ALT.NET Conference Austin — Day 1

I’m at the ALT.NET conference in Austin TX this weekend. Why? Mostly, I’m wondering if the people pushing Agile / TDD / DDD / MVC can mount a coherent presentation that will make a difference in the every day work life (and perhaps more importantly, the quality of typical output) of ordinary mortal developers.

I have to say, there are a lot of Olympic gods in attendance — Martin Fowler showed up, and Roy Osherove, for instance. And there are a surprising number of top people from Microsoft: Scott Guthrie and Scott Hanselman, to name two. Scott will be presenting first thing in the morning, and revealing Microsoft’s nascent MVC framework for the first time publicly. That presentation is being awaited with much eagerness here.

The Microsofties are doing a credible job of listening, and with good humor. Scott Hanselman joked “does ViewState suck so much that you have to have a conference about it?”

There was a lively discussion about what ALT.NET is about and exactly what it’s after. Some talking points:

• While the Java and Ruby worlds are more community driven, the .NET world is more Microsoft-driven.
• That Microsoft drives the .NET world is not a criticism, but the effect is that rather than the brightest visionaries driving things, Microsoft is producing products (and guidance) for the lowest common denominator — the so-called “Morts”, the SharePoint developers, the people who came up through the ranks of casual VB developers.
• The result is tools that rely on lots of “magic” built into leaky abstractions — one of the chief of which is WebForms. The objection is that such tools / platforms are not as maintainable, testable, or scalable as they need to be — at least for larger projects.

All of this sounds a little elitist, but there was really no preening going on that I could see and more than one debater took pains to make the point that this is not about ivory towers and exclusive clubs. Still, I couldn’t escape a certain feeling of religious fervor and that same sort of dynamic that exists in gatherings of “true believers” of any stripe. How much of this passion is on-target and how much is mis-guided, is one of the things I hope to get a sense of by attending this conference. At least, I can say that as an honest seeker, I did not feel condescended to. That’s always a good sign.

I ran into Rod Paddock, whom I haven’t seen since the early 90’s, when we collaborated on some technical writing projects. Today his consultancy wants to do more systematic testing. He’s looking for ways to sell it to his clients. I also ran into a colleague from Phoenix, another one-man shop like myself, who’s pretty much in the same boat as me: a competent developer who has used bits and pieces of ALT.NET concepts but isn’t sure about the whole bundle.

I suspect we’ll all come away with new ideas. I am gratified that Microsoft is bringing some credible-sounding things to the table, because that can solve another problem with open source and third party solutions: every time you use something that’s not in the standard “stack” you have a sell job to do, and then you have to keep defending your decisions. There is also the issue of limited time and resources; do I learn LINQ, SubSonic or nHibernate? Do I go with MSBuild or NAnt? And so forth.

Stay tuned, I’ll be blogging the conference through Sunday morning.

Next post in this series is here.