I attended the ALT.NET Conference last weekend in Austin, TX. I personally find the name "Alt" as in "Alternative" too polarizing and prefer terms like "Pragmatic.NET" or "Agile.NET." At the conference I suggested, partially in jest, that we call it "NIH.NET" as in "Not Invented Here.NET." ;)
Ultimately this is a group that believes in:
I asked "Why is this alternative," and Martin Fowler echoed those sentiments. When I was at Corillian we were using NAnt, NUnit, Subversion, NCover, NDoc, NDepend, CruiseControl, Watir/Watin and Ruby and we practiced Scrum with an Agile Coach. Did that make us alternative or were we just getting the job done? We made practical and pragmatic decisions and it worked out OK.
Whether this is Alternative .NET or just Practical .NET, it's a conversation and that's a a good thing.
ScottGu gave an hour long presentation on the upcoming MVC Framework and I took some guerilla video. ScottGu's presentation is here in Silverlight and it's about 60 minutes long. Considering it's so long, the video squished nicely.
This was the first time the MVC Framework was shown publicly. Note that this was a Prototype, not the Production code and both ScottGu and I make that point a number of times to drive home that it's early. Some of the code was written on a plane, just to give you an idea.
After The Gu did his piece on the MVC Framework, I showed some prototype hacking that I'd done over the previous few days along with some work Phil Haack did. My presentation is here as Silverlight and it's about 30 minutes long. I showed the Model View Controller with Controllers in IronPython and an IronPython view using a WebFormViewEngine. Then I talked about the possibilities of alternate ViewEngines and showed Phil Haack's prototype RubyViewEngine.
Both talks show lots of code. Of course, this is prototype madness. No warranty, express or implied. Features come and go, but I hope this shows that we're committed to aiming for as much awesomeness as is humanly possible. I hope you enjoy them, even though my webcam hand was shaky after an hour. I used a new Microsoft NX-7000 Lifecam for the recoding - it's a great camera for the Alpha Geek. ;)
Here's the videos I promised:
If you want to link to these, link to this post, not those links, as the videos might move around. Thanks.
Here's some of the buzz around the new Framework. I hope this framework is a harbinger of things to come in future frameworks.
Things are looking up.