testing), the state of the world and Tom's fascination with men.  Yes, Tom decided to hit on every person in the group at one time.  The first statement went something like "At least you guys are good looking, because you sure ain't smart". ...