The third and last day of ALT.NET Seattle was a short one for me. My poor extremely patient wife was not feeling well today so I had to leave right at lunch time. But before I left, I did manage to attend a great session by John Lam and Jimmy Schementi on “Adding Scripting Support to .NET Applications”. In fact, you can watch the session here via Kyte.tv. John and Jimmy covered the topic of hosting IronRuby to provide “end-user” ability to script an application. The classic example is that many 3-D games, Half-Life for example, write their core...
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...
Day one of the ALT.NET Seattle conference is over and I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s sessions. As an Open Spaces event, the first order of business was for us, the attendees, to set the session agenda for the rest of the conference. In the above photo, you can see Scott Hanselman proposing a topic in one of my favorite conference photos taken by Brad Wilson. This process took about two hours after which many of us headed out to Red Robin for a nerd dinner. This is my second ALT.NET Open Spaces event and...
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...