Just to prove that the ALT.NET conference was 99% positive, I was definitely on an endorphin high when I wrote this.
There was a day and time when I was intimidated by C++, then Java developers. I thought they were a notch above us lowly VB6 guys. They built real enterprise applications and systems with things like OOP and EJB's. Just upon a casual perusal of TheServerSide.Com I could tell from the myriad EJB workarounds being debated that these cats were serious developers. Later into the .Net years I began to use Agile techniques and tools, all of which was invented in Java or Smalltalk and later ported to .Net. I felt like I was living in a hand me down world.
As I was becoming more confident in my own skills and knowledge I started to get some exposure to the Java camp and realized that they're not particularly any better than us .Net-ters. Nonetheless, I still didn't feel like .Net measured up because of the sheer quantity of community led innovation happening in the Java world. Java developers had eaten from the development tree of knowledge to make their own decisions about right and wrong. They even had the audacity to decide for themselves and tell Sun itself what the best practices were, and what their tools should be like. Back in the my world, the average .Net developer seemed to have a lot in common with the goofy three eyed alien dolls from Toy Story that worshipped the "claw" descending from above.
Who would the "claw" lift up to be the next MVP? When would Microsoft bless us with a new version of .Net? Microsoft threw new API's at us and we were grateful for the love.
Later, the Ruby and Ruby on Rails crowd rose up fast, built on an ever increasing foundation of enthusiasm and novelty. You might not care for the RoR platform itself, but the RoR fanboys have an enviable community. I casually watch the RubyCorner feed. What I see is a heckuva lot of innovation happening as people stretch RoR with new plugins and design patterns -- all without a single big vendor to seed the process with money or sponsership. I love the Ruby "we can do anything!" mentality. One of the continuous topics at ALT.NET was how to bring that same sort of passion more into the .Net community.
After ALT.NET I'm feeling a lot better about sticking around in .Net. That place and those people had energy. There's more passion and innovation happening in .Net than ever before. Even if we're still mostly taking tools and techniques from other platforms, at least we're adding our own spin and adding to the innovation. The new MVC framework from Microsoft feels like it was built for me and my values of software design, and that's a brand new feeling. We've got the beginnings of a pretty nice community brewing around ALT.NET. Thoughts of ditching the warm, comfortable womb of .Net for life out on the Ruby edge are coming with much less frequency. There's some good stuff right where we're at! Heck, we might even get a performant version of Ruby on the CLR in the nearish future. C# 3.0 isn't Ruby in terms of expressiveness, but it's not chopped liver either. We're still behind the curve a little bit in terms of community activity and passion, but it's getting there. I'm happier to be in the .Net world right now than I've been in a long time. I don't have to jump to Ruby to get the community I want to be in. We can just make it right here.
