There and Back Again : ALTNETCONF

ALT.NET - Trip Report

hdierking — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 06:41:58 GMT

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.

ALT.NET - Day 3

hdierking — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 04:43:06 GMT

I can't believe that it has taken me so long to get around to writing my concluding thoughts on the conference. That said, perhaps this is a good thing as I have been able to watch the post-conference churn in the blogosphere over the past couple of weeks and can incorporate some of my thoughts on that into my more general thoughts on the conference and on ALT.NET.

Also, in the spirit of being transparent, I will follow this post with a "Trip Report" post. This will be the (verbatim) summary email that I'm sending out to my management - so if you're curious about "what is being said internally at Microsoft about the conference and ALT.NET?", there you go.

First Things First - Day 3

Session - Engaging with the Community (aka - the Simon and Howard show<g>)

Simon Guest, owner of the MS Architect Journal, and I held a session to discuss how the ALT.NET community could engage with the larger .NET community in a way that is practical, tangible, and generally more helpful than the approaches thus far (for an example of what I'm contrasting more to, see my post on day 2 of the conference). Firstly, many thanks to Simon for being much more detail oriented than I am. Using the dry erase board, Simon captured and related the major points expressed by the session participants. This was the perfect complement (or supplement, depending on how you want to look at it) to my style, which is much more of an extended conversation.

Anyway, the basic point that I came into the conversation hoping to convey was (and remains) very simple. While things like blogging and holding ALT.NET conferences are great, it's an echo chamber. People that 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.

All in all, I think that there was a very positive response from everybody who attended the session - and I have gotten several emails from people who have taken me up on my challenge to submit article ideas for the magazine.

Session - Language Oriented Programming

I now feel like an adult developer - I've gotten into an argument with Scott Bellware <g>. So those of you who know me know that I'm kind of a language geek - Charles Simonyi is my hero. As such, I was really excited to be part of a discussion on what I thought would be in that vein - and needless to say, I was disappointed when Scott seemed to only want to talk about the philosophical ramifications of doing away with parentheses for method calls in Ruby. I remember having similar conversations wrt JavaScript about 5 years ago!

On a positive note, though, I wasn't alone in my thinking - and a side conversation on language oriented programming got started and actually continued after the meeting ended. Several issues were discussed, but a couple interesting ones that jumped out at me were the following.

Language oriented programming is defined along somewhat of a continuum - the continuum is measured by the definition of language and ranges from defining language as a soluble code library to defining language as a full blown DSL. Depending on your definition, the proximity for the realization of language oriented programming shifts.
We will probably go way too far in implementing custom "languages" before we figure out the best practices - then pragmatism will drive things back to the center (sound familiar?)
In the case of DSL, there are 2 major challenges
- Keeping the language scoped to a narrow domain - the biggest mistake for a DSL creator is letting it grow into another Turing-complete GPL.
- The language integration/collaboration strategy. I am personally REALLY interested in this one.

Closing Session

I shook everybody's hand on a piece of silly puddy!

Note to My ALT.NET Friends Submitting Article Ideas

hdierking — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 02:05:13 GMT

I'm glad that I'm obsessive enough to periodically check my junk folder in Outlook. As I was doing this today, I found emails from Jeremy and Russell about writing for MSDN Magazine. I was able to catch these and respond - however, if you submitted an article to me a while back and have not heard from me, it may have very well ended up accidentally getting trashed. Therefore, please resend to mmsubmit@microsoft.com (this is our official alias for content submission anyway).

ALT.NET Conference, Day 2 - Taking the Good With the Bad

hdierking — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 07:57:27 GMT

Today's post is actually a nice continuance of yesterday's because it deals very specifically with one of the issues that I raised yesterday - specifically the issue of the emerging tenuous relationship between the ALT.NET community and the rest of the professional .NET developer community. That said, today was fantastic - great people, great discussions - and a great show of forthcoming technology by ScottGu. So, in sum, we'll deal with the good and the not so good in tonight's post (IMHO <g>)!

