ALT.NET Open Spaces, Seattle Day 2 Recap
Coverage Galore
Jeffrey Palermo was gracious enough to capture the opening ceremonies on video for all to see. Here are some of the videos and they are well worth watching. Really gives you an idea of how to run a good Open Spaces. Doc did a wonderful job as a facilitator for the event. And yes, that's me in the black coat in the background setting up for the event.
- ALT.NET Open Spaces, Seattle - Part 1
An introduction by Doc on the meaning of Open Spaces
- ALT.NET Open Spaces, Seattle - Part 2
More introduction and the suggestion of topics. Everyone who submitted topics had to get in the middle of the room and declare their topic of interest.
- ALT.NET Attendees - Why Did You Come to ALT.NET?
Jeffrey interviews various attendees such as the some Microsofties (Scott Guthrie, Harry Pierson, Glenn Block, Don Smith), CodeBetter guys (Greg, Jeremy, JP Boodhoo, Ian Cooper), Scott Bellware, the Israelis (Udi, Roy, Justin and Ayende), Martin Fowler, John Osborn, Jim Shore, etc on what ALT.NET means to them and why they came.
So, as you can see from the videos it was a pretty diverse crowd. And, hey, we managed to get all of 5 women there too! Peter Laudati posted the schedule here which was initialed by all who wanted to see that particular discussion.
IronRuby Session
Since John Lam wasn't around on Friday for the topic submittal, I so graciously put his name in for him. Luckily he agreed so we were good to go for the first session. We didn't have any canned presentations which is nice. Instead, John focused more on how far IronRuby has yet to go. It was interesting that he is using the Rubinius specs in order to validate IronRuby. Also of note, it was pretty cool to see that Spec# has been used for the IronRuby compiler.
Covering Spec#
Unfortunately, the functional programming talk that I planned with Dustin Campbell was put right along side the Spec# talk, so I had to make a choice. I picked Spec# as it was the first Open Spaces they had done. As I said before, one of the major things I wanted to talk about was Spec# at ALT.NET. Both Greg Young and I were pretty interested in getting Rustan Leino and Mike Barnett to show off the technology to the masses. And what better way than to show a bunch of geeks like us this technology. Anyhow, Mike and Rustan did a really good presentation to show off Spec# to a mass audience. For those not familiar with Spec#, I did a whole series on this on my old blog here. Basically, the intent of Spec# is to provide Design by Contract specifications in your classes and have that exposed to the outside world. So, no more guessing about the preconditions, postconditions and invariants of your system, instead, we can be pretty explicit about it.
The problem that they are facing is that Spec# is not just an additive to the C# compiler, instead it's a separate compiler that is compliant with the C# 2.0 specification. The problem is that C# 3.0 introduces a few more items, albeit mostly syntactic sugar for the most part, and yet Mike is really one of the only guys doing the Spec# compiler. So, making it C# 3.0 compliant is a pretty daunting task. Instead, a future focus is on making language neutral pieces available to all .NET languages just as we saw briefly in the System.Core.dll assembly under the Microsoft.Contracts namespace. The point of inviting them was to help bring their cause to a wider audience. Anders Hejlsberg and Mads Torgersen need to put this on their mind as to how to incorporate, and I'll make sure it's widely known.
It was great to see Scott Hanselman quite excited about the technology and hopefully you'll see more of it from him soon. Also, stay tuned to InfoQ for more Spec# related items as well. I intend to cover things again shortly to talk about some other new things in Spec# as well as the new release. Stay tuned for that...
ASP.NET MVC
Phil Haack and Brad Abrams hosted a discussion on ASP.NET MVC which was pretty positive overall. There has been a number, around 5% that Microsoft has been throwing out there as a number of people that would be adopting ASP.NET MVC over traditional web forms. The audience was rightly skeptical of such a number and wish that they would cut it out. Instead, it could have the effect of scaring away people from adopting this framework as their choice for ASP.NET web applications. I can totally understand that the numbers could be there due to the ISV market which make controls for ASP.NET web forms which is something that the MVC framework doesn't support. Another request was to support open source javascript frameworks better. But overall, Phil and Brad were pretty receptive and it was an overall positive experience.
Are We Innovating?
Scott Hanselman convened a talk asking "Are We Innovating or Are We Just Porting?" in which that very question was asked. If you look at the open source frameworks that exist within the .NET space, it's not hard to see what he's talking about:
- JUnit => NUnit, MbUnit, xUnit.net
- Hibernate => NHibernate
- Spring => Spring.NET
- Ruby on Rails => MonoRail
- jMock => NMock, Rhino Mocks, Moq
- Ant => NAnt, MSBuild
- And the list goes on...
To Be Continued...
