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 a recent post I talked about how good design attempts to minimize the impact of changes to a system, often through Design Patterns. When used appropriately, Design Patterns are a great tool for building a great design, but there is an important caveat to keep in mind anytime you apply a pattern. A Design Pattern might minimize the impact of one kind of change at the expense of amplifying another type of change. What do I mean by this? One common pattern is the Abstract Factory pattern which is often manifested in .NET code via the Provider Model...
We’ve all been there. Your project stakeholder stands in your doorway with a coffee mug in hand and asks for one more teeny tiny change. Yeeeaaah. It’d be great if you could just change the display to include the user’s middle name. That’s pretty easy, right? No problem! Let’s see. I’ll just need to modify the database schema to add the column, update several stored procedures to reflect the schema change, add a new property to the User class, update the data access code to reflect the new property, and finally update the various user controls that render or take in input...