Who We Are

DC ALT.NET is a DC/Baltimore metro area user group associated with the wider "ALT.NET community.

What is ALT.NET?
At it's purest, the driving force behind the ALT.NET developer community may be described simply as "The pursuit of happiness." While Microsoft has provided developers with a powerful framework and a bunch of very good tools and packages to build upon, it often feels like too much effort was put into a "one-size-fits-all" design philosophy that can make it complex, tedious, or just plain impossible to do things that don't follow Microsoft's prescribed approach.

With other development platforms and languages offering so much choice (Java and it's many quality open source offerings) and elegance (Ruby on Rails with its "beautiful" code and "convention over configuration" philosophy), .NET developers longed to craft cleaner, more elegant solutions without having to leave a framework that has so much to offer.

ALT.NET is about following your own beliefs about application design, and using the .NET platform to support your ideas, rather than retro-fitting your ideas to the platform. While none of these things is a requirement to "being ALT.NET," the community openly embraces:

    * Agile, Scrum, XP
    * Open Source Packages and Frameworks
    * Test Driven Development/Design
    * Behavior Driven Development/Design
    * Domain Driven Development/Design


ALT.NET is not about spurning Microsoft's platform and tools - it is about being able to decide when it makes sense to use them, having control over how they are used, and having the option to go in another direction without having to abandon the framework.