I wasn’t at Alt.Net in Seattle this year unfortunately. I believe in the message Alt.NET hopes to instill in developers and I also appreciate how quick they are to embrace change and new idea’s. 10 months may as well be 10 years in Software, some things have changed and some things haven’t..

Interesting Topics

• NET/Mono on the Mac, Linux, the iPhone

No clue who Miguel is but I do plan on reading into this some more.. Sounds like it’s in the early stages and I hope it doesn’t fall into oblivion!
http://www.go-mono.com/visualstudio/

• TDD and Microsoft

I have many gripes about this, I would like to know if anyone out there has a very smooth, easy to adopt way of doing TDD in Microsoft (using MSTest). I had to install Gallio and use TestDriven. Our Team Lead has set up the tests in two different solutions that have to be accessed by a proxy. I probably would not have done that. I’d like to know what others have tried and how they’ve made TDD work (well) with Microsoft.

• Why So Mean

Funny that this was posted by Hanselman, then again maybe it’s not so odd. I wonder this myself.Alt.NET while an awesome idea can easily turn into pseudo-oligarchy that only seeks to dictate and not listen. Many blog posts are negative and derisive, people arguing with eachother over nonsense, no clear voice/vision at times, people become clique-ish and start believing they’re a secret society out to take over the world. In my mind, this community would be better off without these sorts of attitudes even if this mindset is fostered by some of the leaders of Alt.NET. If it’s not peace-ful, inviting and honey-sweet nobody is going to want to listen. That being said, the best examples of members of the community are heads above the rest. They ignore the hype and post less on the community itself -instead, they are are quiet/sturdy pillars of the original principles that lead to Alt.NET taking off in the first place. They seek to inspire instead of brainwash and tend not to eschew/ridicule Microsoft technologies.For the record big up to Microsoft for staying involved in this community and for continuously listening. At least they’re trying, the problem is they can’t please them all.. there’s nothing that will make me stop reading a post than when someone starts hating on Microsoft.
Some other people agree

• Enitities vs Messages

Sounds like it may be way over my head, but it’s one of those subjects you like to think you will one day get to implement!

• State of AOP

Still haven’t made the time to really understand Aspect Oriented Programming. I’m eager to learn more about what it is and why it’s the next hot thing

• Multi-Threading

Always an issue! Have there been any advancements in the framework? Techniques, approaches, patterns, testability? Holla!

• UI Frameworks in 2015

XAML? We had a similar discission at the Canadian Alt.Net last summer… but what’s the consensus from the community.. where are we going? What about mobile apps? Web vs Win.. there is a lot of room for improvement at the framework level for this.. I would love to see a more universal approach to web interfaces and also less polarity between Windows and Web..

• Writing Good Unit Tests

I always feel there is room for improvement in this area.. From “Tripple A” style of writing tests to “BDD” getting some shine and Assert’s going out of style faster than Lil’ Wayne’s Rock album I’m wondering how to write and maintain good Unit Tests, this is a session I would have learned a lot from ( I’m hoping there is a video of this session )

Alt.Hero

I have to second this because Scott Hanselman is easily one of the nicest people I met at Alt.NET. Despite possibly being the most visible member of the .NET community, he is also insanely humble and genuinely interested in meeting people in the community. He definitely makes a lasting impression and has no ego unlike some of the other attendee’s.

