ALT.NET - Trip Report
I had the recent opportunity to travel to Austin, TX to attend a meeting of the minds of those who are considered thought leaders in the .NET agile/open source space. This community, in somewhat of an expression of feeling that the general .NET community (as guided by Microsoft) has gone in a different philosophical direction with regard to designing and building software, has aptly elected the name ALT.NET. While the meaning of "ALT" was the subject of several spirited debates, my general takeaway is that "ALT" is simply shorthand for "alternatives". The plural is important here because this community is not defining themselves or their values as the alternative to Microsoft technology and guidance. Rather, at the core, they are more interested in trying to promote the development of leaner, more maintainable software using whatever tools are most helpful to those ends (Microsoft or otherwise). To give you an idea of just how big this community's toolbox is, see the following.
Frankly, I think that the choice of the "ALT" moniker, while not meant to be seen as an alternative to Microsoft (which would actually be contradicted by the ".NET" part), is born out of the general frustration by the community that the tools Microsoft gives developers enables short term productivity and long term headaches - while at the same time decreasing the overall skill of developers and making them dependent on a specific type of tool (e.g. - designers).
The conference was conducted in a format called "Open Space". In this style, there were no formal sessions and no formal presenters. Anybody who wanted to talk about (not necessarily lead) any subject could put it forward to the group and schedule it for a time slot/meeting room. As such, Simon Guest and I sponsored a talk on how to engage the ALT.NET community with the rest of the .NET developer community. From those individuals who attended the session, we were able to identify a few interesting points of feedback.
- The community feels that MSDN and MSDN Magazine are stale and sterile, and that while there are lots of "how-to" articles, there is very little content that explains "why".
- There was a general lack of awareness about newer offerings from MSDN online - particularly the architecture dev center.
- Many of the audience are already avid and well-followed bloggers, and as such were skeptical as to the value-proposition of writing for MSDN Magazine.
As to the first 2 points, I think that there is a lot we can do as an organization to incorporate many of the ideas expressed at the ALT.NET conference - for MSDN Magazine, the first obvious step is to get more people from this community to write for the magazine - which leads me to the third bullet. The point that I kept reiterating to the participants was that while things like blogging and holding ALT.NET conferences are great, they're an echo chamber. People who visit ALT.NET blogs are generally going there because they have already bought into at least some of the philosophy. If you want to really affect change in the larger community, you need go to the community - and MSDN/MSDN Magazine are 2 fantastic ways to go about it. I think that this message resonated well, as, since returning, I have received several article submissions from conference participants.
In sum, this is a community that really wants to see people develop better software, and it was very encouraging to see Microsoft recognizing their contribution to the community by way of the number of Redmond folks in attendance. Going forward, it will be exciting to see both how this community evolves - and how their values and practices have an impact on the larger development community.
If you want to know more about the conference, such as the specific sessions/topics, I covered each day of the conference on my blog - so see the following.
Click here for pictures from the conference.
I am currently the Editor-in-Chief for MSDN Magazine. I joined Microsoft in 2006 as a product planner with the certification team at Microsoft Learning. Prior to that, I spent my career as a developer and later as an architect. My main technology passions include pretty much anything on language theory, agile development, and service-oriented architecture.
