ALT.NET End of Day 2

This symbol means so much more than I ever thought it could mean. End of day one I left feeling empowered, inspired, and in total awe. Mainly this was due to culture shock... everywhere I looked there was a familiar face and almost every voice that I'd hear would be a familiar one. I guess this is what you expect when you're sitting in a room with all of the developers who's blogs represent your entire Google reader list. :-)

Still, it's the end of day one... so I get home and brush up on the topics that I will learn about today. End of day two (as the title of this post reads) was an amazing experience to say the least. 10:30am first session of the day I kick off with Iron Ruby (talk given by John Lam), Then it was on to the next session... a new tool (Spec#)I haven't heard of before today. So listening to the guys who wrote it and having a chance to interact with them was very cool... I left the talk feeling the same way as everyone else who attended it. We all have high hopes that spec# will find it's way into C# 4.0. After that we broke for lunch and then back to the sessions. When I returned to the sessions I decided to go hang out and listen to a discussion about ASP.NET MVC with Scott Gu, Phil Haack, and Brad Abrams to name a few. It was a good talk, and I certainly gained more insight than I previously had about the framework itself.... however, I wanted to change topics... so I went to a different hall and discovered a topic on DSL's or Domain Specific Languages. This was one of the better talks of the day since it was facilitated by Martin Fowler. Quite a few issues were brought up and addressed on the subject which made for an interesting discussion... with guys like Oren Eini (creator of Rhino Mocks), Roy Osherove(who did not bring his guitar), and Scott Hanselman. After that I caught Scott Bellware's talk on BDD(Behavior Driven Development) which was very insightful. Finally I finished up the day chatting with one of the Mono Framework team members about the pain points I've experienced with getting .NET applications to run on the MAC, and Charlie Pool creator of the NUnit testing framework. Whew! Quite a day... can't wait for the final wrap up day tomorrow.

Develop with Passion
-Jean Paul S. Boodhoo