The Not So Good - How to Be a Catalyst for Change In the Community

I went into this session hoping that individuals would come in wanting to share success and/or failure stories related to creating an environment that bought into at least some of the principles of agile - or at the very least became more passionate about writing great software. I also went in expecting there to be a fair amount of Microsoft bashing because of designers, code generation, NIH, etc... (I would mention MSDN/MSDN Magazine here, but that session is tomorrow, so I'll deal with that in the morning). What actually unfolded actually surprised me a bit. So firstly, I should say that there were some success stories shared. J.P. Boodhoo talked about some of the successes he has had with "lunch & learns" - Scott Hanselman and Jay Flowers talked about growing influence exponentially via a style that for this post we'll call "influencing the influencers" (Jay - you had mentioned a book that dealt with this topic - if you're reading, please post the title in the comments). Past those (and a few other) examples, though, the conversation took what I considered a fairly cynical and elitist turn. Earlier I mentioned that I was surprised a bit by what unfolded. What surprised me was that the frustration expressed was not as much directed at Microsoft, but was directed at the general development community. It basically came across as "why won't all these people stop calling me dogmatic and listen to what I'm trying to tell them?!?" Several in the room made the argument that energy should only be expended on influencing those who wanted to be influenced. Huh?? If they...want to be influenced....doesn't that already....nevermind. Anyway, I basically came away from that session with 2 concluding saddening thoughts about many in the ALT.NET community.

They will always be 10 steps ahead of the rest of the professional development community because they are incredibly smart, talented, and motivated.
They will always be frustrated because they are narcissistic.

OK - maybe it was because I drank more coffee, maybe it was something else, but the day got much better as it progressed. Let's move on.

The Good - DSLs/NHibernate

I'm grouping these together because I walked in half way through the DSL talk and I just didn't take that many notes from the NHibernate talk. In fact, I think I'm just going to do bullet points here.

DSL

I hadn't realized that Microsoft released the source code for the .NET Framework Class Library. Totally cool - especially since, as ScottGu mentioned, they shipped it with the symbols, so profiling and debugging into the framework itself is now simple.
There was a lot of talk about DSL support in Ruby. I haven't worked in Ruby so I really can't speak to this - but now I'm curious.
One really interesting comment that ScottGu made, regarding DSLs is to make sure that you have mastered your GPL first, as this will provide you the best platform from which to jump into DSLs.

NHibernate

It was tough to blur the lines between where we crossed into a general DDD discussion and when we were still talking about NHibernate - particularly when we were discussing architectural patterns for DALs, etc...
To the NHibernate team (or someone with the time to look at this on the forge) - It would be totally cool if we could get JIT loading of HBMs, or at least have the option to suppress fail-fast when building the session factory. This came out of a discussion where many in the group were expressing the pain felt when one invalid HBM file caused every unit test to fail (or nearly every view to crash) because the session factory couldn't be created.
On that note, a MSBuild/NAnt HBM validator build task would be nice for plugging into the build.

The Rockin' - ScottGu's Show and Tell

So I haven't really had a lot of exposure to MVC in web applications (yes, I have let the whole RoR phenomenon pass me by - for shame, I know). And as a result, I really didn't see the point of the whole paradigm shift to MVC. I did DVC in MFC and it was a pain - so perhaps I was just avoiding the topic because of past aches, but for whatever reason, this was all new to me. So anyways, Scott demonstrated the new MVC framework that will be available in CTP form pretty soon. Honestly, it's pretty cool. I don't really buy into the argument that MVC is absolutely necessary to cleanly separate the logical layers of your application. I have been doing DDD for a while now and have never run into a major problem with bleeding of concerns on web projects - but maybe that's just me. However, if you're into having leaner, better controlled HTML and, more intuitive URLs, and reduced probability for concern-bleed, the MVC framework is definitely the way to go.

On a related note, let the record show that Scott Bellware is officially my favorite heckler. Scott - whenever you're in Redmond, the drinks are on me!

