ALT.NET Conference Recap

ALT.NET Conference, take two. When I signed for this conference for the second time I didn't honestly think it was going to be as good as the first one. Boy was I wrong. I got the feeling that the attendees came incredibly prepared. Prepared to stand up and voice their opinions instead of simply watching. Prepared to listen diverging point of views. Prepared to take part in spontaneous conversations, in the conference rooms, in the corridors, in the shared rides, in the hotel lobby, in the restaurants, in the frigging airport waiting to board the plane. And, most of all, prepared to be surprised. I was surprised at so many different levels. Who would have thought that a discussion around JavaScript would spark so much interest? I was certain that the participants that came straight out of the MVP Summit would be all geeked out, but no. I was surprised to see a few MVPs that chose to fly in only for the ALT.NET event and not the summit. I was also surprised to see that some of the greatest talks happened not during the conference hours, but late in the night after a few drinks. Maybe if I start drinking I will become one of the smart guys? From the sessions that I stopped by, several discussions and questions came back with me for further processing.

• Microsoft v 1.0 vs Stable OSS
  • Is that decision based only on risk assessment?
  • MS is clearly happy with OSS built with .Net. Brad Abrams and ScottGu were there to assure that.
  • Are we lacking a corporation (not-MS) to back OSS, like Canonical, Red Hat, mySQL AB, etc?
  • Too many questions, no clear conclusion
  
  
  
• Functional Programming: Great talk. As you may or may not know, I am interested in this type of stuff. Just to reiterate, I think FP has its place and we are just seeing the beginning of it in the .Net universe.
  
  
• ASP.NET MVC update: Among all the surprises in the conference, this was the most intriguing one. I went in as a MVC believer and got out happier with webforms. Weird. Some of the upcoming changes in webforms will address important annoyances, like the id munging and routing for urls.
  
  
• Innovation: I arrived late at this discussion and was kind of shocked to hear Scott Hanselman question (or even suggest) that we already have enough implementation of OSS alternatives for many things and maybe there's nothing left to be innovated there, maybe we should just move on instead of creating another mock framework or another blog engine. I think this is kind of absurd. A great part of the innovation is powered by lower level innovations. My example: we didn't seem to need Moq, but now that we have lambdas in .Net, Moq could innovate in that area. As long as the CLR and the language teams keep feeding us new tools, we will keep using the tools in new and creative ways. Anyway, the central point of the discussion was supposed to be if there's innovation in .Net or if we are only porting existing projects from other languages.
  
  
• JavaScript tools and patterns
  • JSUnit - this is slow. too slow.
  • Do we need a JS-specific test runner?
  • We felt that we lack some guidance and some patterns
  • Watch for a new community around these premises