ALT.NET
The radical idealist problem
This is merely a simple observation. I had a chance to talk with a few people recently, and I heard something that really bothered me. Sadly, this is not a new thing, but it is still extremely annoying and disrespectful. Basically, the problem is that concerns that are being brought up are dismissed as unrealistic, idealist and non workable in the real world. The people who bring up those concerns are also dismissed as radical tree huggers with no concept of how to build things in the field. The reason that I think this is stupid, insulting and...
The fallacies of parallel computing
Notes from alt.net parallel session.
Locality doesn't matter
Locks / syncronization are cheap
Higher parallelism equates to faster code
All actors see the same state
Parallel programming is easy
Alt.net: Alienation by adoption
Last week I participated in ALT.Net Seattle, which was quite interesting. It used the same open spaces format as most ALT.Net conference, and I can honestly say that it was a good experience to most of the attendees. It did not, however, had the same style of interaction. One of the things that I really enjoyed in the previous ALT.Net conferences is the level of interaction and participation. In this instance, I think that a majority of the people arrived mostly to soak in the information. That changed the dynamics of the conference, and it was quite visible...
Enter the demoware
I am writing about documentation at the moment, and I found myself writing the following: I don’t think that I can emphasize enough how important it is to have a good first impression in the DSL. It can literally make or break your project. We should make above reasonable efforts to ensure that the first impression of the user from our system would be positive. This includes investing time in building good looking UI, and snappy graphics. They might not actually have a lot of value for the project from a technical perspective, not even from the point...
Choose a workshop
I am going to give a workshop or two at the ALT.Net Austin in the end of October. Those will be free (as in beer) and will be recorded & available on the net afterward. Right now I want to do on on writing DSLs, but I have another which is basically blank at the moment. I have too many subjects that I can talk about, and too many levels at which I can talk about them. So, this is your chance to help me. If you are going to be there, what would you like to have...
ALT.Net Israel - Clarification
The girls in the picture are responsible for business development SQLink and GotFriends. Just to set the record straight, per their request.
Videos from ALT.Net Israel
Here are the videos that were posted so far from the ALT.Net ISrael: Alt.net Israel - Hallway chat - performance Alt.net Israel - Refactoring Alt.net Israel - Distributed Caching Alt.net Israel - Dynamic Languages & DSLs Alt.net Israel - SOA in the real world Alt.net Israel - Closing Talk
ALT.Net Israel Summary
This is my 3,500th post, wow! Looks like there is some future in this blogging business after all. On Thursday evening and Friday we had the first ALT.Net Israel conference. I would like to thanks the attendees, for a really awesome couple of days. The sponsors, Sela Group, Red Gate, Type Mock, JetBrains and SQLink, also deserve a round of applause. I had fun. I am not sure what happened, but I arrived in the morning and suddenly it was over. Didn't feel any time pass at all. I was honestly surprised by both the...
ALT.NET Israel registration is open
The registration for ALT.NET Israel is now open. You will need an OpenID (I use myopenid.com) to register. We are limited to 50 seats for the first event. First come first served. Worst case scenario you go into the waiting list. Please only register if you are serious about attending. The event takes place in two parts: Thursday eve. from 18:.30 to 20.30 and then the full day on friday (9-17.00). more details on the site.
ALT.Net Israel
Yeah! We are going to have an ALT.Net conference in Israel in a few weeks. More specifically: Thursday 7th, at 18:30-20:30: planning meeting, following a walk to a nearby pub or coffee shop to socialise. Friday 8th, at 09:30-16:30: sessions. The conference will be held at the SQLink offices in Ramat Gan. Ken Egozi was kind enough to not only prod me & Roy moving, but to arrange the location. Agenda: That is really up to the people who attend. We will be following...
Go with High End Solutions
About a year and a half ago, I start an exciting new project (there is a demo of the actual project here). The actual application is fairly complex, and has some it gave me the chance to explore some very interesting ideas. Rhino Security is a generalization of the security scheme used in this project, and it is pretty much the driving force for Rhino Igloo. But that is not what I want to talk about.
