As to being gods or mortals come on get your heads out of world of war craft we are business facing developers , not kids.

Any way excellent post.

Neil

Thus making it possible to talk about the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of each item. What problems have they run into (but haven’t blogged about because it would have divulged too much client information).

Sure, I can go to a conference and give a talk on one of those topics to people who have never heard about them — and probably wont implement them — but get virtually no good dialog about them.

Isn’t this sort of conference about how to do things better? And who better to talk about this with than people who think they have found a better way than what is being offered by the establishment (Microsoft).

Also, Mort is a name used to generalize the 9 to 5 programmer who does what they are told. There is nothing wrong with that. I worked with many people like that. Generally they wont read anything by Martin Fowler, and will barely crack open Code Complete. But their software works, and if you tell them to do something a different way, they will comply. But not until you tell them.

Now either you see mort as a derogatory name because it lumps a lot of programmers into one bucket, and lumping people into a bucket is wrong (in that case — shame on anyone who uses the term “Software Architects” to describe software architects). This is a common sentiment in todays society for some reason.

Or, you just don’t like how the word sounds. In which case: give me a better term and I’ll start using that.

Sincerely,
A Caucasian, religious, college graduate, married w/children, 30-40 year old, male, mort/budding architect.

I see the community as very inclusive and very helpful to people like myself trying to figure all of this stuff out. To me BDD, TDD, CI, IOC, DI, etc. are still alot of alphabet soup and concepts that are down the road for me before I can implement then on production projects.

But the people in the xxx crowd are taking the time to blog on these topics, present at conferences and user groups and helping the entire MS landscape in the process.

I say hello to the xxx crowd and hope that it continues to grow and spread until it is truly mainstream.

“But wouldn’t that conversation have been a whole lot more interesting if the second developer hadn’t heard of those ideas?”

You’d be bringing your ideas to a whole new audience instead of, and I realise this is a generalisation, preaching to the converted.

That’s close to asinine Colin. If you’re trying to learn about or practice BDD/DDD/TDD or DSL creation, where are you going to learn more than a room full of people going through the exact same struggles you are? This wasn’t a lot of look at me and you we’re cool so much as a long set of conversations about learning how to do XDD better.

I think that ALT.NET people are responding to things they have found outside the .NET community. They are trying to bring in fresh ideas and evolve the way people work with .NET. It’s about expanding your knowledge and ability IMHO. Now I’ll duck for cover.

I don’t know anything about being you shield though =)

I’ve had a couple of arsey comments on my blog but that’s only to be expected. At least most have also been constructive with it and that’s a positive thing.

good post!

I am not for or against it but it’s good that people are asking these questions. It is some very good points that I as well think need to be asked.

now excuse me while I step behind this bullet proof glass =)