Hi Kurt,

> To me the separation seems to between .net programmers of the
> type that wouldn't consider letting their job interfere with
> their leisure time by reading development books and blogs,
> and taking part in mailing lists and user groups, or
> programming at home, and those that do who are also likely to
> follow most alt.net principles and practices (even if they
> haven't heard of alt.net)

I used to make that separation. Well, I still do, but without
the implied value judgement. IMO, folks have a right to a
life outside of the development world and the vast majority
of professional programmers don't live and breathe it the
way some of us do. Those folks need to be reached as well.

I did a gig a while back with a bunch of mainframe COBOL guys,
helping to re-invent agile techniques for their environment.
Most of them had families and wanted to go home to them at
the end of the day. But during the day, they wanted to learn
new things and do the best job possible. I respect their
choice - maybe it makes more sense than it does for me to be
typing this note in the wee hours of the morning. :-)

I think there is room for folks like that - there as to be,
since they seem to be the majority. We just have to figure
out how to reach them.

> I don't live near a user group, but I attended a .net Open
> Space recently, (after hearing about it on an alt.net mailing
> list). I was a bit worried that it wasn't specifically an
> alt.net thing, but that was because they didn't want to
> narrow the focus too much. It turns out that every session
> was more or less about alt.net (or agile) topics. I even
> encountered people using nhibernate, TDD, continuous
> integration etc, but hadn't heard of alt.net.

Well, I was doing those things before I ever heard of alt.net,
and so were the guys who invented the term. :-)

> Maybe you could attend these .net user groups, as if they
> were alt.net groups, and see what happens.

I'm pretty sure you can, but if the meetings all have
scheduled speakers - as most I've seen did - then you
might have to become a speaker to be heard. :-)

Charlie

> Colin Jack wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > In general I definitely think you and Cory have a point on
> different
> > focusses. As an example I plan to go to the next meeting of
> the local
> > Ruby user group but I haven't ever considered going to the
> normal .NET
> > group.
> >
> > Ultimately this is because I'm hoping the discussions at the Ruby
> > group will be more interesting to someone with my views,
> but I realize
> > that its not the attitude you'd need if you were aiming to
> be a part
> > of an effort to spread ALT.NET ideas to the rest of the .NET
> > community.
> >
>
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>