What I do want to talk about is the infrastructure that we used for the project. We used IoC, OR/M, AoP, MVC and many other...
Funding Open Source Projects
That was the topic under discussion in the first ALT.Net talks today. There weren't that many people at the talk, but it was very focused and useful.
In general, there aren't that many ways of funding OSS projects. Note that I am talking here from the perspective of the developers who does the actual work, and how they get compensated for their time and effort. This exclude reasons such as scratching an itch, or as a hobby.
The OSS work is useful for the day-to-day work of the developer. This is by far the more common model in the .Net...
Summing the ALT.Net conf
I was a blast, I had a lot of fun, some incredibly interesting conversations, and got to meet a lot of the members of the community that I have only knew by email alias before.
We had some really good discussions today, and I got to clarify some thoughts that have been luring in the back of my mind for a while now. After the ALT.Net conf officially ended, we started hanging around, swapping stories. Somehow it got to 8 PM, I am not sure how. Roy took a bunch of us that remained to dinner at a nice place. I...
The ALT.Net Conf
I think that yesterday was absolutely wonderful. It did feel like I spent about 5 hours straight talking, however. The DSL talk was interesting, and gave me much to think of (and might actually kick start the book again!), great fun.
I think that my liver died at some point last night. MVP Summit + ALT.Net are not friendly to it. No time to recover.
Field Expedients, or why "I don't have the tools" is not an acceptable answer
Recently I had a few conversations about tooling, lack thereof and the impact that this has on the overall system.
I don’t think that someone can argue that starting from scratch is a very good idea in most scenarios. This is especially true when you are talking about any significantly complicate system, which we all do.
There is still a place for quick & dirty solutions, but that is for throwaway utilities. Hell, even calc.exe isn’t simple (arbitrary precision numbers) anymore.
Therefore, I am constantly surprise by people that chose to go without. I could understand that if they chose that path out...
ALT.Net Logo
A while ago I suggested a logo for ALT.Net, which I really liked, but had copyright issues. Since then, I had commissioned the creation of a new logo, using the same ideas, which can be used without copy right issues. This is not the official logo, there isn't any to my knowledge, but it express the way I think about ALT.Net very well. The logos are: And: You may use and modify the logos under the Creative Commons Non Commercial license. I put all the raw images in this...
ALT.NET Open Spaces, Seattle - Registration Open
This is a public service announcement, the registration for ALT.Net Seattle is now open. There are 150 spots available: first come, first served.
ALT.Net quote of the week
That had me in stitches, and no, it is not a typo: I read Ayende's blog rabidly
Reasons for caring: Microsoft & OSS
In the ALT.Net mailing list, we are having a discussion about the CAB and OB. Part of this discussion include this dialog between me and Brad Wilson. Brad: If you're simply angry because we had the audacity to make our own object factory with DI, then I can't help you; the fact that P&P did ObjectBuilder does not invalidate any other object factory and/or DI container. Ayende: No, it doesn't. But it is a waste of time and effort. Brad: In all seriousness: why should you care if I waste my time? That question prompt this post, because I...
ALT.Net Traffic
I was looking at the traffic numbers for the ALT.Net, and I wasn't quite sure that I should believe them: This has got to be the most active group that I have ever taken part at, and about 90% of the discussions there are interesting. The signal to noise ratio is simply amazing. Of course, the mere quantity of information presents a problem:
On the difference between big and right
This discussion came up in the ALT.Net mailing list, it reflects my own thinking so much, I had to quote it: > Some of the largest software development shops in the world would disagree with you Chad Myers: Most of the largest software development shops would disagree with me on a lot of things. They tend to be top-heavy, waterfall-ladendysfunctional bureaucratic/political nightmares, too. Many of the largest shops also still have mainframes and COBOL systems for whichthey no longer have the original source code for (I know of at least one). They're mostly concerned with protecting middle management...
