Bring back alt.NET
dylanbeattie.net
dylanbeattie.net
One of ALT.NET's flagship events was the yearly unconference that was held, ironically, at Microsoft's main campus in Redmond. For the most part it was a truly inspiring event and inspired me and few others in Vancouver to try to do something similar locally. However, we decided that making an event and organization like this language, framework, or ecosystem specific was unnecessarily limiting, so we decided to call it the [Polyglot UnConference](http://www.polyglotconf.com/)
We've been running this quietly for a number of years now. Many of the original ALT.NET people from the Seattle area regularly attend and we are always at capacity. We also use the organization we created to help organize and sponsor other events as well like CascadiaJS, Erlang Factory Lite and Devops Days.
On that note, we would be love to help other groups and localities copy this model and to help grow it.
Bringing ALT.NET back would be a mistake precisely because by definition of being .NET oriented it limits the kind of thinking, discussions and people who can or want to be involved. ALT.NET inspired a lot of new thinking in the .NET community but ironically it also inspired many of them (myself included) to walk away from .NET and explore more open ecosystems. If anyone really wants to rekindle what ALT.NET inspired then I highly suggest they endeavour to carry the movement forward by taking new steps. Don't retrace the old steps of ALT.NET for nostalgia's sake.
ScottGu presents in the Phoenix area with a few others once a year, and I always really enjoyed it. I don't recall what year it was (2012 I think) that pretty much every demo was an Azure demo, that I just stopped going to them, and the local user groups as well.
I'm genuinely interested in .Net core... I love VS Code... but I'm not interested in an Azure sales demo.
For instance NuGet was Microsoft's project which completely ignored the fact that OpenWrap (an OSS project) had existed and was gaining momentum. But then NuGet came along and obviously the Microsoft loud speaker basically killed OpenWrap over night. That is just one example - but there are dozens of others.
ALT.NET was also about the social aspect, such as Twitter, meetups and non-Microsoft-owned .NET conferences.
I don't see the need for any kind of similar movement right now. Microsoft is firing on all cylinders and I believe it will only get stronger, wiser and bolder now.
It isn't long now before the .NET CLR will replace the JVM as the open source standard on which enterprise apps are built (and more) - watch this space!
I work with Java and .NET every day and the day our customers UNIX servers will run .NET is still very far away.
Why's that true for the customers you mentioned?
Java is a complete platform, not only CLI and Web, has application servers like Websphere that offer a full server OS abstraction across the cluster and run in several flavours of enterprise grade UNIX and mainframes, not only GNU/Linux.
Also every database worth using in the enterprise space has JDBC drivers, whereas good luck getting ADO.NET drivers or mainframe connectors for .NET Core on those platforms.
And many of the .NET libraries don't run out of the box on either Mono or .NET Core, so unless they get ported, they won't be available.
Oh, and as far as I am aware you still don't get performance monitoring tooling like the JetBrain products talking to .NET Core.
Also they have legions of replaceable programmers used to Java, unless the IT department changes their infrastructure and spends money in trainings, it won't happen, even if .NET Core already had feature parity with Java.
When you get a list of solid points about why Java won't be displaced and the response is watch this space, it reminds me of the folks saying "this is the year of the Linux desktop" without pointing to actual improvements coming to life.
The "new" .Net CLR really only has a compelling story if you are already a .Net shop. Nothing in the new Core and Standard implementations gives you something new if you are outside of it.
Hopefully I don't need to point out the very well publicised and ongoing efforts to revamp the .NET CLR and peripheral items to run on non-Windows systems.
As for SQL Server, it is better than last time I checked. Do you have data about production loads on GNU/Linux?
The efforts to revamp .Net CLR to run on non-Windows systems is of little value to shops that are not already running .Net CLR. At best it is removing a negative for running .Net CLR. There is no net gain for a Rails or JVM shop for example.
The gain is only for shops that already paying the Windows tax to get .Net.
Regarding .NET, that is only for 100% Windows stacks, even if they run across VMs on Amazon or Azure instalations.
I am yet to see a single RFP asking for .NET deployments on GNU/Linux.
They don't have any reason to switch to GNU/Linux VM instances instead of Windows ones, the infrastructure costs are a tiny portion of the overall project costs.
It will also be interesting - in the widest possible sense of the word - to see how the interactions between altnet and 2017-era Microsoft play out as compared to the 2007-era Microsoft. As the saying goes, watch this space :)
Ironically, now that Microsoft is much friendlier to OSS, there are dramatically fewer people interested in working on open source .NET. Don't get me wrong, it's great to see Microsoft doing this stuff. It's just about 7 years too late.
For open source .NET to regain its relevancy, it would require a unique OSS project or framework to be built on .NET and gather meaningful mindshare. To my knowledge, that hasn't happened in years.
>Most people are not in the .Net space because of what it can do without the frameworks they are use to using if they re-write their code.
The clearly there's a lot of growth potential in .Net once those people find out what it can do without all that "framework" baggage.
Where do we go from here?
I'm interested in being part of a .NET/open source movement. I think that's awesome.
Don't get me wrong the MS prescribed frameworks are great. I just prefer SQL over LINQ, lightweight HTTP muxes and middleware as found in node.js or Go.
And it's great to see such a positive reaction. Thank you :)
Of course, I would often bypass certain behavior as I didn't like the way some parts work, specifically I'd override the user/token behavior, allowing me to both stow a few more things in the encrypted token, as well as be able to use ARR to relay to other things (node, java) using the same user cookie (encrypted token).
The following is in response to a comment directly on TFA regarding the "mess" that was WebForms... What it really came out of was the pain in the shear number of differences in JS between the browsers at the time... in 1997-2000 there were radical changes. People complain today about the missing pieces in JS between browsers/engines, but it's NOTHING like the pain of dramatically different DOM implementations... Layer/Frame NN/IE... and if you had to support Netscape 4.x when IE5-6 were just released, OMG that was a nightmare.
I'm a big fan of JS, and love what it's become today (fatigue from webpack, babel, etc and all), but at that point in time, it was truly painful. IE6 getting well over 90% market share was a bit of a mixed blessing as all the old cruft of the v4 browsers had passed, and the newer DOM started to take hold with Mozilla and IE. JQuery wasn't around until 2006, and prototype (the library) had quite a few issues itself.
People were begging for a server-side solution to all the client-side problems. That's how we got WebForms, and frankly by the time ASP.Net MVC came out the landscape had changed dramatically for the better.
I think a lot of developers today either don't remember, or came in after the pain of client side development in the mid-late 90's. It really wasn't the JS language (though prior to nn4/ie4 it was kind of bad). People didn't update their browsers, and corporate standards held things far longer. I was working in a job that required Netscape Navigator 4.08 support when IE6 was released, and IIRC NN8 was in beta. I had to do some interactive charting and stack diagrams and had to support both newer and older interfaces. To say it was painful would be an understatement. I'll take what we have today with the node/npm space every time over what it was like prior to 2003. Although we've now had jQuery over a decade, and node/npm for over 6-8 years, there were some bad old days before.
In fact it wasn't around until 2006!