MSDN Magazine - March 2008 - (Page 132)

What Is ALT .NET? JEREMY D. MILLER Last year David Laribee coined the term “ALT .NET” that the most important qualities of a solution are maintainability and sustainability. Maintainable code means good deto describe a coalescing community of like-minded individuals sign. Good design arises from the skillful application of design within the larger world of the Microsoft® .NET Framework who felt knowledge. The .NET community has been placing too much a growing frustration that Microsoft tooling, guidance, and .NET focus on learning API and framework details and not enough culture at large did not reflect or support an important set of core emphasis on design and coding fundamentals. values. In October 2007, some hundred-odd souls descended upon Part of the catalyst for the raising of the ALT .NET banner was Austin, Texas, for the first ALT .NET Open Spaces event, turning the blogosphere buzzword into something more tangible and kick- a demonstration of a beta of the new Entity Framework in March 2007. I, along with several others, was disappointed ing off the formation of a real community. at certain elements of the Entity Framework, speSo what is ALT .NET? And how does it differ cifically the lack of “Persistence Ignorance” and from the .NET that we already know and love? Tools only take you so the tight coupling to the database. At that time, What are these values that many of us think are far; it’s the principles the Entity Framework did not appear suitable for missing? What are these alternative tools, techand knowledge that TDD, Domain Driven Design, or Continuous niques, and practices that ALT .NET’ers are esreally matter. Design—all things that I consider valuable for pousing? Let’s first examine the original tenets maintainable development. of being an ALT .NET developer. On the other hand, the new Model View 1. You’re the type of developer who uses whatController (MVC) Framework for ASP.NET development is exever works while keeping an eye out for a better way. One of citing because it explicitly supports and enables the values I feel the common topics at the ALT .NET event was closing gaps are important for successful software development. The MVC between requirements, testing, and code. There’s still fat in the Framework clearly reflects the values of maintainability and testway we develop software that can be eliminated. ability with an emphasis on Separation of Concerns and testability 2. You reach outside the mainstream to adopt the best of any throughout the design of the Framework. community: Open Source, Agile, Java, Ruby. In no way does It’s easy to be cynical or apathetic about the state of developMicrosoft or the .NET community have a monopoly on good ment. However, instead of lamenting that Johnny can’t code and software development. For instance, Agile processes and Design complaining that it’s hard to find good developers to hire, perPatterns started with Smalltalk. Likewise, Inversion of Control haps we should admit our main problem: we’re terrible at growtools and techniques originated in Java. And two fundamental ing strong developers. Ruby on Rails principles—Don’t Repeat Yourself and Convention Many developers would be happy to use Object/Relational over Configuration—are ones that we can adopt in .NET. Mapping and TDD if they just knew where to start. Likewise, folks 3. You’re not content with the status quo. Things can always be already practicing these techniques want to get better by interacting more elegant, more mutable, and of higher quality. We’re all exwith other practitioners. My chief hope for the ALT .NET moveperimenting with techniques to more closely connect the codment is that it creates a community that assists both groups, helping ing and testing to the business domain. For example, Behavior them all become strong developers. To that end, the Altnetpedia Driven Development (BDD) refines and extends Test Driven Web site (altnetpedia.com) has just opened for business with the beDevelopment (TDD) by specifying the intended behavior of ginning of a list of resources for learning how to apply these techthe code in a more readable way than classic xUnit testing. And niques in .NET. The altnetconf message board (tech.groups.yahoo.com/ language-oriented programming has the potential to raise the group/altdotnet) is already up and going strong as a place for .NET abstraction layer up to the level of the domain logic. practitioners to discuss development topics. Stop by! 4. You realize that tools are great, but they only take you so far. It’s the principles and knowledge that really matter. The best tools are those that embed the knowledge and encourage the Jeremy D. Miller is the Development Manager for BayerSoftware in Austin, TX. See his blog at principles (for example, ReSharper). Furthermore, you feel codebetter.com/blogs/jeremy.miller. { } 132 msdnmagazine http://altnetpedia.com http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/altdotnet http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/altdotnet http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeremy.miller

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of MSDN Magazine - March 2008

MSDN Magazine - March 2008 Contents Toolbox CLR Inside Out Data Points Advanced Basics Office Space Introducing ASP.NET MVC Loosen Up CI Server Performance Office Development Test Run Security Briefs Extreme ASP.NET Foundations .NET Matters {End Bracket}

MSDN Magazine - March 2008

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