MPLS ALT.NET - The first get together.
MPLS ALT .NET
Yesterday was the first ever MPLS ALT.NET get together at the Bulldog N.E Thanks Ira Mitchell and Jim Swanson for hosting. Judging by the turnout at the initial meet one can easily tell that there is a great enthusiasm for alt .net in Minneapolis.
Jim and Ira do a better job of explaining What ALT .NET is all about.
The folks at Redmond, WA do a great job trying to build awesome tools for developers but often times committing resources to every available tool in the open source community is not possible. Filling this gap is where a community like ALT .NET can help.
The state of Microsoft and the OSS community is better explained by Ayende Rahien.
I hope that this community becomes successful and brings in the best of the OSS, Java and RoR communities into the .NET world.
September 30th, 2008 13:06
This sounds like it was cool. I’m sorry I missed it. One thought that I had has to do with this quote from the alt.net wiki
“While Microsoft has provided developers with a powerful framework and a bunch of very good tools and packages to build upon, it often feels like too much effort was put into a “one-size-fits-all” design philosophy that can make it complex, tedious, or just plain impossible to do things that don’t follow Microsoft’s prescribed approach.”
I wonder if the difficulty some have with deviating beyond Microsoft’s prescribed approach has more to do with an over dependence on Microsoft’s GUI development tools rather than limitations imposed by languages like C# and supporting .NET libraries. I find these to be excellent tools (aside from their limitation to the Windows OS and yes I know about Mono). I’ve written before on how Visual Studio can sort of force you down certain design paths but there’s nothing saying you can’t fire up you’re favorite text editor and let your imagination run wild. People forget that you can use the compiler at the command line or via tools like NAnt to build whatever you want. It does require greater knowledge and more time but under certain circumstances that’s a good thing because it makes you a better developer.