Day two of ALT.NET is over and I’m already pooped (for you non-English speakers, that means tired, not something else that might come to mind).
Once again, photos by our Chronicler, Brad Wilson. As a testament to how engaging the sessions were, there are a lot fewer photos from day two in his photostream.
The first session I went to was on the topic of Encouraging Open Source in the .NET Space as seen above, which veered all over the place. Many felt the industry is shifting towards more and more Open Source software so those who can leverage that will be better off than those who can.
One interesting idea that came out of it was there’s a need for more education regarding Open Source. For example, understanding licensing is very challenging. It’d be great to have simple tools like a compatibility matrix or a license chooser (ala Creative Commons license generator).
In the meanwhile, I’ve tried to do my best to explain what little I know of software licensing in the past.
Another interesting point tied into our TDD discussion later on in the day related to the fact that for many shops, it doesn’t exist unless Microsoft endorses it.
The next session I attended was “.NET/Mono on the Mac, Linux, and iPhone” facilitated by the always entertaining Miguel De Icaza and Joseph Hill. I’m quite certain that everyone was there because they wanted to pull in $10,000 a day writing the next Fart app for the iPhone using C#.
Later in the day, Karen Liu (a PM on the Managed Languages/IDE team), Euan Garden (PM for Visual Studio Test), and I (photo above) gave a wide ranging session on TDD and Microsoft, which covered investments we’re making across Developer Division to help make the experience for writing proper unit tests better for developers such as ASP.NET MVC, WPF’s Model-View-ViewModel, Visual Studio improvements, Silverlight, etc….
The focus of our efforts has been addressing the need for our tools and frameworks to support all developers who write automated tests. But the bar set by the expectations of a TDD developer is typically very high, and by striving to meet those expectations, we feel all developers benefit.
I showed off a few slides to set the context for what groups we’ve talked to and what improvements we’re seeing start to happen for the next wave of products.
Karen Liu gave a few demos of how Visual Studio 2010 greatly improves the workflow for a test-first developer and Euan Garden led a discussion about the Visual Studio unit testing framework.
We discussed where we’d all like to see Visual Studio take unit testing in the future. There were quite a few voices who said they’d like to see Visual Studio include something like xUnit.NET, much in the same way that ASP.NET MVC includes jQuery, because for the places where they work, for better or worse, it doesn’t exist unless it’s part of Visual Studio. This is a common theme I’ve heard when it comes to people wanting to promote a development tool at their workplace for which Microsoft does not have an alternative.
To illustrate this point, one person came up to me and told me he had never used jQuery (and didn’t write a lot of JavaScript) until it was included in ASP.NET MVC and now he’s very happily using jQuery with ASP.NET MVC.
To me, that’s a great testimonial for how leveraging Open Source in smart ways can make customers happier.