ATL ALT.NET

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MTG-2008-11-15 Planning Discussion Notes contains notes from a brief meeting of Josh and Chris about future topics and ideas for the group.

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Welcome!

Welcome to ATL ALT.NET! (What is ALT.NET?)

ATL ALT.NET is an Atlanta area user group interested in exploring and promoting the tools, ideas, and practices of the "ALT.NET" community.

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ATL ALT.NET Mission

We are a community of developers in Atlanta dedicated to helping each other learn and apply the best of .NET technologies.

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Goals

Support one another in our individual and collective quests for continuous learning and improvement
Be pragmatic about the practices and tools we use in building our .NET applications
Select practices and tools that enable us to deliver the best quality and/or value to our customers

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Practices and Tools

This means that some of us:

Use many commercial out-of-the-box tools from Microsoft like Visual Studio
Use third-party commercial tools like Resharper, Red Gate SQL Compare, SQL Data Compare, and SQL Prompt
Use Microsoft open-source tools like WiX and Sandcastle
Use third-party open-source tools like NAnt, NUnit, SharpDevelop, Mono, etc
Build apps that use SOAP, COM, DCOM, WCF
Build apps that use REST, POX, and JSON
Organize teams according to MSF
Organize teams following Agile, XP, and Scrum

The point is that we use what is pragmatic and works to get the job done for our customers and for ourselves.

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Next Meeting

Check out our Meetup.com event calendar to RSVP for upcoming events:

http://dotnet.meetup.com/134/calendar/8336478/

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Past Meetings

See MTG-2008-07-23 Pub Night for a great recap of our 2008.07.23 Pub Night!

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Pages

There is not much specific information on this wiki yet, but we do have a page about "High-Performance Teams" that collects links and videos about Agile, Scrum, Lean, TDD, etc: http://atlalt.net/screwturn/High-Performance%20Teams.ashx

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What is ALT.NET?

At it's purest, the driving force behind the ALT.NET developer community may be described simply as "The pursuit of happiness." While Microsoft has provided developers with a powerful framework and a bunch of very good tools and packages to build upon, it often feels like too much effort was put into a "one-size-fits-all" design philosophy that can make it complex, tedious, or just plain impossible to do things that don't follow Microsoft's prescribed approach.

With other development platforms and languages offering so much choice (Java and it's many quality open source offerings) and elegance (Ruby on Rails with its "beautiful" code and "convention over configuration" philosophy), .NET developers longed to craft cleaner, more elegant solutions without having to leave a framework that has so much to offer.

ALT.NET is about following your own beliefs about application design, and using the .NET platform to support your ideas, rather than retro-fitting your ideas to the platform. While none of these things is a requirement to "being ALT.NET," the community openly embraces:

Agile, Scrum, XP
Open Source Packages and Frameworks
Test Driven Development/Design
Behavior Driven Development/Design
Domain Driven Development/Design

ALT.NET is not about spurning Microsoft's platform and tools - it is about being able to decide when it makes sense to use them, having control over how they are used, and having the option to go in another direction without having to abandon the framework.

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