ALT.NET Recap: Not Invented Here – Um, are you kidding me?

Posted by Jeremy Miller on October 12, 2007

EDIT:  Softened the language a bit.   

Scott Hanselman made what I thought was, even in jest, a statement that didn’t quite feel right to me.  Mr. Hanselman, a newly minted employee of the company that brought us MSBuild and MSTest but forgot to clone CC.NET while they were at it, says that he thought the conference could have been called the “Not Invented Here” (NIH) conference.  The same company that on pain of death refuses to use design pattern terminology from outside of Redmond.  I’m guessing he said that because of our almost willful usage of so many tools from outside of Redmond.  I’d say that one of the most encouraging things about ALT.NET and the ALT.NET conference was the openess to ideas coming from outside of Redmond.  One of the very best tenets from David’s original post is the openness to other communities.  Heck, you could arguably call ALT.NET the “Fast Follower” group.

One of the best things about ScottGu’s MVC framework presentation from my perspective was how much they had obviously researched other platforms.  Several times ScottGu alluded to design choices inspired by other MVC frameworks like Rails or Django or a couple other frameworks I hadn’t even heard of.  Several, several references were made to MonoRail.  They didn’t try to make everything up themselves.  They went out and took the best stuff from other platforms while trying to avoid some of the pitfalls of the existing frameworks.  They used common names for design patterns when appropriate (it’s a huge pet peeve of mine that Microsoft creates new nomeclature for commonly used terms or patterns).  They were part of the greater software community!  This wasn’t the “Not Invented Here” conference.  This was .Net’s “Not Invented Here Exorcism!”

I am still cranky about Microsoft’s relationship with Open Source tooling, but I blame the lawyers more than anyone else. 

Hanselman, dude, you had some of the best one liners in the conference, but you lose points for looking way too happy with yourself after your pre-canned zingers.

About Jeremy Miller

Jeremy is the Chief Software Architect at Dovetail Software, the coolest ISV in Austin. Jeremy began his IT career writing "Shadow IT" applications to automate his engineering documentation, then wandered into software development because it looked like more fun. Jeremy is the author of the open source StructureMap tool for Dependency Injection with .Net, StoryTeller for supercharged acceptance testing in .Net, and one of the principal developers behind FubuMVC. Jeremy's thoughts on all things software can be found at The Shade Tree Developer at http://codebetter.com/jeremymiller.
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  • http://blowmage.com/ Mike Moore

    I think ScottHa was referring to the non-toolset, non-Microsoft content of the conference. Alot of the Agile/XP principles we discussed originated from other communities. I still find it fascinating that so many .NET devs look so intently to Microsoft for all of their experience and direction. I do believe that is specific to the “Mort culture”, and I think that because of my own history as “that guy”. But in my experience the folks at Microsoft don’t think of their role as that, and are often befuddled by the community’s desire for more guidance. That is more what I think ScottHa meant, but I could be wrong.

  • sergiopereira

    Jeremy, ScottHa is one of people that actually use and evangelize a lot of the stuff we like to use (nunit, cc.net, ncover, and the reasoning behind these tools). I think it’s great that he was there considering his new job title at MS and his history of community participation. Whether one likes his style of humor or not, is another story.
    BTW, +1 on ScottGu’s demonstrable knowledge about “the others”. It was refreshing and reassuring.

  • Joe Chung

    “I still find it fascinating that so many .NET devs look so intently to Microsoft for all of their experience and direction.” That’s because Microsoft has buttered our bread with development tools. You, on the other hand, have done nothing for me, ever.

  • http://blowmage.com/ Mike Moore

    Joe, Microsoft has done nothing to butter my bread. I paid for the butter and applied it myself. And I say this as a self-taught college dropout who learned more practical on-the-job knowledge from MSDN than anywhere else. That said, _I_ did it. Microsoft supplied some tools and articles to sell and support their tools, but it was my effort nonetheless. I would have learned that stuff anyway, but Microsoft and MSDN was the path of least resistance.

    I feel indebted to Microsoft for their role in my career, but I am not blinded by it. I was honestly surprised how many folks at ALT.NET held Microsoft in quiet reverence, where I’m starting to see myself as more of an equal. Think about it, if you were a guy working for Microsoft, which would you rather talk to? A worshipper? Or an equal?

  • http://www.hanselman.com/blog Scott Hanselman

    The whole room laughed as much of comedy is rooted in truth. But, you know me well enough to know that it was a joke, and it was a funny one. Pre-canned? I made that sh*t up on the spot. But I balanced one-liners with content, technology, reality and demos. Remember Linus “Talk is cheap, show me the code.” :P

    I’m not really clear on what you’re trying to accomplish with this public post? You never mentioned it to me at the conference and I was around for 3 days. Sorry you didn’t find it funny. Mike gets where I’m coming from.

  • http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeremy.miller Jeremy D. Miller

    Scott,

    “The whole room laughed”

    So did I, and I knew where you were coming from. All the same, I was praising the MVC framework for the research on non-Redmond stuff. One of the best parts of ALT.NET is simply the pulling in of good stuff from other places. Taken at face value, NIH isn’t a completely accurate handle to sling on us.

    “Absurd” was too harsh on my part and I apologize.

  • http://www.hanselman.com/blog Scott Hanselman

    Cool.