I AM ALT.NET

(AltNetPedia)

A week or so ago I listened to Scott's weekly podcast as I do every week, and the topic was ALT.NET. After listening to it... I went over to altnetpedia(the link above) to learn more.
It is so refreshing to learn that a lot of what I'm doing and what I'm striving to do actually has a name and meaning. As I gear up for the conference next month I'll be going over the major principles and practices that I try to incorporate in my daily development efforts. It'll just be a review, but again I want to be sure I'm covering as much as I can.

Practices and Principles like the following: (These will be referenced from Agile Principles Patterns and Practices in C#)

1) Single Responsibility (SRP)
2) Open-Closed (OCP)
3) Liskov Substitution (LSP)
4) Interface Segregation (ISP)
5) Strategy
6) Facade and Mediator
7) Singleton and Monostate

In addition to the list above... I'll also be digging around in Spring.NET a little more since I got the hang of the IoC container. That along with daily development efforts should be enough to find myself ready for the event.

So what does all this mean? What does it mean to be ALT.NET? On a daily basis I find myself being a little frustrated at the fact that I'm apart of a large organization and yet... I'm the only one in my group who is employing fresh, innovative design ideas. As a contractor I came in and built a bridge between existing legacy C++ and Modern .NET with the help of CLI. I had no previous C++ skills.... the only thing I had at the time was passion, confidence, and the will to make the .NET platform play a key role in enhancing the legacy code base. This got me noticed, and so I became a part of the team full time. Even though I'm apart of the team, the fact still remains... I'm the only one implementing TDD, BDD, MVP,IoC, SRP,ISP, etc. I mean I've even tried to employ XP style approaches to some of the projects that I'm working on. Nothing formal, just some basic techniques like index cards for user stories, breaking up two weeks worth of work into two iterations. Even though I'm doing all this... it's completely going unnoticed.... mainly because no one knows about this stuff at all. Sigh... what does it all mean?

I'll continue to push myself and the .NET platform to the edge... because that's what's made me the developer that I am today. A lot of great development coming with emphasis on home automation, Micro Framework(embedded devices), integration with Media Center (Vista Ultimate) , Windows Home Server (mControl add-in), etc.

The way things are going I've decided to give it a little more time to see how it goes. They're finally making plans to migrate some legacy C++ code over to C#, and seeing as how I've got experience in Migration, Porting, and Total Re-Writes... I'd say it's right up my alley. :-)

Anyway, I'm gearing up for ALT.NET!! (A little over two weeks to go)

-Develop with Passion
Jean Paul S. Boodhoo