ALT.NET UK (un)conference

I had a lot of fun yesterday at the ALT.NET UK (un)conference. Ian, Alan and Ben do a great job organizing it and they managed to raise a lot more sponsorship money this time which meant that they could hire a larger venue, Conway Hall.

Friday night was spent suggesting sessions. There was some kind of dance thing going on in the main hall and it was difficult to hear what was going on at times but there was still a huge range of ideas put forward. Later we retired to the pub where I had some great conversations. I especially enjoyed hearing Sebastien Lambla talking about his open rasta RESTfull web development framework. I've heard him presenting about it before, but maybe it needed a couple of pints of Czech larger for it to make sense. I'm awaiting its release with some anticipation now.

Saturday morning kicked off with a 'park bench'. I'm not sure what the subject was since I spent a little too long enjoying the hotel breakfast and complementary FT. BTW good choice of hotel Ben! I think it was something like 'what does ALT.NET mean?' There was a suggestion that we needed a list of principles somewhat like the Agile movement, but I have to agree with Alan here; I think it would be a bad idea. I didn't get to the bench, but to me ALT.NET is really simple, it means building a community around .NET development that is not controlled by Microsoft. You don't need ALT.Java because that market is diverse and competitive enough that no single vendor is perceived as the single source of tools and guidance. But that is exactly the case with .NET development. The majority of .NET shops simply look to Microsoft for both. ALT.NET provides a convenient label for the .NET community to coalesce ideas around. This is good for .NET development in general, but also good for Microsoft itself.

The first session I attended in the morning was covering ORM use. We had a great discussion of the pros and cons of NHibernate vs Linq-to-SQL vs EF. I ranted a good deal about how any ORM in the .NET space had to have a LINQ provider. We also had a good discussion around repository patterns, where LINQ fits into the specification pattern and DTOs. We stayed in the same room to talk about Multi-tenanting. There were three or four people present who were actively involved in developing multi-tenanted applications so this was a very useful discussion. It mostly revolved around database sharding vs multiple-database patterns and security concerns.

During lunch we had a very interesting and wide ranging chat about IoC containers that then became a discussion on the horrors of sharepoint development.

Ian Cooper lead a very good session on Domain Driven Development in the afternoon. I've heard Ian talk about DDD several times now, but I always seem to learn something new. I would love to see a project that he'd worked on.

This brings me to a suggestion for future ALT.NET conferences. There are some excellent conversations but I do think that it would help if more people brought laptops and we had some projectors available where we could demonstrate real code. Talking about code is very difficult without having examples in front of you. I don't mean that we should be giving presentations, but that at least we should all come prepared to show off something of what we're doing. Of course this is problematic with the commercial code that most of us work on, but being able to fire up Visual Studio (or notepad Peter :) and show rather than tell would be a huge advantage. So Ian, Alan and Ben, if you want to know what to do with the sponsorship money next time: projectors!