An apt description of ALT.Net
Charlie Poolie, on the ALT.Net mailing list: So one reaction I had to Alt.NET was that it was a group of folks who don't do stupid things: sort of like forming a club for people who don't playin traffic or don't juggle sharp instruments.Oddly, as others have pointed out to me, such a group is actually needed in the .NET world. ROTFL.
The ideal IDE
We are discussing the ideal IDE on the Alt.Net mailing list, I thought that it would be interesting to gather all the requirements in one place. I made some minimal attempt to reduce duplication, and to put the interesting parts, but check the discussion, it is still going on. This is not a list of "what is wrong with VS", it is a list of things that we want to see in an IDE (or not see in an IDE :-) ). IDE is defined as the place where I write code / debug /test. Good quotes: ...
ALT.Net and the Enterprise
Simone Chiaretta has a post that I strongly disagree with. The two parts that sum the parts that I most vehemently disagree with Simone are: imagine you have an Enterprise-level project, with 100 developers, how many of them are likely to grasp what IoC is? And: if you have 50 developers in your team you can't use MonoRail or Windsor or even the kind of main-stream NHibernate, because 40 of them will not know what you talking about. There are two reasons that I disagree, let us start with the one that had forced me to sleep on...
A friendly community
Colin Ramsay has a post titled Abandon ALT.NET which I want to respond to. Here is the first interesting quote: Just as I find it pointless that you’d go to a conference to discuss the stuff that everyone there already knows. DDD, BDD, MVC - these aren’t things that will be unknown to people attending the ALT.NET conference. ALT.NETter A: so… heard of that new BDD business?ALT.NETter B: Yep.ALT.NETter A: Oh, well there’s this great new idea called DDD!ALT.NETter B: Yeah, right into that too.ALT.NETter A: Oh. And so on. But wouldn’t that conversation have been a whole lot...
Quotes of the weeks
Those are courtesy of Jdn's post. If you don't, you are stupid, a Mort, or, god forbid, an architect. Oh my, I am not sure if this was intended to be amusing, but I certainly find it so. Similarly, it is okay to use a Visual Studio designer. It is even okay to use drag and drop. There, I said it. Let me say it again, with feeling: IT IS OKAY TO USE DRAG AND DROP. This comes at a very appropriate time, since I just spent a few hours wresting with a drag & drop code-gen solution....
ALT.NET is a divisive thing
Note, this is a partial (and the final) response to Sam Gentile post about ALT.NET. Now to the part that actually talks about ATL.NET: ALT.NET is a divisive thing. No matter what they tell you, they are full of negative energy, they sneer at others that don't buy into their view and sneer at the "enterprisey" folks. ALT.NET is divisive, of course. Like any idea, it divide people into those who agree and those who don't. The ALT.NET doesn't include a value statement about those who don't agree, I am feeling forced to point out. And I am...
Architects & ALT.NET
Note, this is a partial response to Sam Gentile post about ALT.NET.
One of the things that Sam said that I fully agree on is this one:
...walking into a Fortune 50 bank with 200 systems, using 20 different technologies, totally non-integrated, and listening to the business needs and using solution technologies like BizTalk, Neuron, WCF, MOSS, Sharepoint and such putting together a solution that requires me to have intimate knowledge of the business as well as single sign on, multi-domain security trust domains, asynschronous message brokering and lots more
Solving this kind of problems is non trivial and requires understand both tech...
Enterprisey vs Enterprise Software
Note, this is a partial response to Sam Gentile post about ALT.NET.
Enterprisey - This is a derogatory term, used to refer to a system whose design or implementation is overly complex compared to its supposed function. Often the term refers to the usage of anti patterns such as Everything is configurable, Executable XML, etc. Those systems are consider bad because a simpler design or implementation would have achieve the same purpose, at far lower cost, with greater maintainability overall.
Enterprise Software - A common term used to refer to systems that usually run a core part of a business. Often those are mission critical systems, which...