Back to the MVC discussion, my main next action is to see if I can actually find the bits so that I can get up to speed a bit. Who knows, maybe I'll even take the approach of one of my close friends at P&P and buy a Macbook Pro to play with RoR <g>!

The Confused - DDD

So since this post is getting long, I'm going to sum this session up with a pretty simple statement. Eric - A little help please? There continues to be a great deal of confusion and disagreement in the DDD community about some very fundamental concepts. Examples include the definition of a domain service, an application service, and the very distinctive characterics of DDD that make it different than simply good OOP heuristics.

On a closing note, I have never seen so many iPhones in one place.

ALT.NET Conference - Opening Day..Opening Thoughts

hdierking — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 08:32:00 GMT

I'm currently in Austin, Texas where I'm attending the ALT.NET conference. This conference is essentially a who's who of thought leaders in the .NET agile/open source community - everyone from Martin Fowler to Jim Newkirk to Scott Hanselman to Scott Bellware - the list goes on and on. In sum, over half of the people that you wanted listed as wanting to hear from in MSDN Magazine are attending this conference.

The conference is being conducted in a format called Open Spaces. This is one of the coolest things that I've ever seen in conferences. Basically, after a brief round of introductions, we launched into tonight's main activity - determining the schedule for the remainder of the conference. On a whiteboard was a 2-dimensional matrix - available rooms on the y-axis; time slots on the x-axis. Anybody that had an idea for a session wrote down the idea on a post-it note, presented it to the group, and placed it into a time slot. Once all the slots had been filled additional ideas were placed in a general holding space. Once all the ideas were collected, every individual marked which sessions they were interested in attending and based on this feedback, the schedule was renegotiated. It's worth pointing out that in this type of conference, there is no distinction between presenter and attendee. Everyone just shows up to whatever they are interested in. If you aren't interested in a session, get up and go. If you get sucked into a conference in the hallway - cool. It's incredibly exciting.

So there were 2 comments that I thought were really noteworthy/funny in tonight's opening session. The first was as follows.

"The values support the tools."

I'm not sure I buy this. I think that the values support the tools if you have values that make you interested in values. I think that many developers are perfectly content with using whatever tools they are presented with (e.g. - not going in search of 'better' tools) to do the job that they are being paid to do - solve the problems that they are being paid to solve. I'm not trying to make a value judgement on this group of developers (though I admit, it does kind of sound that way). At the same time, I believe that this is a reality, and as such, focusing on 'instilling values' is not the approach to take if the goal is to change behavior. I imagine that this theme will reoccur throughout this weekend. And that leads us to the second notable quote - ala Scott Hanselman.

"Mort is crying because mommy and daddy are fighting."

So in case you missed all of the conversations from last year on the blogosphere, Mort is the Microsoft persona to describe the group that I talked about in the previous paragraph. Unfortunately, Mort has become somewhat of a derogatory term as of late since he is used more as an accusatory glass that different communities and Microsoft throw at one another when arguing over products, methodologies, etc... you know - 'values'. As a result, Mort is sitting quietly on the sidelines wondering why Microsoft and it's community thought leaders can't get along - and he here's his name mentioned in so many arguments, he wonders "could it be me?"

Why do I care about this? Because I love agile - I love DDD, TDD, BDD, patterns, NHibernate, R#, et al. And I want to introduce more and more of this type of content into MSDN Magazine. However, I think that many of you who read the magazine are not as zealous in programming ideology as many here at the conference - and that's ok. What I refuse to do is allow the magazine to become a forum for the next religious war - to basically take the "C++ rules - VB sucks" argument and turn it into "ALT rocks - Mort sucks". So, for those of you who want more content on all of the cool agile things mentioned above, me too. For those of you who don't care about all of the ideology, that's cool too. I am interested in seeing MSDN Magazine provide practical solutions to all of its readers, no matter where they are on the programmer continuum. I think that a strong case can be made for many of the tools/methods in the agile space - and I want to present them in the Magazine in a way that provides a real incentive for using them. That incentive? Making programming easier and more enjoyable - not buying into a set of values.

Until tomorrow...