6 ms·

Bring back alt.NET

60 points by douche 10y ago

passivepinetree 10y ago
So is alt.NET a series of meetups? Conferences? Is there a call to action for .NET developers to try to get this type of thing going in their hometowns? Where do we go from here? I'm interested in being part of a .NET/open source movement. I think that's awesome.
- mmgutz 10y ago
  Way back when I used to do .NET, alt.NET was also an umbrella for alternative frameworks like Castle, data mappers, etc. It would be great to see a resurgence of non-MS frameworks. 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.
- dylanbeattie 10y ago
  There's a group of us specifically talking about running another big alt.net 'unconference' here in the UK, but we're also keen to rekindle wider interest in the whole open source .NET ecosystem, and the kind of ideas that fuelled the first wave of alt.NET. For now we've got people posting their own things and we're using Medium (https://medium.com/altdotnet https://medium.com/altdotnet) as an aggregator, but nobody owns this; there's no trademarks or anything. If you want to kickstart something in your own community, go for it. We're going to be talking to other community groups and some of the extant alt.NET meetups that are still running, and share their ideas about community engagement, how to promote diversity and inspire enthusiasm, that kind of thing. And it's great to see such a positive reaction. Thank you :)
nbevans 10y ago
From what I remember ALT.NET was pretty much a movement that was against Microsoft anti or ignorant OSS policies of the time. 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!
- pjmlp 10y ago
  > 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.
  - ZenoArrow 10y ago
    >"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?
    - ygra 10y ago
      Java has an enormous foothold in the enterprise with lots and lots of code running and often dating back years, if not a decade or more. That's not going to be replaced easily. The other thing is that Java users seem to be very averse to upgrading. We got a lot of backlash for releasing our newest library version for Java 8 only (so our API could offer a few niceties from that version and be less awkward to use), even though it's the only currently supported Java version by Oracle. We still have customers that use Java 1.4 ...
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      Because .NET Core even with the .NET Standard 2.0 only covers part of the APIs for CLI and Web applications, and only targets GNU/Linux, OS X and Windows. 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.
lucisferre 10y ago
I was part of alt.net years ago, and it died for a variety of reasons but one of the primary ones was that many influential members of it were taken in by the lure of the Microsoft MVP program and the consulting prestige that it offered. This slowly lead to the underlying message of ALT.NET becoming undermined and co-opted it until it was just another part of the MS/.NET marketing machine and many of us simply lost interest. 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/ 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.
- tracker1 10y ago
  I'd love to see some of the ALT.NET passion come back around the .Net core space... but it feels like you can't attend a meeting/presentation that isn't also tethered to Azure demos. I mean, I actually like/appreciate what Azure offers, but it was the feeling that every MS presentation was a sales demo for Azure that drove me away from attending the local presentations several years ago. 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.
nkohari 10y ago
ALT.NET died because a huge number of the people who were involved have left the .NET ecosystem entirely, mostly to Ruby and node.js. (For example, I wrote Ninject, which was a fairly popular OSS .NET project in its day, but I haven't written a line of C# in years.) 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.
- intrasight 10y ago
  I agree on the "about 7 years too late". But you're leaving out an important new development that is making .Net relevant again, namely that the three major cloud computing companies are supporting C# for their "serverless" cloud computing.
  - lmickh 10y ago
    How does support for some function services translate to "making .Net relevant again"? In all of the talk I've seen regarding recent changes of .Net Core/Standard, serveless has never come up. 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.
    - intrasight 10y ago
      Because there is an audience, and I think that it is growing, for "serverless" server-side platforms feeding SPAs. Apps that outgrow Firebase have somewhere to go with AWS Lambda and Azure Functions. >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.
  - nkohari 10y ago
tracker1 10y ago
It's funny, but I also started out using JScript for my ASP pages. The only thing that was alien was dealing with COM Enumerables (Active Record results, etc). I was also into the Alt.Net space pretty early on. I used Castle Monorail (iirc that was the name) for a few things, and was genuinely happy to see ASP.Net MVC come from MS as a prescribed solution. 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.
- dualogy 10y ago
  > JQuery wasn't around until 1996 In fact it wasn't around until 2006!
adamconroy 10y ago
Maybe it has had its day. It influenced the mindset of the masses and is now mainstream. There is no alt anymore. Even Microsoft ships software that leverages newtonsoft.json

