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Becoming more ALT.NET

Tuesday, April 10 2007 4 Comments

Dave Laribee had a great post where he has coined a new term for .NET Developers called ALT.NET. An ALT.NET developer is always looking for a better solution and is willing to go outside the .NET community to find new solutions.

Being ALT.NET means that you don't simply take what Microsoft spoon feeds you and wait until a tool/solution is wrapped in Microsoft goodness before you use it. However, once Microsoft does emulate your tool/solution, you make a serious attempt to conform to their solution if it meets your needs better.

Here are some of my definitions of what is to be ALT.NET:

What are you doing right now to become more ALT.NET?

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Comments

#1 On April 23,2007 at 10:04 PM joeyDotNet said:

1. Check (R# is an absolute must)

2. Check (How could MS hire the guy who wrote NUnit and still get MSTest so wrong?)

3. Check (I hope NAnt can hang on)

4. Check (NH == nice PI domain objects, EF not so much)

5. Check (and actually MonoRail is really a MVC implementation, subtle, but important difference)

:)

#2 On May 02,2007 at 6:05 AM Derik Whittaker said:

Why would an Alt.Net developer use NUnit of MSUnit.  They DO THE SAME thing.  Just is one is Open and the other is M.S.  Personally i like them both, have used them both.... But at the end of the day, I dont CARE which i use as long as I have TESTS......

A tool is a tool, it is all about the results the tool provides.  And in this case they both provide the same results.

#3 On May 02,2007 at 8:05 AM Karthik said:

Derik,

I'm not suggesting that an ALT.NET developer has to use NUnit over MSUnit.  More that they were aware of nUnit and using it to do their unit testing before a suitable solution like MSUnit came out of Redmond.

Also, at the moment MSUnit is only usable if you have a Team Edition of Visual Studio.  That is changing, but for now nUnit is the only choice for many developers out there.

#4 On May 12,2007 at 8:05 AM Mark Hoffman said:

This will not end well.

This will degenerate into a "I'm a better developer because I use this tool" argument.  Even worse, it focuses on what tools you are using, rather than if you are *accomplishing the job*.

Pointless and stupid.