
Bring back alt.NET - douche
http://www.dylanbeattie.net/2017/02/bring-back-altnet-but-why.html
======
lucisferre
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
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.

------
nbevans
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!

~~~
blakeholl
I think ALT.NET was one of the drivers for this change within Microsoft.
Without it or something else like it, we may see the old MS patterns creep
back slowly. I think it is good to have alternatives to a lot of the
prescriptive MS frameworks and "best practices" \- and I say this as a career
MS, .NET developer.

~~~
bartread
I'm not so sure. The leadership at Microsoft nowadays is quite different
compared with back then. I do think the need for (something like) ALT.NET
perhaps isn't there in the way it was back in 2007-09 because the software
development, and particularly the web development, landscape has changed so
much over the past 10 years.

~~~
dylanbeattie
One of the reasons we're keen to do this - or at least to try it! - is that
both the industry and Microsoft have changed enormously in the last ten years.
There's a much richer range of platforms available, and there's all sorts of
new protocols and patterns we can use to integrate those platforms - and with
stuff like containerization and serverless cloud functions, there's all kinds
of interesting ways to use .NET and .NET Core as part of a larger heterogenous
application stack.

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 :)

------
nkohari
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
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
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
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.

------
passivepinetree
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
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.

------
tracker1
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
> JQuery wasn't around until 1996

In fact it wasn't around until 2006!

~~~
tracker1
corrected, thanks.. lol.. I know it's been a decade now.

------
adamconroy
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

