Addisu Hailegiorgis Desta

I was attending a .NET User Group yesterday about the buzz word “Alt.NET” at Metro Toronto User Group.

They said it is an alternative tools and approaches to the mainstream .NET. My question was, haven’t we tried different approaches, tools, for the past couple of years. In my J2EE experience I was appreciating the .NET environment that there is one huge tool that is ease to learn, configure, and use. Everything is integrated and I believed that that way is more productive. In Java world there are a number of frameworks, tools, that not only difficult to learn but also difficult to configure and make it work.

Anyway, most of the alterative tools that are presented are tools that were in use in the J2EE framework. For instance, NHibernate, Spring frame work, NUnit, NAnt and so on. Saying all these, I really like the fact that these tools are real implementations of some of the really useful patterns and practices that Microsoft misses in its development environment.

I believe the presenter participated in the big Alt Dot Net conference (http://altnetconf.com/participants ), i.e. Donald Belcham (http://www.igloocoder.com/ ).

Links that I found useful

http://weblogs.asp.net/rosherove/archive/2007/06/04/alt-net-alternative-tools-and-approaches-to-mainstream-net.aspx

http://www.castleproject.org/

http://www.hibernate.org/343.html

http://www.nunit.org/