Love them or hate them, the ALT.NET mailing list is a source of interesting debate, commentary and insight. I can’t help myself but to participate. Debate is good. Stifling debate is bad. Period. End of debate. (see!? That was bad!)
The community itself is a young community, and as such, they are going through a period of identity forming. What are their shared values? What does it mean to be an ALT.NET-er? It's not exactly clear yet, but it is starting to form.
One thing I would caution this community is to be careful in how they define their shared principles. For...
In his post Goodby CodeBetter and ALT.NET, Sam Gentile writes about his dissatisfaction with CodeBetter and the ALT.NET movement. I don’t know Sam personally, but I’ve read his blog for a long time and know him to be a well reasoned thoughtful person. Sam, please don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater, to use an old cliche. I don’t think it’s necessary to equate CodeBetter with ALT.NET. Perhaps CodeBetter bloggers are very influential in the ALT.NET circles, but it’s important for ALT.NET to stand separately and on its own. Sam mentions that ALT.NET is divisive. ALT.NET is a...
Scott Hanselman writes a thought provoking post that asks the question, Is Microsoft Losing the Alpha Geeks? An interesting question, but troublesome to make sense of, let alone answer. First of all, how do you define “Alpha Geeks”? Who are they? Paul Graham would lead you to believe that alpha geeks are the influencers who use Macs and lots of parenthesis to write code. By that definition, the alpha geeks were never there or left a long time ago. But I don’t think this is a fair definition of alpha geeks. Certainly there are still alpha geeks who love writing...