I'm just back from Omaha, NE where I spoke at the Heartland Developers Conference.  This was my 2nd time speaking at this conference, and I got to say, I really like the conference that Joe Olsen and Phil Wolfe have put together.  It isn't your prototypical large conference (even though they had 500 people there this year), and they manage to keep that mid-western (OK, heartland) feel.  This year I was asked to speak on ALT.NET, which is a pretty broad topic, and thus a little hard to get that talk just right.  They also had a number of Agile or ALT.Net oriented talks: Javier Lozano did a talk on Software Factories, Tim Rayburn did a great TDD talk, Beth Schmidt, Director of Application Development for Farm Credit Services of America, spoke about  her experiences with Agile, Adam Esterline spoke about MonoRails, and Ron Jacobs had the first day's keynote - The Perfect Pattern Storm, where TDD meets UX and MVP.  Definitely a nice coverage of ALT.Net topics.

In my talk, I did my best to try to cover all the bases and expose folks to all sorts of alternative development styles/practices.  The night before, I heard that F# is going to make it into VS 2008 as a first class language, so I added it to my list of alternative languages.  In the talk I mentioned that F# would help turn your brain inside out, and that it is something that I've been playing with.  Unfortunately, I didn't think of it ahead of time and have F# installed on my presentation machine and have some example code to show them, and of course someone asked me to show them some F#.  Man, I blew that opportunity.

But, I was able to get some of the attendees to engage in a bit of conversation during the session.  Midwest folks tend not to ask as many questions as my NJ and NYC brethren, and it took some doing, but I did have a couple folks come up to me later in the conference and ask for suggestions on getting their teams to look outside the box.  This definitely seems to be a reoccurring theme with the ALT.Net folks, and I think we need to spend some time in this space.  There seem to be a lot of people willing to give this stuff a try and just need a little help.  One of the things I suggest is to find a mentor, either online or if you can, someone local.  Even better would be to hire a consultant as a mentor for a couple months.  There are enough independent consultants in the ALT.Net movement, and I'm a firm believer that although training is a good thing, it might be more cost effective to bring in a consultant for 2-3 months and get the pump primed.  I've seen too many folks come out of training classes all gung-ho, just to fall back into their old habits after a couple weeks.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention, yes, I'm back to blogging on CodeBetter.  I'm still keeping my personal blog up and running, but I'm going to post different material on both sites.  This one, I'm going to try to keep more "ALT.Net in the field", and leave my other site just the way it is.  Actually, I've been suffering from writers block over the last 6 months, so I'm hoping the change of scenery will help get me past that.