indy alt.net
The inaugural indy alt.net meeting was last night!
The group appears to be led up by jaxidian/Shane Milton of Leaf Software Solutions. Many thanks to Shane for getting this group together! I think this is an awesome opportunity for our community to learn how to be more receptive to alternative thinking in a .NET world. I have heard of so many shops that have their blinders on and won't even consider working with frameworks/etc. other than those provided by Microsoft. This can only be a true blessing to our community and where we are going as craftsmen.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not dissing Microsoft, they make world-class software. The problem is that we need to be careful to always use the best tools that serve us in any given situation, rather than using only the tools that we are told to use via the mothership.
Last night's discussion was led by one of the co-founder's of Entity Spaces. Their product, Entity Spaces, is a code generation based ORM tool. I'm very familiar with the concept, but haven't had much of an opportunity to use many ORM's other than ActiveRecord in a Rails project I worked on, so I'm not sure how the usual suspects (NH/ActiveRecord, Linq2Sql, Linq2Entities, SubSonic) add up in a real implementation scenario, but it's at least worth thinking about. Maybe I'll do a write up or try to find a comparison.
Also, many thanks to Tridge Alliance for their financial support of the group.
All-in-all, it was a great inaugural meeting. I am sure we'll only continue to grow and get better. If you're reading, and are in the area, and feel like you're missing something (sort of like Neo, ya know?) please come and see what we're all about! We meet the third Thursday of every month. Check the website for more info.
I'm stoked! Let's make our tech community a better place!
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View Jon Fuller's profile
May 16th, 2008 - 16:37
Regarding the Frameworks vs Microsoft argument, I totally agree. I think the jcp is one of the best things Java has going for it now. Things that are part of the community end up being brought into core Java, while still giving vendors who provide implementations the ability add value with extensions.
In the project work on at work we have built a framework that is similar to the EntitySpaces approach. It at least seems that way from the info I can see on the entity spaces site. It is very useful and you get some very nice things like type safety and some semantic saftey.
I have briefly looked at ActiveRecord, and I have used iBatis and JPA(which Hibernate is a provider of). I am going to assume that most of Hibernate is very close to NHibernate I have to say that JPA is the most impressive. JPQL(a subset of HSQL) has really powerful features that extend basic sql syntax in to the object oriented world and it really does a great job of getting things done easily and expressively. There was a definite learning curve on how to set it up, but having tools like HSQL for unit/integration testing is incredibly powerful.
Now I realize that a lot of what I am talking about is in JVM land and not .NET, but I am hoping that there are analagous entities in the CLR space also.
cheers,
Stephen
May 20th, 2008 - 12:32
Hi Jon!
I just wanted to correct that I am an employee of Tridge’s, not Leaf. That’s a big reason why we were able to get their financial support.
I’m looking forwards to seeing you again this Thursday to help us make some important decisions about how to run the group going forwards!
-Shane