Old and busted or new hotness

Roy Osherove posted a what's hot and what's not list, mainly aimed at this whole ALT.NET developer talk that's been going on. Unfortunately, I'm a little at odds with what Roy posted and don't agree with some (most?) of his comparisons. It's also hard to compare things here as he's grouped items together that either overlap, are completely different, or don't make sense to be together and are vague. I really don't care for the whole ALT.NET tagging as I think even the term ALT.NET is silly but here's my spin on Roy's items.

UPDATE: Roy updated his blog entry with a note that he didn't necessarily agree with the list, these were his observations of the world. I was a little confused because I thought he was emoting what he felt. Silly me. Still, I think the comparisons are a little strange as it mixes technology with concepts hence why I put my list at the end together. I also stand corrected on A# and that Castle can do both DI and AOP quite well. Thanks for the info!

Hot: Castle, ActiveRecord, NHibernate
Not: Datasets, Entity Framework, MS Application Blocks

I'm not quite sure what he's talking about here. I don't feel ActiveRecord is "hot" and I try to avoid the pattern altogether. NHibernate for sure and Castle is cool (over DataSets any day). Is he comparing Castle and it's DI against MS Application Blocks? More on that later.

Hot: MVC, NUnit, MonoRail
Not: Web Forms, SCSF, VSTS, MSTest

Again it gets a little clouded here (at least with my glasses on). Definately NUnit over MSTest hands down. With the pain and suffering Oren's been going through with Web Forms, MonoRail looks like a good alternative (JP gave a presentation at the Calgary Code Camp and from what I saw it looked promising). MVC hot? A pattern? I guess. However it's a tough call here as SCSF implements MVC and it's not a horrible implementation of the pattern, so how can one be hot and the other not. Also I'll agree that VSTS isn't necessarily hot (more like complex, expensive, etc.) but what are you comparing it to?

Hot: XP, TDD, Scrum
Not: MSF Agile, MSF for CMMI

No argument here and right on the money. I wish MSF Agile was never created.

Hot: OR/M, NHibernate, LLBLGen, etc.
Not: DLinq, Data Access Block, Plain ADO.NET

NHibernate for sure, but LLBLGen generates code that uses ADO.NET under the covers here. I guess the point is that it's not hot to write ADO.NET code directly but have a code generator do it for you? Personally that's fine because anyone that writes their own full DAL is just wasting brain cells.

Hot: Open Source  (Mono, SourceForge)
Not: Application Blocks, CodePlex

This confuses me. Open Source is one thing, but it's being compared to... Open Source. The MS Applicaition Blocks are all open source and every project on CodePlex is as well. If you're comparing SF to CP from an open source perspective, neither really are. You can't get CodePlex code at all (there's an Open Source version someone wrote but it's far from complete) and SourceForge hasn't released their code for years with the old code barely able to instal and configure (Alexandria). Better to go with GForge if you're looking to run your own SourceForge site and source code is provided.

Hot: CVS, SVN
Not: VSS, VSTS Source Control

Agreed. VSS is the devil's spawn, although with all the crashing you can get I would suggest SVN is hot and CVS isn't. CVS is better than VSS stability wise, but it's still not all that hot.

Hot: Subtext, DasBlog, WordPress, etc.
Not: Microsoft MSN Spaces, Community Server

Roy is comparing blog software for those that haven't clued in. I do agree that SubText/DasBlog/WordPress is much more powerful and are better blog engines. CS seems to be bloatware now (and I have a bad feeling from it after the last weblogs update). Microsoft does have SharePoint for blogs and it's getting better, but maybe still not ready for primetime to compete with something like DasBlog. The thing about blog software though is that there isn't going to be a giant shift. I mean, let's say the next guy (Google, MS, whoever) comes out with the be-all and end-all blog engine. Do you think thousands of DasBlog or WordPress users are going to migrate en masse? My blog is on CS, so is Roy's. So are we not hot because of this setup and Hanselman is?

Okay, I'll stop there as there are some other weird deviations Roy makes. I totally am all in when it comes to simplicity in design, but he compares it to the entire P&P (which started this entire thread the last couple of weeks). I'll bite that CAB is complex and we've done that discussion to death. However where is the more simplistic version of CAB that gives us everything we need? Where's the HOT version of CAB? RYO Winforms, I don't think so. And I haven't worked at Google but being at Microsoft is pretty fun, but I guess that depends on what team you're on.

There's also a point he makes about Google Gears being hot and Smart Client not. I haven't had an opportunity to really get into Gears and it sounds great, but things always come in great packages. Is this really the future of apps? I mean, with Silverlight we have super rich clients written in .NET managed code and all doing whatever they need to over the wire. Are going back to writing crappy web apps (maybe with MonoRail to reduce the crappiness) and just plug Gears in and voila, offline capabilities. Is a Silverlight/Gears combination the golden ticket here and Smart Clients go the way of big fat clients from VB6 days long passed.

Like I said, I do agree with some of his comparisons, but let's compare apples to apples here. Here's my modified list where it's just one product/technology/concept against the other. I've also ommitted things that Roy and I agree on that are already in his list: