Here are some of my thoughts about the ALT.NET conference in Austin, TX this last weekend:

1.) Yea Austin!

2.) This is a diverse crowd. A lot of what you read about on blogs and such is not necessarily the majority opinion. For example, Ruby is not a majority language (yet?). It gets praise and attention by some of the frequent bloggers, but there were still a lot of doubters and skeptics. Most are keeping an eye on Ruby, I think, but only a few have taken the plunge. I'm still not sure, exactly, what Ruby has to do with .NET at this point, but let me know if you figure it out.

3.) Some things were pretty universal or at least acknowledged as being good. From what I overheard, these were:

  • Serious unit testing (TDD was popular, but not everyone is practicing)
  • Domain model architecture/design (not necessarily DDD, though)
  • Using NHibernate or some other ORM-type technology and not using Windows DNA-style data access.  My feeling, though I could be wrong here, is that some of the 'official' data access strategies sold by Microsoft in the early Visual Studio.NET days like typed datasets, xml everywhere, etc are, usually, Not Good(TM) and lead to maintenance headaches which is why people are interested in things like NHibernate (to try to fill in the gap and cause less pain). But NHibernate causes its own set of pains and the Adv. NHibernate session I went to, there still seemed to be a lot of frustration about dealing with mapping vs. schema vs. changes/maintenance, etc. and the need for better tools, faster is apparent.
  • People are interested in BDD, but no one really knows what it is or how to do it (well, at least).
  • The new MVC framework bits that ScottGu and ScottHans demonstrated
  • A great acknowledgment/reverence for the fact that some people feel ALT.NET = elitism and a willingness to try to make the ideas of the conference broadly appeal to every .NET programmer.
That should get you started. Anyhow...

4.) Some people sounded enthusiastic about producing something from this conference.  Fecundity, after all, is a good sign of success of an idea.  Colin Ramsay challenged the community to produce something and I think he's right.  I think he's wrong in that everyone knows what DDD, MVC, BDD, etc are. I know a lot of people didn't know what BDD was (or at least know OF it, but not what it was) -- myself included. I'm still scratching my head about how it all works and what problems it solves and to what extent.

If anything, this conference wasn't a masturbatory exercise as Colin alludes, but more for people who are interested in this and, in fact, organizing it, to figure out exactly what the hell ALT.NET is and why it seems to cause so much passion in people (either positive or negative).

I hope it produced that, but I'm afraid more people are still scratching their head than coding. Perhaps the most important result of this is that more people will be reading blogs and more people will be contributing (like I'm trying to do here) and advanced the debate and the Grand Experiment thus producing better software and helping Microsoft keep their eye on the ball -- Developers, Developers, Developers!
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