Coming to Austin, TX… October 5-7, 2007… Brought to you by the NHibernate Mafia themselves… 3 days of ALT.NET mayhem… See behaviours twisted, tests tortured, dependencies injected, object-relations mapped, and DSLs like you’ve never seen them before…

More seriously, what exactly is ALT.NET? David Laribee coined the term to describe developers who look outside the “official gospel” for ideas of how to develop software better.

  1. You’re the type of developer who uses what works while keeping an eye out for a better way.
  2. You reach outside the mainstream to adopt the best of any community: Open Source, Agile, Java, Ruby, etc.
  3. You’re not content with the status quo. Things can always be better expressed, more elegant and simple, more mutable, higher quality, etc.
  4. You know tools are great, but they only take you so far. It’s the principles and knowledge that really matter. The best tools are those that embed the knowledge and encourage the principles (e.g. ReSharper.)

Scott Bellware has assembled an all-star organizing committee, including:

The conference will be run in an open space format, which is very agile in nature and execution. Fundamentally OpenSpace is a conference with self-organizing sessions. If you have an idea for a session, you post it on the schedule. If you see a session that interests you, you show up. If that session sparks an idea you’d like to talk about, post your new session on the schedule. Lather, rinse, repeat… This will be my first time participating in an OpenSpace conference, but I’m excited by the concept.

You can expect topics covering:

  • Software design
  • Testing strategies and continuous integration
  • Test-Driven Development (TDD)
  • Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD)
  • Domain-Driven Development (DDD)
  • Domain-specific languages (DSLs)
  • Object-relational mapping (OR/M) using NHibernate
  • Dependency injection with Castle Windsor
  • Web development with MonoRail
  • Agile team practices, such as XP and Scrum
  • Plus anything else that attendees want to discuss

The Important Stuff

Cost: FREE! (except for the cost of airfare and accommodations)
Location: St. Edwards University Professional Education Center, Austin, TX
Date: Friday, October 5th, 2007 @ 5pm to Sunday, October 8th, 2007 @ noon
Attendance: 100 (max)
Registration: http://www.altnetconf.com

If you are interested in attending the event or would like to know more, please don’t hesitate to contact me or one of the other organizers.