60 points by douche 10y ago

So is alt.NET a series of meetups? Conferences? Is there a call to action for .NET developers to try to get this type of thing going in their hometowns? Where do we go from here? I'm interested in being part of a .NET/open source movement. I think that's awesome.

mmgutz 10y ago
Way back when I used to do .NET, alt.NET was also an umbrella for alternative frameworks like Castle, data mappers, etc. It would be great to see a resurgence of non-MS frameworks. 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.
dylanbeattie 10y ago
There's a group of us specifically talking about running another big alt.net 'unconference' here in the UK, but we're also keen to rekindle wider interest in the whole open source .NET ecosystem, and the kind of ideas that fuelled the first wave of alt.NET. For now we've got people posting their own things and we're using Medium (https://medium.com/altdotnet https://medium.com/altdotnet) as an aggregator, but nobody owns this; there's no trademarks or anything. If you want to kickstart something in your own community, go for it. We're going to be talking to other community groups and some of the extant alt.NET meetups that are still running, and share their ideas about community engagement, how to promote diversity and inspire enthusiasm, that kind of thing. And it's great to see such a positive reaction. Thank you :)

nbevans 10y ago

From what I remember ALT.NET was pretty much a movement that was against Microsoft anti or ignorant OSS policies of the time. 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!

pjmlp 10y ago
> 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.
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  >"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?
  - ygra 10y ago
    Java has an enormous foothold in the enterprise with lots and lots of code running and often dating back years, if not a decade or more. That's not going to be replaced easily. The other thing is that Java users seem to be very averse to upgrading. We got a lot of backlash for releasing our newest library version for Java 8 only (so our API could offer a few niceties from that version and be less awkward to use), even though it's the only currently supported Java version by Oracle. We still have customers that use Java 1.4 ...
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Because .NET Core even with the .NET Standard 2.0 only covers part of the APIs for CLI and Web applications, and only targets GNU/Linux, OS X and Windows. 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.

lucisferre 10y ago

I was part of alt.net years ago, and it died for a variety of reasons but one of the primary ones was that many influential members of it were taken in by the lure of the Microsoft MVP program and the consulting prestige that it offered. This slowly lead to the underlying message of ALT.NET becoming undermined and co-opted it until it was just another part of the MS/.NET marketing machine and many of us simply lost interest. 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/ 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.

tracker1 10y ago
I'd love to see some of the ALT.NET passion come back around the .Net core space... but it feels like you can't attend a meeting/presentation that isn't also tethered to Azure demos. I mean, I actually like/appreciate what Azure offers, but it was the feeling that every MS presentation was a sales demo for Azure that drove me away from attending the local presentations several years ago. 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.

nkohari 10y ago

ALT.NET died because a huge number of the people who were involved have left the .NET ecosystem entirely, mostly to Ruby and node.js. (For example, I wrote Ninject, which was a fairly popular OSS .NET project in its day, but I haven't written a line of C# in years.) 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.

intrasight 10y ago
I agree on the "about 7 years too late". But you're leaving out an important new development that is making .Net relevant again, namely that the three major cloud computing companies are supporting C# for their "serverless" cloud computing.
- lmickh 10y ago
  How does support for some function services translate to "making .Net relevant again"? In all of the talk I've seen regarding recent changes of .Net Core/Standard, serveless has never come up. 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.
  - intrasight 10y ago
    Because there is an audience, and I think that it is growing, for "serverless" server-side platforms feeding SPAs. Apps that outgrow Firebase have somewhere to go with AWS Lambda and Azure Functions. >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.
- nkohari 10y ago

tracker1 10y ago

It's funny, but I also started out using JScript for my ASP pages. The only thing that was alien was dealing with COM Enumerables (Active Record results, etc). I was also into the Alt.Net space pretty early on. I used Castle Monorail (iirc that was the name) for a few things, and was genuinely happy to see ASP.Net MVC come from MS as a prescribed solution. 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.

dualogy 10y ago
> JQuery wasn't around until 1996 In fact it wasn't around until 2006!

adamconroy 10y ago

Maybe it has had its day. It influenced the mindset of the masses and is now mainstream. There is no alt anymore. Even Microsoft ships software that leverages newtonsoft.json