My brief thoughts on alt.net
Thank you.
If it were not for alt.net, we would not be getting an MVC framework.
Sometimes, my skeptic nature puts me, while not quite in the laggard crowd, certainly not in the early adopters with most things. I have a certain distaste for "purists". Lets be honest - it is very hard to be a good technology evangelist of anything interesting without sounding like one. However, that distaste is probably more due to my own issues I have had on certain consulting gigs where I was force fed "trendy stuff" much earlier in my career than anything else.
That said, I deeply appreciate those who are building alternatives to Microsoft tools. Not because I don't like Microsoft tools, but because the economist in me knows that competition will force Microsoft to produce better stuff, such the MVC framework.
One might say "but Aaron, you attached yourself to LINQ early, where is your skepticism there?". Well, in that particular case, unlike a lot of newer stuff like DDD, TDD, and the like, LINQ was something, for whatever reason, I saw obvious merit in. Nobody would argue that set operations are not a good primitive to have in programming. SQL, love it or hate it, is very successful partially because it makes sets 'easy' to do. TDD, and more recently, DDD, that light did not go off as fast for me. In many ways, maybe I have somewhere still to go with it.
Why am I so cautious? Perhaps its seeing a LOT of things come and go during the years, and seeing a lot of the same types of evangelism. I remember when you were a complete moron if you were not doing J2EE and EJBs with bean managed persistence. I remember when we were all going to write models in Rational Rose, write the code in Rational Rose, and then generate our apps right there (did anyone ever actually do it? sorry - I just remember the sales demo). At one point, COM was Love ;)
I guess my point is that it can be wise to be cautious. Consultants have so many things they can decide to learn. I don't mind being late to the alt.net party... or to learning TDD and DDD. Yes, my friends who adopted earlier will have an extra year or 5 of TDD experience on their resume. I suppose I can deal with that.
Did I say thank you already? Let me say it again.... thank you. When the alt.net conference comes to the midwest, I'll be there. I may even help organize it.
(p.s. IMHO, I still think 100% code coverage is silly... if you ever see me writing a unit test for a soon to be simple get/set pair, please shoot me on the spot :) )