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Welcome to Minneapolis ALT.NET Wiki! (What is ALT.NET?)


Mpls ALT.NET is a Minneapolis area user group interested in exploring and promoting the tools, ideas, and practices of the "ALT.NET" community.

Please join our mailing list - feel free to use the form at the bottom of the page.

• Become a sponsor - it's inexpensive, easy, fun, and a great way to meet some of the best software developers in your area!
• Member Info and Blogs - find out what your local ALT.NETters are talking about
• Future Meetings and Topic Suggestion

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Next Meeting

Tuesday, August 19, 2008
At 6:00PM

Minneapolis ALT.NET Pub Night v1.0

At the Bulldog Northeast (if you show up at the one in Uptown, you'll probably have fun, but it won't be with us).

401 East Hennepin Avenue
Minneapolis, MN 55414

Meeting Recap Coming Soon!
IM: - jim s



link

We have the back room reserved so come on in and head on back.
The format will likely be as follows:

6:00 PM - Eat, Drink, Talk Tech

6:30 PM - Talk Tech, Drink, Eat

8:00 PM - Discuss/get feedback on future meeting ideas

Check back for more details in the next week or two.

Other Meetings

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Upcoming Local Events

Heartland Developer's Conference 2008 in Minneapolis
September 28th to 30th
Hyatt Regency, Downtown Minneapolis

This is always a great event. There are some really good looking sessions in here for us .NET developers. Of special note to the ALT.NET crowd is Javier Lozano's session on Open Source Tools ("Open Source Tools Every .NET Developer Should Use") and Scott Colestock's "Release Management with TFS".

Sign up now. We'll see you there!



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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.

ALT.NET Resources
More on ALT.NET