Videos

By the way I’m not really feeling Kyte.tv… maybe after it gets out of beta but the video interface isn’t intuitive at all. Anyone here are some links via Kyte. If you don’t get too annoyed you’ll be able to find more video’s linked to these.

http://www.kyte.tv/ch/245251-jrwren

http://www.kyte.tv/ch/240253-shanselman

Link’d Up

• Hanselman speaks
• A favourite blog of mine: Tom sprinkles a few non MONO posts in there, this is proof
• Sessions and notes ( no one is updating this Wiki!)
• Osherove is calling you out!
• Haack speaks and speaks and speaks ( I mean that in the nicest way, where are all the other day by day’s?)
• Cooper loves him some Alt.NET ( Wish I’d been able to speak with him the first go around, I have since followed his blog in my Shortlist of RSS Feeds. His is one of the better blogs out there technically )
• Did he just diss Lincoln?
• Someone, somewhere out there, watched from afar…

Like many of us, Microsoft is an 80’s baby… I’m feeling Softwear by Microsoft“>Softwear and not just because Common’s co-signed it! Since the 80’s Hip Hop and MS have grown to iconic heights and it’s hard to imagine the world today without either… As easy as it would be, I won’t write an essay and metaphor-ize one with the other… I’ll leave it to you to draw your own conclusions and parallels. Check out these fly t-shirts while you’re doing that.

Bonus: Common performs & A Hip Hop Gem after the cut… …click here to read more

I listened to this on Friday and I’ll be listening again today, so I thought I’d post.Greg explains his approach to DDD and the benefits of DDD in a suitable architecture environment.

I like the format of this because of the Q&A style of the presentation/interview.The questions are smart and the answers are well delivered Greg answers in his usual methodical way. I think this is why I enjoy listening to his explanation, unlike other DDD practioners, he usually has a way of breaking down very advanced DDD implementations and explaining why he implements it in a particular way ( i.e. why he doesn’t believe in Getters and Setters ). It may not be everyone’s cup of tea but there is a rhyme and reason.Also in this interview Greg is asked about popular development topics and their place in a DDD world.

I am still strengthening my own understanding of DDD, I have not used it in a professional capacity but I do prescribe to what Greg refers to as DDD-Lite. I leverage many of the patterns and I find that it works well with TDD. I get all of this without having to worry about the very advanced intricacies of DDD.This is a good one if you’re interested in furthering your own knowledge DDD or are looking to leverage it in your next solution. Check it out! Surely this one video won’t be all you need and should you want to jump into DDD you can check out his blog and some of the links below.

DDD Quickly

Greg’s blog
domaindrivendesign.org

Happy New Year, this is a new beginning in many ways. I have moved to a new city and I have a new outlook on life and Obama’s been elected president of the United States.. it’s a new day in deed. I will try to be good about posting. I have signed up to work on a really cool at home project with a friend so I will be posting anything worthwhile if I can find the time. I am tryign to find User Groups here and they seem to be defunct. This is not cool considering my old User Group was so well managed, we’ll see how it turns out I will search and see if I can stay motivated to code in the ‘09. I’m looking forward to learning new things and expanding on my existing knowledge. Stay blessed in the New Year….�

Throughout the centuries there were [people] who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.
~ Ayn Rand

There won’t be a single blog entry, wiki entry, vlog or podcast that can ever capture the essence of what this past weekend’s Alt.NET Conference in Calgary was like. Period.

I’ll offer links for the content, I will add my comments on the speeches to the wiki site. I’m only making this entry in reflection of the soft-side of the weekend and things (good and bad) that I noticed.

Sessions

• All of them were excellent. I particularly enjoyed “DDD Day” and especially listening to James Kovacs and Greg Young speak on DDD, implementing it in a team and applying it during refactorings and also most importantly stating it’s not a magic solutions. I find this topic unending fascinating and I look forward to learning more and of course working with it hands on either in practice or in the field. Greg Young did an awesome job in breaking DDD down and delivering the basic fundamentals of DDD and also itemizing his own approach to DDD.His expertise on the subject was reflected in how well attended this session was.  He’s very easy to watch and follow
• Another session I quite enjoyed was Greg’s Command/Query separation, Future of Alt.Net and James’s “Convention over Configuration”
• Angel’s “Future of Web technologies” was almost like creating a wishlist for new technologies, and how to move away from HTML’s limitations and complexities into a new - age markup. It was a very well attended discussion, not necessarily a large number but excellent contribution by the participants

…click here to read more