The next Brighton ALT.NET Beers will be held at the co-working venue ‘The Skiff’ at 7.00 pm on Tuesday 1st June. I’ll be hosting again.

The address is: The Skiff, 49 Cheltenham Place, Brighton, BN1 4AB

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The format will be the same as usual, a quick round of suggestions for topics, voting and then an evening of beer and geekery.

What better way to recover from the rigours of the bank holiday weekend?

I had a lot of fun yesterday at the ALT.NET UK (un)conference. Ian, Alan and Ben do a great job organizing it and they managed to raise a lot more sponsorship money this time which meant that they could hire a larger venue, Conway Hall.

Friday night was spent suggesting sessions. There was some kind of dance thing going on in the main hall and it was difficult to hear what was going on at times but there was still a huge range of ideas put forward. Later we retired to the pub where I had some great conversations. I especially enjoyed hearing Sebastien Lambla talking about his open rasta RESTfull web development framework. I've heard him presenting about it before, but maybe it needed a couple of pints of Czech larger for it to make sense. I'm awaiting its release with some anticipation now.

Saturday morning kicked off with a 'park bench'. I'm not sure what the subject was since I spent a little too long enjoying the hotel breakfast and complementary FT. BTW good choice of hotel Ben! I think it was something like 'what does ALT.NET mean?' There was a suggestion that we needed a list of principles somewhat like the Agile movement, but I have to agree with Alan here; I think it would be a bad idea. I didn't get to the bench, but to me ALT.NET is really simple, it means building a community around .NET development that is not controlled by Microsoft. You don't need ALT.Java because that market is diverse and competitive enough that no single vendor is perceived as the single source of tools and guidance. But that is exactly the case with .NET development. The majority of .NET shops simply look to Microsoft for both. ALT.NET provides a convenient label for the .NET community to coalesce ideas around. This is good for .NET development in general, but also good for Microsoft itself.

The first session I attended in the morning was covering ORM use. We had a great discussion of the pros and cons of NHibernate vs Linq-to-SQL vs EF. I ranted a good deal about how any ORM in the .NET space had to have a LINQ provider. We also had a good discussion around repository patterns, where LINQ fits into the specification pattern and DTOs. We stayed in the same room to talk about Multi-tenanting. There were three or four people present who were actively involved in developing multi-tenanted applications so this was a very useful discussion. It mostly revolved around database sharding vs multiple-database patterns and security concerns.

During lunch we had a very interesting and wide ranging chat about IoC containers that then became a discussion on the horrors of sharepoint development.

Ian Cooper lead a very good session on Domain Driven Development in the afternoon. I've heard Ian talk about DDD several times now, but I always seem to learn something new. I would love to see a project that he'd worked on.

This brings me to a suggestion for future ALT.NET conferences. There are some excellent conversations but I do think that it would help if more people brought laptops and we had some projectors available where we could demonstrate real code. Talking about code is very difficult without having examples in front of you. I don't mean that we should be giving presentations, but that at least we should all come prepared to show off something of what we're doing. Of course this is problematic with the commercial code that most of us work on, but being able to fire up Visual Studio (or notepad Peter :) and show rather than tell would be a huge advantage. So Ian, Alan and Ben, if you want to know what to do with the sponsorship money next time: projectors!

I really enjoyed my 15 minutes of fame at last night's ALT.NET meeting. It was great to meet everyone, and I'm only sorry that I couldn't hang around for the after show drinks. Such is the cost of provincialism.

All the talks were good, but I especially enjoyed Seb Lambla's Open Rasta presentation, a very interesting RESTfull approach to ASP.NET. David De Florinier's talk on NServiceBus was also interesting since it's a tool I haven't had a chance to look at.

My talk was on Castle Windsor. You can download the slides here:

Powerpoint 2007

http://static.mikehadlow.com/The Castle Windsor Inversion of Control Container.pptx

Powerpoint 2003

http://static.mikehadlow.com/The Castle Windsor Inversion of Control Container_2003.ppt

My last post: ‘The ALT.NET virtuous network’ has a comment from Ken Egozi: "imo this is all stuff that Mainstream.NET people should do anyway ... I mean - High cohesion/Low coupling? that's software engineering 101" I started writing a reply in the comments, but it soon became a full scale rant so I’ve promoted it to a post. Of course, Ken is absolutely right, why should all this be ALT.NET? Well, by ALT.NET I guess we mean doing things not necessarily as recommended by MSDN and using non-Microsoft tools to do it. If you’re doing Domain Driven Development with Monorail and NHibernate and using Rhino Mocks in your tests then you are ALT.NET. It’s recognition that while the core .NET framework is a powerful beast; easily the equal of Java for example, much of what Microsoft has built on top of it is poorly conceived. So why does Microsoft not encourage good development practice? Partly it’s a symptom of being a monopoly; they commit early and poorly to particular technologies, but partly it’s because they are trying to satisfy developers with such a wide range of skills. I’m an itinerant consultant and have worked in wide range of development shops, many of which have been in blue chip companies with household names. I’ve found that a majority of developers don't know “software engineering 101”. Microsoft’s market research tells them that creating developer tools that assume that knowledge will just confuse many of their customers. It’s well known that the move from classic ASP to ASP.NET was not a popular one with many developers. I know at least two who are still using classic ASP after a frustrating and fruitless attempt at learning ASP.NET. Sometimes Microsoft seems to listening to the ALT.NET crowd, with developments like the MVC Framework. But then Entity Framework comes along which seems to suggest the opposite. So here’s my suggestion for Microsoft: I would like to see them recognize that they have at least two (probably more) very distinct developer markets and clearly mark different tools and guidance for them. One group is what we describe as ALT.NET; Software developers who clearly understand the core principles of software engineering. Microsoft should continue as they have been doing with the MVC Framework for this group: enter into dialogue about the development of the tools and encourage integration with 3rd party and open source frameworks. Another group could be described as the ‘we’d probably defect to PHP’ group, or ‘Morts’ in Microsoft parlance. These are developers who don’t fully grep software engineering 101. It should be clear that the advice to this group is based on this presumption. The core point here is to avoid the situation that many in the ALT.NET group often find themselves in: that they are blocked from pursuing good software development principles or using the best tools because the MSDN documentation is aimed at this group. A majority of developers never look further than the MSDN home page and much of the guidance there doesn't encourage basic principles like HC/LC. Just look at any of the Microsoft official training courses none of them encourage the trainee to learn core programming skills, or even make them aware that they exist. If Microsoft made it clear in their documentation that there is a better way of doing things, but it requires some study to understand, I think it would raise the game across the developer spectrum.

This is an attempt at visualising the virtuous relationship between various ALT.NET development practices. Any comments?

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