Spreading ALT.NET

The guy who is running(?) MSDN mag was here and really wanted to learn about the community and bring some of these ideas into the magazine. This was good as there is lots of talk about the divide between alt.net and Microsoft so this is a positive sign coming from MS.

James Kovacs had a good point that e are in an echo chamber and need to find how to spread the word.
Some ideas to do it:
-Speaking at user groups
-INETA speakers bureau
-Codezone
-Tying it to MSDN
-Including open source tools and techniques  in sample apps
-Focus on concepts, not specific frameworks
-When showing a solution, make sure that you explain the problem
-Linking to existing content vs. Writing new stuff
-Show unit tests in your demo (and show things breaking too)


When MS does something (i.e. introduce the entitiy framework) then ORM mappers will become really popular.

We broke into a bit of a debate that when you take certification you do not have to take any test on OO. Some of this breaks into that it is hard to determine what a right answer is programmatically.

Peter from the patterns and practices group was asking what they can do to be better. I liked the idea of having them show their tool or method but also show the other frameworks and techniques out there.  He said he was worried that if they start writing about this stuff that 80% of us would flame him about it and they are in the hard position that some people follow them blindly.

There is an agile developer center on MSDN. It actually links to more external content than internal MSDN content which is good. You can get to it from http://msdn.microsoft.com/architecture

Peter also said that they were like us and that they are here because they are interested in this stuff. They are not here to spy on us. They are here to learn with us.

PnP has a cool thing called “Work at PnP”. They will pick up a development shop and move them to their office and work with them for a week to learn and teach in the community.

Roy had the idea of having a critic column in MSDN that is basically the review of something that came out. Scott Bellware was volunteered.

Jeff Sutherland (sp?) had a good article with stats about introducing agile. The article showed a 50% increase in productivity after switching to test first

Someone had a good story that when they introduced testing/CI that it caught a bug before it went out. The dev who implemented it said “I just saved you $1,200” as that is the cost of a bug making it to production. By looking at the cost of a bug and the cost of a solution is really good

MSDN might be introducing screen casts for people too.

We also said that we are talking about stuff we knew two years ago. We assume that what we are doing that everyone knows it. This is not the case. I showed nunit to someone and they were amazed. We need to keep talking about what we know and realize where we sit on the curve really.

We need to unify all of our knowledge into a site. If people write for MSDN then they can link to that site.